The Prime Minister stated that the ‘dangers [of Covid-19] had not gone away’, revealing his plan for economic recovery with the slogan ‘build, build, build’, promising £5 billion to build new infrastructure and homes. Projects in this include £1.5bn for hospital maintenance and building, as well as the £1.1bn in the Spring budget; £100m for 29 road projects; over £1bn for new school buildings; and £12bn to help build 180,000 new affordable homes. Other projects in the Spring budget will also be accelerated, making the plans in the Conservative manifesto happen sooner than expected.
Through this, he refused to say whether taxes would be increasing or not. This will be followed up on Wednesday with Rishi Sunak’s economic statement.
Labour leader Keir Starmer has reacted to this by saying that ‘We’re facing an economic crisis... the recovery needs to match that’. He stressed that focus had to be on jobs, while Nicola Sturgeon has also said that she was ‘extremely underwhelmed’ at his plans, saying it was ‘not on the scale that is required’. The plan seems to be, as Sturgeon says, ‘simply shuffling around money in the system’. How much this adds to the proposed Spring budget is very little and although it’s not another ten years of austerity, the difference it will make to social issues is likely to be small.
Written by Anna Male
Media by Ben Hyland
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