Reeves says she will make statement to MPs before summer recess on ‘spending inheritance’ left by Tories
Rachel Reeves is delivering her first major speech as chancellor.
She started by announcing that before the summer recess she will make a statement to MPs about the government’s spending inheritance. She said what she has seen in her first 72 hours confirmed that the economic situation was as bad as she thought.
She said:
I have repeatedly warned that whoever won the general election would inherit the worst set of circumstances since the second world war.
What I have seen in the past 72 hours has only confirmed that. Our economy has been held back by decisions deferred and decisions ducked. Political self-interest put ahead of the national interest. A government that put party first and country second.
We face the legacy of 14 years of chaos and economic irresponsibility.
That is why over the weekend, I instructed Treasury officials to provide an assessment of the state of our spending inheritance so that I can understand the full scale of the challenge. And I will present this to parliament before the summer recess.
This will be separate from a budget that will be held later this year. And I will confirm the date of that budget alongside a forecast from the Office of Budget Responsibility in due course.
This sounds like a major “blame the Tories’” exercise. In an extract from the speech released in advance, she said taxpayers were losing out because of the way growth stalled under the last government. She said:
New Treasury analysis I requested over the weekend exposed the opportunities lost from this failure.
Had the UK economy grown at the average rate of OECD economies since 2010, it would have been over £140bn larger.
This could have brought in an additional £58bn in tax revenues last year alone to sustain our public services.
It falls to this new government to fix the foundations.
UPDATE: There was a transcription error in an earlier version of this post. It said that what the Treasury had found in the past 72 hours showed there was “no money left”. That phrase was wrongly included by mistake, and has now been removed from the quote above.
Key events
There was a transcription error in the post at 10.49am. Rachel Reeves said that the economic inheritance was as bad as expected, but she did not say there was no money left. I’m sorry for the mistake.
Q: Will HS2 go to Leeds?
Reeves says in opposition she did not make promises without knowing where the money would come from. That same approach will apply in government, she says.
And that is the end of the Q&A.
Q: If the pay review bodies recommend big pay rises, do you have enough money to fund those?
Reeves says she will be presenting to parliament the Treasury’s assessment of the state of the public finances before the end of this month.
With public sector pay, there is a process. She will go through that.
She says the government will have to take “difficult decisions” because of the “mess left by our predecessors”.
But she wants to turn things round, she says.
Reeves says Tories were the ‘anti-growth coalition’
Q: Liz Truss said there was an anti-growth coalition. Do you agree?
Reeves says the Tories were the anti-growth coaliton. The voters kicked them out.
Q: Will your plans for new housing include energy efficiency standards?
Reeves says that will be a matter for the housing deparment. But the government is committed to energy efficiency, she says.
Q: Are you worried about the OBR downgrading its growth foreceast?
Reeves says she hopes people will see from her plans that she is serious about growing the economy. The OBR is forecast growth at about one and two thirds per cent a year. She wants to improve that.
Q: Will you change the interest paid on Bank of England reserves?
Reeves says she does not have any plan to do that.
Q: Will you encourage people to downsize?
Reeves says the government wants to increase the supply of homes, so that if people want to downsize, they can. She wants to give people choice.
Q: Will the budget be nearer to September or November?
Reeves says it will be in the autumn. She will set out the date before the summer recess.
Q: We have not built 300,000 new homes a year since the 1950s. When will you be able to reach this target? And will you tweak targets so they go in the right place?
Reeves says she is announcing new homes today. They are spread around the country.
The government will deliver on its manifesto commitment, she says.
She says people cannot be in doubt about the seriousness of the government’s intent.
Q: You are not the first chancellor to promise economic growth. Every chancellor promises this. When will this happen? By the end of this parliamentary term? Or 10 years?
Reeves says there is no time to waste. That is why she is giving this speech after 72 hours. The government has a mandate for change.
And she has already had a report from the national wealth fund taskforce. She will be responding to that in due course, she says.
She says she cannot change things overnight. But she is working on change.
It is fine to say you want growth. But you have to “will the means”, she says. She says those difficult decisions have been ducked over the past 14 years.
