Jeremy Hunt suggests tax cuts in budget won’t match last year’s £20bn giveaway – UK politics live

The chancellor said he wanted to manage people’s expectations ahead of the spring budget

Good morning. Labour is holding a business conference today, with tickets going at £1,000 a time to executives who want to learn how a Keir Starmer government might handle the economy. According a press release overnight, 400 senior business leaders are attending, and tickets sold out within four hours. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, are both speaking.

But this morning it is Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, making the news, with a declaration that his scope for tax cuts in the budget may be limited. In an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson for his Political Thinking podcase, Hunt said:

It does not look to me like we will have the same scope for cutting taxes in the spring budget that we had in the autumn statement.

And so I need to set people’s expectations about the scale of what I am doing because people need to know that when a Conservative government cuts taxes we will do so in a responsible and sensible way.

As things stand at the moment, things can change, it doesn’t look like I’ll have the kind of room I had for those very big tax cuts in the autumn, and I did mention that to the cabinet, yes.