Rishi Sunak defends letting second home owners get ?400 energy bill rebate twice – UK politics live

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Boris Johnson has given an interview to Bloomberg, extracts from which are being released over the course of the day. Speaking about Ukraine, he said Russia was making “slow but palpable” progress in Donbas. He said:

I think it’s very, very important that we do not get lulled because of the incredible heroism of the Ukrainians in pushing the Russians back from the gates of Kyiv.

I’m afraid that Putin – at great cost to himself and Russian military – is continuing to chew through ground in Donbas, he’s continuing to make gradual, slow, but, I’m afraid, palpable progress. Therefore it is absolutely vital that we continue to support the Ukrainians militarily.

As Bloomberg reports, Johnson said he would like to see further military support going to Ukraine, including more multiple launch rocket systems that would allow the Ukrainians to strike Russian targets from a greater distance.

He also appeared to dismiss the prospect of negotiating with Vladimir Putin, saying the Russian president was not to be trusted. He said

How can you deal with a crocodile when it’s in the middle of eating your left leg? The guy’s completely not to be trusted.

Here are the main points from Rishi Sunak‘s morning interviews.

Sunak, the chancellor, urged wealthy people who do not need the ?400 energy bills rebate to give it to charity. He would be doing that himself, he said. He also defended the decision to allow second home owners to get it twice. (See 9.34am.)
He would not rule out a further emergency package of support for people with energy bills, even if it meant more borrowing or taxes. Asked on the Today programme if he was willing to do this, he replied:

People can judge me by how I’ve acted over the last couple of years. I’ve always been prepared to respond to the situation on the ground, what’s happening to the economy, what families are experiencing and making sure we’ve got policies in place to support them through that.

In terms of ‘is it one-off?’, what’s happening next year, I’d go back to what I said earlier. I do want people to be reassured and confident that we will get through this. We will be able to combat and reduce inflation, we have the tools at our disposal and after time it will come down.

If Sunak does have to extend these measures for another year, the impact on borrowing will be considerable. This is what Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said on this topic in the IFS analysis published last night.

Today’s announcement is a big package of support for households this year. But it is not without risks. In particular, if oil and gas prices remain high then the government will doubtless come under pressure to continue the additional household support for at least a further year. Extending the 5p cut to fuel duties and the ?9 billion help with energy bills announced in the March spring statement and the ?15bn of additional giveaways for households announced by the chancellor today for a further 12 months would add a further ?26bn to borrowing in 2023-24.

He said benefit claimants could expect an above-inflation increase in payments next year. That is because next April’s uprating will be pegged to the inflation level in September, after which inflation is expected to fall. He said:

What is likely to happen is that benefits and pensions next year will go up by this year’s much higher inflation levels. That is forecast to be much higher than the inflation that people will actually experience next year. So, for all those people they can look at next year and actually feel relatively confident about that.

He insisted that he was still a “fiscal conservative”. He said:

First and foremost I’m a fiscal conservative, I believe it’s incredibly important that I manage the country’s finances responsibly. That means after suffering the shock we did to get our borrowing and debt levels back on a sustainable trajectory.

As my colleague Graeme Wearden reports on his business live blog, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has criticised the decision to allow second home owners to get the ?400 energy bills rebate twice. She claimed on Sky News that this would not have been necessary if the Treasury had not “rushed through” its package. She said:

If the government hadn’t have been resisting Labour’s calls for a windfall tax and this additional support for months, the government could have taken the time to get this package right.

It is not right that if you own a second or a third home you should get this ?400 payment multiple times. You can now get a situation where somebody who’s incredibly wealthy gets ?400 on three or four occasions because they own so many properties.

This is only happening because this package has been rushed through because the government has been resisting this.

Good morning. It is the day after Rishi Sunak‘s cost of living support package announcement, and his third momentous fiscal intervention of the year, after the February energy bills announcement and the spring statement in March, has turned out to be the biggest (worth ?15bn). And in some quarters it has turned out to be the best received. The two leading budget thinktanks, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation, have been about as positive about this as they ever are about anything.

But Sunak also finds himself in the situation faced by one of his predecessors as chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell was only chancellor briefly at the start of the 1950s, but he went on to become Labour leader and in that capacity he gave a speech in 1962 opposing membership of the European Economic Community (because it would mean the end of “a thousand years of history”). It was a terrific speech, and it got a great reception at Labour conference. But as Gaitskell listened to the applause on the platform, his wife Dora warned: “All the wrong people are cheering.”

They probably feel much the same way in the Treasury this morning. The Resolution Foundation says in a new analysis that the impact of all Sunak’s measures this financial year is “highly progressive” (that’s a compliment). But the Resolution Foundation is run by a former Ed Miliband adviser, and the leading Tory newspapers are much more sceptical.

I will post more on the media reaction to the announcement later.

Sunak has been giving interviews this morning and one aspect of the announcement he has had to defend is the decision to allow people with second homes to get the ?400 energy bill rebate twice (once for each property). People with even more homes could get even more.

In interviews this morning Sunak said that, to get the money out easily, it was simplest to distribute these payments per property. He told Sky News that he considered using a council tax rebate to help most households, which would have allowed people living in the most expensive homes to have been excluded, but that this created other problems. He said:

We tried that [with the ?150 for most homes announced in February] and we tried to do it with a discretionary fund and it has worked reasonably well, but there are lots of cases of people who will say ‘hang on, I happen to live in this expensive looking house or in a high council tax band house but I need help too’.

So actually this being universal means that we avoid all of those problems and really do get help to everyone who needs it.

Second homes account for only one or two per cent of the housing stock, Sunak added.

Sunak also said that, as he did not need the ?400 payment, he would be donating the money to charity, and he urged other wealthy people to do the same. Addressing the Sky presenter Niall Paterson, he said:

I am sure, like me, you can also give that money to charity if you don’t need it.

The Sunaks own several properties and so his charity donations are likely to be more than ?400.

I will post more from his interviews soon.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Boris Johnson is doing a visit in County Durham, where he is expected to record a clip for broadcasters.

11am: John Swinney, Scotland’s deputy first minister, attends the official opening of the Scottish Covid memorial.

12pm: The ONS publishes its regular Covid infection survey results.

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