Rachel Reeves has promised the UK’s economy and living standards will improve, as she pledged to cut running costs of government by 15% and civil service jobs by 10,000.
Ahead of Wednesday’s spring statement, Reeves defended her stewardship of the economy since the election, saying she had made difficult choices.
She said she was “not satisfied with the numbers that we see at the moment”, telling Sky News: “It’s not possible within just a few months to reverse more than a decade of economic stagnation, but we are making the changes necessary to get Britain building again, to bring money into the economy.”
She said that she would stick to her fiscal rules and not raise further taxes, but said there would be cuts within central government to help her stick to her spending limits.
Although overall government spending will increase, with big rises for defence and the NHS, other departments have been asked to model cuts of up to 11%.
Reeves said on Sunday that the administrative costs of government would need to be cut by 15% by the end of the parliament, and confirmed this would mean the loss of 10,000 civil service jobs.
She told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday: “The world has changed and that is having an impact on growth, you can see that in every country … but do we need to go further and faster in increasing growth? Yes we do.”
Asked about a grim forecast from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that all UK families will be worse off by 2030, with the poor bearing the brunt, Reeves disputed the findings and said living standards would rise.
She told Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips: “I reject that and the Office for Budget Responsibility will set out their forecast this week.
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“Living standards in the last parliament were the worst ever on record. I’m confident that we will see living standards increase during the course of this parliament. What we’ve already seen in these last few months of the Labour government is a sustained increase in living standards.”
She was also optimistic about the prospect of avoiding tariffs from Donald Trump’s administration in the US, saying she was confident in the ability of the UK’s trade negotiators to strike a deal.
Reeves was also pressed over having accepted free tickets to a Sabrina Carpenter concert with a family member, despite the row over Keir Starmer’s acceptance of “freebies” last year.
She said it had not been possible to pay for the tickets offered as hospitality and she had accepted them because it was difficult to sit in general seating because of her security needs.
“Look, I took those tickets to go with a member of my family,” she said. “I thought that was the right thing to do from a security perspective.”
The chancellor later added: “These weren’t tickets that you could pay for, so there wasn’t a price for those tickets. Obviously, I’ll declare the value of them but they weren’t tickets that you were able to buy.”
