Reeves confirms Budget spending deals struck with all departments

Chancellor Rachel Reeves says she has now reached spending settlements with all authorities departments forward of her much-anticipated Budget on 30 October.

It comes after stories of Treasury rows with a number of departments over the anticipated scale of spending cuts.

Reeves advised BBC Radio 5’s Matt Chorley she had struck deals with all her cupboard colleagues – and in line with custom, popped all balloons put up within the Treasury to signify every division’s funding settlement.

While sympathising with “the mess” her colleagues had inherited, Reeves insisted departments wanted to seek out financial savings to stability the price range.

In current Budgets, chancellors have adopted the custom of hanging balloons within the workplace of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to signify spending deals that should be negotiated with authorities departments.

As settlements are reached, the balloons are popped.

In the unique interview, Reeves stated: “There are no balloons left in the Chief Secretary’s office – the balloons have been burst.”

In the run-up to the Budget there have been rising stories of unease within the Cabinet over the spending cuts wanted to fulfill the Treasury’s goal of discovering £40bn of financial savings.

Sky News reported that the Treasury missed its preliminary 16 October deadline to finalise all main Budget measures for submission to spending watchdog the Office of Budget Responsibility forward of the Budget.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner who runs the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, in addition to Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Transport Secretary Louise Haigh have all been reported as writing to Sir Keir Starmer to complain in regards to the scale of cuts their departments have been dealing with.

Haigh has since advised the BBC she didn’t write a letter, however had been having Budget negotiations with the Treasury “in the normal way”.

Addressing stories colleagues had gone over her head to take their considerations about price range cuts on to the prime minister, Reeves stated, “I wouldn’t believe everything you read” within the media.

But she went on to say it was “perfectly reasonable that Cabinet colleagues set out their case – both to me as chancellor and to the prime minister, about the scale of the challenges that they find in their departments”.

“I’m very sympathetic towards the mess that my colleagues have inherited”, Reeves stated.

“But any additional money, in the end, it has to be paid for either by taking money from other departments or raising taxes.”

The Labour manifesto promised to not elevate revenue tax charges, nationwide insurance coverage or VAT to guard “working people”.

Labour additionally campaigned on a pledge to not “return to austerity” – the programme of deep spending cuts and tax hikes aimed toward lowering the UK’s price range deficit pursued by the 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

“All of those things mean that we do need to find additional money,” Reeves stated.

Reeves admitted this meant she was contemplating tweaks to “other taxes to ensure the sums add up”.

“We were clear during the election campaign, you can’t undo 14 years of damage in one Budget or in just a few months,” she stated.

“It is going to take time to rebuild our public services to ensure that working people are better off and to fix the foundations of our economy and our society as well.”

As she seems to be to stability the primary Labour Budget in 14 years, Reeves admitted she speaks to a number of main political figures.

“I speak to Gordon regularly – I also speak to Tony Blair regularly,” she stated.

She additionally maintains a “good relationship” with her predecessor Jeremy Hunt, usually messaging the Conservative shadow chancellor.

“I may not be particularly impressed with the state of the public finances that he left me, but I do recognise that after Kwasi Kwarteng, he had a tough job to do as well,” she stated.

The one individual she needs she may “pick up the phone to now” is Alistair Darling, the final Labour chancellor to ship a Budget – who died final yr aged 70.

Lord Darling served in cupboard for 13 years underneath each Blair and Brown, and was finest referred to as the chancellor who steered the UK by way of the 2008 monetary disaster.

“I hope that he would be proud of what I’m doing as the next Labour chancellor after him,” she stated.

Reeves spoke about her satisfaction at being the primary feminine chancellor within the position’s 800-year historical past.

Becoming chancellor was “beyond what a girl like me, from the ordinary background that I came from, could have ever dreamed of,” Reeves stated.

Now in her “dream job”, Reeves stated, “one of the wonderful things in the first few months of doing this job is to meet female finance ministers from around the world” – equivalent to US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian finance minister.

“I take a lot of inspiration from those amazing women and so many others,” Reeves stated.