Rachel Reeves has accused Jeremy Hunt of mendacity concerning the state of the general public funds, intensifying a dispute with the Conservatives over claims that they left a £22bn gap within the finances.
The Chancellor alleged that her predecessor “knowingly and deliberately … lied” to MPs and the general public about public spending.
“Jeremy Hunt covered up from the House of Commons and the country the true state of the public finances. He did that knowingly and deliberately,” she informed Sky Information. “He lied, and they lied during the election campaign about the state of the public finances.”
Hunt has rejected the claims and wrote to Simon Case, the cupboard secretary and head of the UK’s civil service, disputing the Labour authorities’s evaluation. In his letter, Hunt demanded an “immediate answer” to “conflicting claims” that danger “bringing the civil service into disrepute.” He argued that both the spending plans signed off by senior civil servants have been incorrect, or the doc Reeves introduced to the Commons on Monday was incorrect.
Reeves, citing a £22bn gap within the public funds, scrapped a number of Conservative insurance policies on Monday, together with a long-anticipated cap on social care prices, plans to construct 40 hospitals, and numerous street initiatives. She additionally minimize winter gasoline funds to 10 million wealthier pensioners, reversing a coverage launched by Gordon Brown, saving £1.5bn within the subsequent monetary 12 months.
Because of the choice to means-test a profit value as much as £300 for a family with not less than one member aged over 80, the variety of pensioners receiving the winter gasoline fee will likely be diminished from 11.4 million to 1.5 million.
The Conservatives identified that whereas Labour was in opposition final autumn, Darren Jones, the present Chief Secretary to the Treasury, wrote to Hunt questioning whether or not he was planning to scrap the winter gasoline allowance for some pensioners. In his letter in November, Jones mentioned pensioners can be “deeply concerned” and “anxious that their incomes may be under threat from this government.”
It was additionally famous that almost half of the shortfall cited by Reeves, £9.4bn, resulted from her resolution to completely fund above-inflation public-sector pay suggestions.
Requested about the associated fee to settle junior docs’ pay, the Chancellor informed Instances Radio: “It’s £350m – and that’s a drop in the ocean … It cost £1.7bn to our economy last year because of industrial action. It caused huge misery, pain and agony for people waiting for appointments that never happened.”
Reeves argued that public sector staff, together with junior docs, have been receiving pay rises in keeping with the personal sector and deserved to take action.
She additionally defended her resolution to scrap the deliberate cap on social care prices, citing the need of creating “incredibly difficult decisions.”
“What I inherited … is a gap between what the previous government said it was going to spend and what it was actually spending of £22bn so I’m in a position of having to make urgent decisions to restore economic stability and financial stability,” she informed BBC Radio 4. “I was determined to ensure that we got a grip of these pressures.”
“When I did the audit with Treasury officials of the state of public spending and the public finances, we discovered that some of the promises that the previous government made did not have any funding attached to them. Social care was one of those things. New hospital programmes was another. Transport spending was another. The replacement of A-levels was another. Asylum was another.”
“There are lots of difficult decisions that I had to make yesterday, decisions that I didn’t want to make, decisions that I never expected to make,” Reeves mentioned. “There are a lot of things that this new Labour government would like to do. But unless you can say where the money is going to come from, you can’t do them.”
She added that Wes Streeting would take ahead plans to work with the sector to reform social care.
