‘No short cuts’ to rebuilding UK after Tory neglect, warns Starmer in pre-budget speech – UK politics live | Politics

Kiran Stacey

Another part of the dripping out of budget announcements ahead of Wednesday has been the prime minister this morning stating that local services to “get Britain working” will get a £240m funding boost.

It is part of the Labour party’s stated national mission to pull the employment rate up to 80%.

In quotes issued from the Chancellor about the funding, Rachel Reeves said “Due to years of economic neglect, the benefits bill is ballooning.”

Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall is quoted as saying that “Through our Get Britain Working plan, we will ensure every young person is supported to find earnings or learning, while our new jobs and careers service will transform opportunity for all.”

Economic inactivity has risen by nearly one million people since before the pandemic in 2020, with PA Media reporting that 85% of this is due to those who are long-term sick.

If you didn’t see it, at the weekend our economics correspondent Richard Partington had a reported out piece looking at this issue in Barnsley, where for the first time since the deindustrialisation years, there are more vacancies than people looking for work.

I imagine the number of people who could put together a specific list of top five most impactful UK budgets from the last five decades is quite small, but our economics editor Larry Elliott is among them. Readers of a certain age – including me – are sure to get a certain frisson from seeing pictures of Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Norman Lamont and Kenneth Clarke among others. Kwasi Kwarteng also, inevitably, puts in an appearance.

The adult prison population in England and Wales has dropped 3% after reaching record levels.

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show there were 85,867 people in prison on Monday, which was 1,598 fewer than recorded at the beginning of last week.

PA Media reports the drop means there is capacity for 3,141 more people in the system, and that the figure for inmates is the lowest since 30 June in 2023.

Earlier, speaking in Birmingham, prime minister Keir Starmer criticised the record of the previous government, saying “Just look at the state of our prisons. Where’s the Tory apology for that? Watching the prison population rise while they were too weak either to reform sentencing or build new prison places.”

A little bit more context around the bus fares cap in England. It was introduced by the last Conservative government at the beginning of 2023 as a three month scheme, budgeted at £60m. It initially capped single bus fares at more than 130 bus operators serving more than 4,600 routes, saving almost a third of the average single ticket price. Some smaller operators declined to participate.

In September 2023 government analysis claimed that the overall price of bus fares in England, outside London, had dropped by 7.4% between June 2022 and June 2023, largely as an effect of the scheme.

Bus fares in London are capped at £1.75.

Robert Jenrick, the Conservative leadership hopeful, has described the Labour government’s decision to extend the bus fare cap in England for another year, but raise the maximum price to £3 as “clueless”, adding “Starmer must think people who get the bus aren’t working people.”

Tories: England bus fare cap extension and price rise means ‘£10 a week extra to get to work under Labour’

Keir Starmer has posted to social media to say that “This budget will help to get Britain working. It will pave the way for reforms that tackle the root causes of economic inactivity, so those who can work, will work.”

Earlier, speaking in Birmingham, the prime minister had said the UK is “the only G7 country for whom economic inactivity is still higher than it was before Covid”.

He continued:

That’s not just bad for our economy. It’s also bad for all those who are locked out of opportunity. So the Chancellor will announce £240m in funding to provide local services that can help people back into work.

The Green party of England and Wales’s co-leader Carla Denyer has responded to Keir Starmer’s speech in Birmingham by reposting some comments she made yesterday calling for more taxation on the super-rich, saying:

14 years of Tory underinvestment have left public services on their knees, our economy broken. We can’t afford five more yers of this. It feels like Labour are stuck in second gear on the motorway. They could deliver on the change they promised if they’re prepared to tax the super-rich.

Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice has also been on the airwaves today talking about Wednesday’s budget. He described Labour’s plans as a “targeted assault on wealth creation,” saying “We’re all gonna get absolutely hammered and assaulted on Wednesday.”

Starmer promises ‘no short cuts’ to rebuilding country after inheriting neglect of previous government

Keir Starmer somewhat sidestepped a question on whether a rise in fuel duty would count as a rise in taxes on working people, and whether the government planned such a rise.

During a question and answer session with the media in Birmingham, Jack Ellison from the Sun had asked “Every day millions of people across the country will get in their cars and go to work. So would any hike to fuel duty on Wednesday be a direct hit on the working people that you claim the champion?”

In response the prime minister said:

Well, I know this is a particular concern to your readers, and I’m not going to preempt what happens on Wednesday, but obviously this is an issue that comes up at every budget, and you’ll see how we deal with it at this budget.

But I do understand how important it is. I understand what you’re putting to me, and I know how important it is to you, your readers and others.

Keir Starmer has drawn a round of applause from the audience in Birmingham after a rather brusque response to a question from a journalist from the Daily Mail.

Asked whether Starmer thought his government was at odds with the priorities of the public after Kumail Jaffer cited “new polling this morning suggests that the majority of voters would prefer Wednesday’s priority to be lower taxes ahead of investment in public services,” Starmer initially simply said “No.”

He then elaborated:

I think for too long we pretended that you could lower your tax and spend more on your public services. It is about time we faced up to that fiction.

A couple of questions during this session from Sky News and the Times have attempted to get the prime minister to commit to no further tax rises during the course of the five year parliament. Keir Starmer has refused to allow himself to become a hostage to fortune here, saying:

We are fixing the foundations in this budget. So that is the purpose of this budget, to take the difficult decisions.

Now nobody wants tax rises, least of all me, so we will do the hard work in this budget to allow us then to rebuild the country.

I can’t give you a cast iron guarantee that never again in any budget will there be any adjustment to tax, because we just don’t know what’s around the corner. We’ve lived through, in the last five or six years, Ukraine, Covid, et cetera.

But I can tell you that as we stand here now going into this budget, it’s our intention to take the tough decisions here and now up front, in the hope that we can then build and rebuild the country on that stable foundation.

Starmer announces England’s bus fare cap will be extended but rise to £3 in 2025