UK: Liz Truss to fast track tax cuts, report says

UK foreign secretary Liz Truss is reportedly moving to fast-track her plan on tax cuts compared to her initial plan. Truss is considering moving six months ahead of schedule to push for tax breaks in an effort to boost the country’s economy.

According to a report by The Telegraph, Truss is considering fast-tracking her plan to reverse the year’s increase in social security contributions which were slated for April 2023.

The report added that Truss’s advisers believed the tax break could be introduced within days as part of an emergency budget that her government would implement by September, should she win the race to be the next prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party.

Truss’s rival, former finance minister Rishi Sunak, however, said that cutting taxes now would only worsen the country’s rising inflation rates, which is already set to exceed 13 percent by October, according to the forecasts of the Bank of England.

In a piece for the Sunday Telegraph, Truss said she wants to “immediately tackle the cost of living crisis by cutting taxes, reversing the rise on National Insurance, and suspending the green levy on energy bills.”

Sunak gave a different approach, which was to give support to low-income households that are most vulnerable to the increase in energy bills which are expected to rise by October.

On Saturday, Sunak also stressed that he wanted to “go further” than the support he gave during his time as finance minister under Boris Johnson, saying that Truss’s tax cuts would not provide significant help to those who rely on their pension or are low-income.

Friday last week, Sunak came under fire for saying he previously pushed for policy changes to divert funding from low-income areas. The former finance minister, who is also trailing behind Truss in the polls, was heard making the comments in a video dating July 29 shared by the New Statesman magazine at a meeting of Conservative Party members in Tunbridge Wells in southeast England.

“I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this are getting the funding that they deserve because we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labor Party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas…that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that,” said Sunak at the time.