Rishi Sunak announces new cost of living support as Starmer accuses Tories of U-turn – UK politics live

Good morning. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, will later this morning announce a colossal cost of living support package, primarily intended to help people cope with soaring energy bills. He is not calling it the “emergency budget” that Labour has been demanding, but the size of the giveaway – at least £10bn, according to overnight briefing – makes it more significant than many of the budget we’ve had over the last decade or so. But this is the third fiscal event on this scale already this year – after the £9bn energy support package announced in February, and the spring statement, which included further giveaways worth around £10bn – and we have not even had the 2022 budget. Spending interventions on this scale have become the new norm.

Sunak has been promising further support measures for a week, but no one at Westminster believes that its timing, less than 24 hours after Boris Johnson made his statement to MPs about the Sue Gray report, is a coincidence. Banging on about “dead cats” is one of the most hackneyed, and often erroneous, features of modern political commentary, but today it is fully justified.

As we explain in our overnight story, Sunak is going to announce a major U-turn, because he will announce a windfall tax having spent months rejecting what has been Labour’s flagship economic proposal. But his announcement today may indicate a change of approach in another respect. In his speech in the Queen’s speech debate, and in other recent inteventions, Sunak has implied that he wants to focus help on the most vulnerable. Some of the measures announced today will be targeted at the poorest households, but the overnight briefing suggests there will also be a strong universal element too it as well, with every household getting extra support. In an interview on the Today programme this morning Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the public spending thinktank, questioned whether this was the right approach. He said:

For the poorest households it’s certainly very much needed. It’s extraordinarily hard to cope with that kind of increase in your energy bills and general inflation, not least because benefits have only risen by 3% this year.

Whether it’s needed for all households, I think, is more of a difficult point. £100 off for each household in the country costs, each £100, costs something like £3bn and a lot of that money, frankly, will go to households who don’t desperately need it. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it, but won’t necessarily need it.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.15am: James Cleverly, the Europe minister, gives evidence to a Lords committee on the Northern Ireland protocol.

Around 11.30am: Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, makes a statement to MPs about a multi-billion cost of living support package, partly funded by a windfall tax.

12pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions from MSPs.

12.30pm: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

12.30pm: Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, appears on ITV’s Loose Women.

After 12.30pm: Boris Johnson leads tributes to the Queen in a debate marking her Platinum Jubilee.

Afternoon: Sunak does a Q&A with people on a visit, as well as a social media Q&A with the moneysaving expert Martin Lewis.

2pm: Sir Stephen House, the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan police, gives evidence about the Partygate investigation to the London assembly’s police and crime committee.

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