UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves said ‘we are renewing Britain’ as she set out how she plans to spend hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
The chancellor said total departmental budgets would grow by 2.3% a year in real terms.
Setting out the spending review in the House of Commons, Reeves said the tax hikes and looser borrowing rules allowed her to spend £190 billion more on the day-to-day running of public services and £113 billion on investment.
The review marks a watershed moment for the government, almost a year after Labour’s election landslide.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the Cabinet that the spending review ‘marks the end of the first phase of this government, as we move to a new phase that delivers on the promise of change for working people all around the country and invests in Britain’s renewal’.
In a sign of the difficulties which face Starmer and the chancellor, migrants continued to cross the English Channel in small boats on Wednesday.
Reeves promised funding of up to £280 million more per year by the end of the spending review period in 2028/29 for the new Border Security Command and committed to end spending on hotels for asylum seekers by the next election.
In an attack on the Conservative legacy, she said: ‘The party opposite left behind a broken system: billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money spent on housing asylum seekers in hotels, leaving people in limbo and shunting the cost of failure onto local communities.
‘We won’t let that stand.’
She said ‘we will be ending the costly use of hotels to house asylum seekers, in this Parliament’ with funding to cut the asylum backlog, hear more appeal cases and return those with no right to be in the UK.
By David Hughes, Caitlin Doherty and Christopher McKeon, PA
source: PA
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