Tomorrow’s Budget is expected to be brutal, with the Conservatives recognising that now is the time to inflict the maximum pain as the party is the furthest it will ever be from the next election. But Sky News reports tonight that one of the most-reported aspects of that brutal Budget, the £12bn of welfare cuts, will be introduced a little more gently than expected.
Faisal Islam writes that this is ‘partly because buoyant tax revenues and new Office of Budget Responsibility projections mean the Chancellor can meet his fiscal mandate without making the welfare cuts within two years’. It does also mean that a withdrawal of tax credits, for instance, can be introduced much more slowly and gradually, which will satisfy those in Whitehall who were worried that a sudden cut would leave a lot of families in the lurch until their wages picked up. It also makes it much more difficult for Labour to criticise the welfare cuts as being gratuitously harsh.
As ever on the eve of the Budget, everyone in Westminster is straining to work out what the ‘rabbit’ is that Osborne could be producing. Slowing welfare cuts is insufficiently bunny-like, but this does fit the hints that those around the Chancellor were dropping that things might be better than expected in tomorrow’s statement.
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