Reeves says 60% of families who would benefit from scrapping the 2-child benefit limit have parents in work
Q: Paul Johnson, who runs the IFS, said yesterday that the tax increase was mostly to finance additional spending. But you’re protecting people who don’t work, because the benefits are going to the bill.Yes.
reeves says that 60% of the families who would benefit from removing the two-child benefit limit have working parents.
And poverty creates problems for children. She says, visiting a hospital yesterday, nurses told her that their children were going to the hospital with respiratory illnesses because they were living in cold houses.
Reeves gave an interview on the Today program
Rachel Reeves The interview is being taken in the Today programme.
nick robinson Is asking questions.
He starts by playing a clip of Reeves’ budget speech last year when he said freezing the tax cap would violate the manifesto.
Q: The OBR said you are £6bn short. But you have increased taxes by £26 billion. Are these your favourites?
reeves Admits that they are his choice.
Q: So it’s not the Tories’ fault, or Donald Trump’s fault?
reeves Says that her choices are defined by the context she confronts. She says there were misconceptions about productivity under the Tories.
Question: You didn’t tell people the truth about what would be required.
reeves Doesn’t accept it. She says she is asking working people to pay more. But she is keeping her contribution to a minimum. And it will come from 2028. She says she’s also looking to cut down on energy bills from next year.
Q: Every day during the election the think tanks said the numbers were not going up, and taxes had to be increased. You denied him. Why won’t you apologize?
reeves Says she has to work within the given forecasts.
‘Outsider’ may have been involved in accidentally early release of OBR’s budget report, its chair says
Richard HughesThe chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that “some outsider” may have been involved in the surprise release of his budget report yesterday.
In an interview on the Today programme, he said that he had written to the Chancellor apologizing for the fact that the document was made public about 40 minutes before the Budget was announced – allowing people to know all the details in advance.
He also said that Professor Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, would join the OBR’s investigation into what happened.
Hughes told TODAY:
The documents were not published on our webpage itself. It appears that there was a link that an outsider was able to access.
We need to get to the bottom of what really happened. We are going to do a complete investigation. A full report will be given to Parliament.
We are going to do that quickly so that people can have reassurance in our system and it can be restored.
Think tank says working people would have been better off if Reeves had broken his manifesto promise on income tax
Good morning. Rachel Reeves, The Chancellor is speaking to broadcasters and defending her budget. This is not easy because, although it went relatively well with Labor MPs and the financial markets (no mean feat – these are two groups whose desires do not generally match), it is being hammered by right-wing newspapers. Today is the day when the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation, two leading public expenditure think tanks, publish their detailed assessments, and they also have reservations about some of the budget decisions.
Reeves is facing questions about breaking Labour’s manifesto promise on the tax, which she insists she has not done. But the Resolution Foundation says it would have been better if it had been torn down. It explains:
Working people have been harmed by the manifesto tax pledge. After previously hinting at raising income tax rates, the Chancellor opted to freeze the personal tax threshold for three more years. But raising all rates by 1p for anyone earning less than £35,000 would have been less expensive than leaving the cap frozen. In fact, all but the top 10% of the income distribution are worse off, having chosen cap cuts over rate hikes (which would raise the same amount of revenue).
I’ll cover what Reeves is saying shortly. Graeme Wearden Some of his lines are already on his Business Live blog.
Here is the agenda for the day.
at 9 am: The Resolution Foundation holds a press conference to discuss its budget analysis.
9.30 am: The ONS publishes net migration figures for the year ending June 2025. And, separately, the Home Office publishes asylum figures for the year ending September 2025.
10.30 am: The Institute for Fiscal Studies held its post-Budget briefing.
11.30 am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Morning: Keir Starmer is on a tour of Warwickshire. In the afternoon he is visiting a synagogue in London.
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