Reeves says she does support development, and has done as a local MP.
She says there are projects that have been stalled that will now go forward.
But “this is not a green light for any type of housing”, she says.
Reeves says local communities will not be able to always say no to new housing under government’s plans
Rachel Reeves has finished the speech, in which she confirmed a range of measures to speed up planning. I will post a full summary shortly.
She is now taking questions.
Q: Are you declaring war on Nimbies (“Not in my back yard” – a term for people who oppose new developments)?
Reeves says it will still, in the first instance, be up to local communities to decide where homes can be built. But the answer cannot always be no. If it is always no, the status quo will continue. Reeves says she is not willing to tolerate that.
Labour wants to promote home ownership, she says.
She says affordable and socially rented homes will be included in the plans.
Reeves says she will make statement to MPs before summer recess on ‘spending inheritance’ left by Tories
Rachel Reeves is delivering her first major speech as chancellor.
She started by announcing that before the summer recess she will make a statement to MPs about the government’s spending inheritance. She said what she has seen in her first 72 hours confirmed that the economic situation was as bad as she thought.
She said:
I have repeatedly warned that whoever won the general election would inherit the worst set of circumstances since the second world war.
What I have seen in the past 72 hours has only confirmed that. Our economy has been held back by decisions deferred and decisions ducked. Political self-interest put ahead of the national interest. A government that put party first and country second.
We face the legacy of 14 years of chaos and economic irresponsibility.
That is why over the weekend, I instructed Treasury officials to provide an assessment of the state of our spending inheritance so that I can understand the full scale of the challenge. And I will present this to parliament before the summer recess.
This will be separate from a budget that will be held later this year. And I will confirm the date of that budget alongside a forecast from the Office of Budget Responsibility in due course.
This sounds like a major “blame the Tories’” exercise. In an extract from the speech released in advance, she said taxpayers were losing out because of the way growth stalled under the last government. She said:
New Treasury analysis I requested over the weekend exposed the opportunities lost from this failure.
Had the UK economy grown at the average rate of OECD economies since 2010, it would have been over £140bn larger.
This could have brought in an additional £58bn in tax revenues last year alone to sustain our public services.
It falls to this new government to fix the foundations.
UPDATE: There was a transcription error in an earlier version of this post. It said that what the Treasury had found in the past 72 hours showed there was “no money left”. That phrase was wrongly included by mistake, and has now been removed from the quote above.
No 10 announces 18 minister of state appointments
Downing Street has anounced a number of government appointments at minister of state levels. Ministers of state are middle-ranking minister, one rung below cabinet, although some of the people on this list will be attending cabinet.
Here is the list in full sent out by No 10.
Most of these people are doing jobs that they shadowed in opposition, althought there are some additions and changes.
Anneliese Dodds, who has been shadow secretary for women and equalities, is now a minister of state for women and equalities. But she is also a Foreign Office minister. The name plate at cabinet, which she attended on Saturday, said she would be in charge of international development.
And Stephen Kinnock, who was shadow immigration minister, has been given a job as a health minister.
· Anneliese Dodds MP as a Minister of State in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and as a Minister of State (Minister for Women and Equalities) in the Department for Education;
● Rt Hon Nick Thomas–Symonds MP as Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office (Minister for the Constitution and European Relations) in the Cabinet Office;
● Lord Livermore as Financial Secretary to the Treasury;
· Stephen Doughty MP as a Minister of State in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office;
· Dame Angela Eagle DBE MP as a Minister of State in the Home Office;
· Rt Hon Dame Diana Johnson DBE MP as a Minister of State in the Home Office;
· Lord Coaker as a Minister of State in the Ministry of Defence;
· Rt Hon Maria Eagle MP as a Minister of State in the Ministry of Defence;
· Heidi Alexander MP as a Minister of State in the Ministry of Justice;
· Karin Smyth MP as a Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Care;
· Stephen Kinnock MP as a Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Care;
· Catherine McKinnell MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Education;
· Sarah Jones MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Business and Trade;
● Alison McGovern MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions;
● Rt Hon Sir Stephen Timms MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions;
● Sir Chris Bryant MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Culture, Media and Sports;
● Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill CBE as a Minister of State in the Department for Transport;
● Daniel Zeichner MP as a Minister of State in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Anneliese Dodds MP will attend Cabinet.
