Latest updates: Simon Clarke, chief secretary to Treasury, criticises Daily Mail’s briefing against Sue Gray as she prepares to publish full report
When Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury, said this morning that all options were on the table as the government considered its response to the cost of living crisis (see 9.52am), he did not mean that literally. As he made clear in a subsequent interview, on the Today programme, one option has been swept off the table; the government will not be restoring the £20 a week universal credit uplift paid during the pandemic. He said:
On that question [restoring the uplift], we were always explicitly clear that was a temporary response to the pandemic. That is not going to return. The question is how we best now look at the next range of solutions to deal with the challenges we’re facing.
We took decisive action back in December with the change to the taper rate, that is to say the rate at which benefits are withdrawn as people’s earnings rise, and we cut that from 63p in the pound to 55p in the pound. That’s a tax cut worth an average of £1,000 to two million of the lowest earners in society.
I know that was something Iain [Duncan Smith, the Tory former work and pensions secretary] warmly welcomed at the time and which is precisely the kind of authentic Conservative solution to this question that we want to see.
We have a situation in which millions of people, because of the massive increase in global oil and gas prices, are facing fuel poverty and a serious cost-of-living crisis in the next few months.
And so the question is, how should government respond to that? And, of course, one thing to note is that those oil and gas prices have also resulted in a massive spike in the profits of the oil majors.
