Tory Spending Plans Were "Like Five-Year-Old" Writing Their "Favourite Numbers", Says Labour MP Defending Tax Rises
Labour has criticised the figures in March's Budget unveiled by then-Chancellor Jeremy Hunt (Alamy)
3 min read
A Labour MP has called spending plans set out by the previous Tory government before the General Election as “complete rubbish” after criticism of Rachel Reeves for raising £40bn in tax rises.
Chris Curtis, MP for Milton Keynes North, said the numbers in March’s Budget by the then-chancellor Jeremy Hunt were “meaningless”, and that his party was now being “honest” about the scale of the shortfall in the country’s finances.
"The numbers from the March Budget, you might as well have given a pen to a five-year-old and asked them to write down his favourite numbers, they just were meaningless,” the vice chair of the Labour Growth Group of backbench MPs told The Rundown podcast from PoliticsHome.
It comes after Reeves unveiled a host of new tax rises in her first Budget, justifying them by saying she uncovered a “£22billion black hole” in the public finances since entering the Treasury that was left by the outgoing Tory administration, and she would therefore have to make “difficult decisions”.
The Chancellor also said the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) would set out the details of that shortfall in their documents accompanying Wednesday’s fiscal statement.
But the regulator’s chairman Richard Hughes said “nothing in our review was a legitimisation” of the £22bn figure, leading to criticism from senior Conservative and former Cabinet minister Mel Stride.
Speaking on the same podcast, he said the OBR “would not legitimise that black hole”, and instead suggested it was normal “in-year pressure” on departmental spending which amounted to a shortfall of just under £10bn.
Stride, who used to work in the Treasury as Financial Secretary, and chaired the Treasury select committee, agreed with Curtis on the importance of economic growth, but added: “The problem is they've come forward with this extraordinary Budget, and the growth figures don't show the growth.
Labour MP Chris Curtis defended Chancellor Rachel Reeves' tax-raising Budget (Parliament UK)
“In fact, they're in a worse position than they were in the forecast back in March.”
But Curtis said the OBR’s revised figures projecting the UK’s economic growth to fall back slightly in the coming years was “not a downgrading”, adding the earlier forecast was “complete rubbish” because it was based on dishonest spending projections.
Stride accused him of having “swallowed the Kool Aid”, but Curtis said the OBR “have admitted they didn't have the information they needed in order to come up with projections”.
Hughes, the head of the fiscal watchdog, said while he was “not an astronomer” it was clear the Treasury knew before March’s Budget “about £9.5bn-worth of debt pressure on departments’ budgets in 2024-25, which it did not share with us”.
Speaking on Thursday, leading economist Paul Johnson described Reeves' decision to raise tax and spend in the Labour Government's first Budget as "welcome", and praised the chancellor for her "courageous" decision to take a long-term approach to achieving growth.
However, the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies cast doubt over government plans to lower public spending in the latter half of this parliament, describing the forecasts as "odd" and unrealistic because in reality it would mean real-terms cuts.
PoliticsHome Newsletters
PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe
