Britain’s new finance minister, Rachel Reeves, is due to accuse the previous Conservative government of promising billions of pounds of spending that was not properly budgeted.
Elected to lead the world’s sixth-largest economy in a landslide victory on July 4, the Labour Party has spent much of its first three weeks in power telling the public that things are worse than expected in almost every area of ​​public policy.
When he takes office, Finance Minister Reeves will order officials to carry out a new assessment of the government’s funding needs, the results of which will be presented to Parliament on Monday to help prepare for the first formal budget announcement later this year.
A Labour Party source said Friday the assessment found a shortfall of about 20 billion pounds ($26 billion), and on Saturday Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said it “shows that the UK is broken and dysfunctional.”
The Treasury said late on Sunday that the audit would reveal “a series of unfunded commitments made by the previous administration resulting in billions of pounds of overspending this year’s budget”.
According to the Treasury Department, Reeves will also announce the creation of a new Value for Money Office, a crackdown on government waste, reduced use of outside consultants and the sale of unused government assets.
“The previous administration refused to make the hard decisions, covered up the truth about our finances and ran away,” Reeves said in a planned speech to Congress.
Britain’s Conservative Party has dismissed the accusations as an excuse for tax hikes, saying the centre-left Labour party, which ruled out raising income tax, value-added tax and other key taxes during the election campaign, was using them as a pretext. The March budget outlook, approved by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, featured widely reported funding shortfalls in areas such as prisons and health care.
“Rachel Reeves is trying to trick the British people into accepting Labour’s tax rises. She wants to pretend the OBR doesn’t exist after it was spent entirely in the previous Conservative government’s budget,” said Gareth Davies MP, who speaks for the party on budget policy.
