Budget 2024: Chancellor Rachel Reeves defends £40bn tax rises – ‘everything has to be paid for’

Rachel Reeves has defended raising taxes by the highest amount since 1993 as she said “everything has to be paid for”.

The chancellor announced £40bn worth of tax rises in Wednesday’s budget, with the lion’s share coming from a £25bn increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions.

She told Sky News’ Breakfast With Kay Burley that unlike the previous Conservative government, she has included everything ministers will spend in their forecast, including £11.8bn compensation for victims of the infected blood scandal and £1.8bn for victims of the Post Office accounting scandal.

Ms Reeves insisted the tax rises would “fix the foundations and wipe the slate clean” and this will be a one-off budget.

She added: “As a result of what we’ve done, we’re not going to have to come back and ever do a budget like this again, because we’ve brought everything out into the open.”

The chancellor also admitted growth “is largely unchanged” in the next five years, as revealed by the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) report on the budget.

But she said that is because she is looking at the economy in the long-term.

She said: “For the first time, the OBR are now looking at economic growth over a longer time frame.

“And that’s really important because often politicians make short-term decisions rather than things that are in the long term interests of the country.”

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