21 October 2022
New Chancellor Restores Fiscal Responsibility

Regular readers of this column will be aware that I have long been a supporter of Jeremy Hunt. I backed him for the leadership in 2019 and again earlier this summer. It will come as little surprise therefore, that I welcomed his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer last week.

Jeremy is one of the longest serving and most experienced cabinet ministers in the parliamentary Conservative Party. When I served as a Health Minister when he led the Department as Secretary of State, I was impressed by his ability to master his brief and provide calm and rational leadership when faced with challenging circumstances and tough decisions quickly and adeptly.

A core responsibility of Government is to ensure economic stability to allow businesses to make long term investment decisions, for households to be confident that they will be able to meet their outgoings each month and to encourage investment across the country.

While the new Government outlined its plan for growth under the previous Chancellor, it has become clear that market conditions have worsened across the globe. This is most visible to households through the global rise in interest rates affecting bills, mortgage rates and increasing the cost of living. The Treasury under Jeremy Hunt have therefore had to adapt the Government’s strategy.

Growth will remain the central ambition of this Government, but the Chancellor has demonstrated this week that market stability must be secured to fund public spending and deliver sustainable growth.

The Chancellor addressed Parliament on Monday afternoon, outlining the measures he has taken to restore confidence ahead of the Medium-Term Fiscal Plan to be published at the end of the month. No Conservative Member of Parliament wishes to see the tax burden increased, but it is essential that markets have confidence in the Government’s fiscal policy to fund public spending.

Vital reforms and policies to drive growth are firmly on this Government’s agenda:- accelerating infrastructure projects; delivering investment zones; legislating to prevent trade unions from shutting down our national infrastructure; removing burdensome EU bureaucracy from statute; and making it cheaper to buy a new home.

The Prime Minister told MPs at a meeting I attended on Monday evening that she is focussed on delivering the manifesto on which we were elected in 2019.

This is in the context of a very different economic environment, following the global ravages of the Covid pandemic. Governments around the world have increased public debt to keep their economies going. The global economy has also suffered the shocks from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with soaring energy costs stoking inflation. The UK economy cannot be immune from these pressures.

The new Chancellor is the right man for these challenging times. He has already shown from his first decisive days at the Treasury that his decisions are starting to have the desired effect at the time of writing, restoring confidence and settling the financial markets. I look forward to supporting him.