Both Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced significant backlash when they opted to raise National Insurance despite the Tory manifesto pledge not to. But with Mr Johnson’s leadership in tatters, the Prime Minister could be shifting his focus on short term solutions to his waning popularity with his party and the public.
Speaking at the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the Prime Minister said such issues are “really uppermost in people’s mind” and that they “want Government to be helping them to get services they need promptly”.
He said: “I think in particular people deserve to get their passport and their driving licence just as much as they deserve to get their test, their scan or their screen on time, promptly and we’ve got to focus on that.
“We’ve got to make sure that as we spend - make these colossal investments, which I repeat I think is the morally economically the right thing to do, we’ve got to get value out of it. We’ve got to make sure people see that they are getting the services they need when they want.”
“And we will have the scope, by delivering tax cuts, I think, to deliver considerable growth in employment and economic growth.”
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The Prime Minister’s official spokesperson said Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak “do want to reduce taxes on hard-working people and hard-hit businesses”.
“But equally it is right that we do invest in addressing some of these long-standing problems that the public care about, whether it is the Covid backlog, addressing adult social care or other challenges.”
While no specific plans for further tax cuts were set out during the Cabinet meeting, speculation is already rife about how the PM could aim to help ease the current cost of living crisis on Britons’ pockets.
Express.co.uk takes a look at three measures the PM could be considering.
Lower income tax
Rishi Sunak announced in his Spring Statement that the rate of income tax would be cut from 20 percent to 19 percent.
While welcome news for workers, the catch is that this won’t come into force until April 2024.
An immediate cut to income tax would go some way to helping the Prime Minister claw back public support.