Scotland’s deputy first minister Kate Forbes says this was ‘change election’, and SNP government must respond
Last night, after his meeting with Keir Starmer in Edinburgh, John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, posted a video message on social media indicating that he was optimistic that the two governments would be able to work constructively together. In an interview on the Today programme this morning Kate Forbes, Swinney’s deputy, who attended the meeting, said it was “very positive”.
She said Starmer and Swinney talked about substantive issues, “as well as the need for building a mutual respect to our relationship”.
She also said that what Starmer said about wanting to protect jobs at the Grangemouth oil refinery was “really positive”.
Asked how the SNP should respond to its electoral defeat, Forbes said:
The priority now has got to be to listen to the message that the electorate were sending, take some time to reflect on that. And, might I add, the greatest danger is that you become navel gazing, listening to yourself, rather than listening to the electorate.
They want to see change. This was a change election, and that’s what we’re going to do.
You’ll know that John Swinney and I were only in the post for – I think I was in the post for about 10 days before that the election was called. So we had already set out an agenda for that change.
She also said “competence and integrity” had to be at the centre of the SNP’s leadership.
Foreign secretary David Lammy meets his Canadian counterpart, Melanie Joly
David Lammy has met his Canadian counterpart, in the first engagement he has hosted as foreign secretary, PA Media reports. Lammy met with Melanie Joly, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, on Monday morning.
“Can I thank you so much for being my first official visitor as foreign secretary here in the UK,” he said.
“I have known Canada all of my life, it is a country I love, I have family in Canada, so this means the world to me.”
Lammy stressed the two nations had “the closest of relationships” and said he and Ms Joly had got to know each other while he was serving as shadow foreign secretary.
He added: “Lots to discuss this morning, I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you have made this so special by coming to my first official visitation.”
Although the engagement is the first Lammy has hosted, he has already travelled to Europe for talks with key players, with a promise that the UK would be a “good neighbour” after the years of Brexit acrimony.
Patrick Wintour has written a good account of Lammy’s weekend trip here. Here is an extract.
It did not escape UK officials that after years as the sick man of Europe, the opportunity arises for the country to suddenly look like an oasis of stability, led by a government with at least four years in power and an impregnable majority.
Lammy aimed to come not just with warm words, but with the outline of a plan for an EU-UK security pact. That plan, carefully hatched in opposition, and in some ways reviving ideas that fell by the wayside in the original Brexit negotiations, is more ambitious and wide-ranging than commonly recognised, since security is being defined by the Lammy team in its broadest sense, to cover not just defence, but the web of issues that make up modern-day security, from the climate crisis to energy, pandemics, cyber, investment strategies and critical minerals.
And here is the full article.
Sinn Féin president says she feels ‘real optimism’ about working with Labour government
Sinn Féin leaders have welcomed the election of the Labour government. Speaking after a meeting with Keir Starmer in Belfast, Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin president who is leader of the opposition in Ireland, and Michelle O’Neill, the first minister and Sinn Féin leader in Northern Ireland, made it clear that they preferred working with a Labour government at Westminster than a Conservative one. McDonald said:
This is the government that we wish to work with in a constructive way. We are very conscious that, 26 years ago, a British Labour government was at the heart of striking the Good Friday agreement. We want this British government to be at the heart of honoring that agreement, fulfilling that agreement in all of its parts. And we’re going to work very, very constructively for that to happen.
Because the opportunities that the challenges that we face as societies are real and substantial, but the opportunities too are there for us to grasp.
So I think that we need to sound a notion of real optimism today that we can move forward together, that we can work closely together to honor the Good Friday agreement, to ensure that public services are funded correctly here in the north of Ireland, to work on pressing issues like the issue of immigration together. So we look forward to that.
Government does not have ‘secret tax plan’, says Treasury minister Darren Jones
In his interviews this morning, Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, also rejected suggestions that Labour has a secret plan to put up taxes. He said:
There is not a secret tax plan. This was an attack from the Conservatives. It is not a reflection of reality.
