Theresa May will need to find £20 billion to end austerity by the next election
An extra £20billion would be the equivalent of paying another 3p on income tax
THERESA May needs to find £20billion to end austerity by the next election, experts declared.
Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) chief Paul Johnson said a small fortune was required to fund public sector wage hikes and reverse cuts by 2022.
An extra £20billion is equivalent to another 3p on income tax.
The blast came after ‘Dancing Queen’ Theresa May told the Tory conference that people need to know austerity is coming to an end.
Mr Johnson told the BBC: “It won’t look like the end of austerity if she doesn’t find money for significant pay rises across the public sector.
“If the rest of the public sector is to avoid austerity, so at the very minimum if cuts stop from now on, that is going to require the Government to find at least an extra £20 billion or so by the end of this Parliament.”
The UK’s tax burden is already at a 49-year high.
Mr Johnson insisted the money didn’t have to come from tax rises.
But avoiding tax increases would require £20billion more on the nation’s “very high” debts at a time the Treasury needed as much spare cash as possible for Brexit.
Mrs May told Tory conference that next year’s Spending Review would show the Government’s “approach for the future”.
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And she said: “Debt as a share of the economy will continue to go down, support for public services will go up.
“Because, a decade after the financial crash, people need to know that the austerity it led to is over and that their hard work has paid off.”
Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell accused the PM of peddling a “complete con”.
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