Our manifesto commitments, our priorities that we’re now implementing, our first six steps and our missions are funded with the loophole changes that were in the back of the manifesto that people voted for last Thursday.
Local communities will still get say as government changes rules to speed up planning decisions, says minister
Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is expected to confirm that the new government will relax planning rules in her speech this morning. Giving interviews this morning, Darren Jones, her deputy at the Treasury, said local communities would still get a say in plannng decisions. He told Times Radio:
Local communities will still be involved in the planning process and our policy is not to exclude them.
What we’re talking about today, in which the chancellor will set out in more detail later, is that when in particular it comes to large developments, large national pieces of infrastructure, we need to speed up the decision making process.
That doesn’t mean excluding people’s voices from the decision making process. It just means not waiting years and years and years and then projects being stalled and not delivered as a consequence of inertia in the system.
So people will still be able to contribute their views and they will still be considered within the law in the normal ways but we do want to speed up the delivery of infrastructure.
Starmer holding talks with political leaders in Belfast
Keir Starmer has met Northern Ireland first minister Michelle O’Neill and deputy first minister Emma Little-Pengelly in Belfast, PA Media reports. PA says:
The prime minister is visiting Belfast following his trip to Scotland on Sunday, and will also visit Wales to round off a visit to the three devolved nations.
He arrived at Stormont Castle early on Monday morning as he begins his first full week in office, ahead of travelling to the Nato summit in Washington on Tuesday.
O’Neill and Little-Pengelly greeted Starmer and new Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn at the castle entrance before they held a meeting inside. O’Neill congratulated him on his electoral success and they discussed Westminster and Stormont parliamentary schedules.
After half an hour with Stormont’s leaders, the new prime minister then moved on to Parliament Buildings, where he was greeted at the foot of the landmark steps by Assembly Speaker Edwin Poots. He is holding talks with representatives from the main Stormont parties.
‘The adults are back in the room’: Treasury minister promises new approach as Starmer’s government starts work
Good morning, and welcome to the first full working day of the new Labour government. Parliament is not sitting until tomorrow, but many new MPs will be arriving at Westminster in the hope of finding an office (good luck with that – it normally takes a while), and the new cabinet is busy. Keir Starmer is in Belfast, on the latest leg of his tour to meet the devolved governments, Rachel Reeves is making a major speech on growth this morning, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is starting the process of setting up a new Border Security Command, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is meetng the British Dental Association to discuss changes to the dental contract, and Downing Street is holding its first lobby briefing under the new regime.
Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, was on the media round. Policy-wise he did not really have anything new to say, but in an interview with the BBC he struck a note of confidence that contained a withering put-down to the previous government. Asked if he thought the Tories would not be able to provide a credible opposition given the leadership contest might take a while, he replied:
I expect that we will be challenged in the House of Commons.
Of course the Conservatives suffered a historic loss, but that doesn’t mean there’s no opposition in the House of Commons and of course, we have the House of Lords to get any legislation through as well.
And the key thing that you’ll see from this Labour government is that we’re going to return both to the service of the British people, but also to the norms. The adults are back in the room.
Announcements that we make will be made to parliament, they will follow proper processes through parliament, and we welcome them to be challenged and scrutinised by colleagues from different parties.
That’s the right and proper way to do business and that’s what you will have from this Labour government.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Keir Starmer is meeting Michelle O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s first minister, and Emma Little-Pengelly, the deputy first minister, in Northern Ireland. There is due to be a press briefing at 10.30am.
10.30am: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, gives a speech on growth.
11.30am: Downing Street holds its first lobby briefing since Starmer became PM.
1pm: Reeves visits a building site in London with Angela Rayner, the levelling up secretary.
1.30pm: Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader, holds a press briefing at Westminister with the party’s four MPs.
2pm: The Green MPs Carla Denyer and Siân Berry hold a press briefing at Westminster.
Afternoon: Starmer meets Vaughan Gething, the Welsh first minister, in Cardiff.
And at some point today Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has a meeting with the British Dental Association to discuss changes to the dental contract.
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