Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith has pledged that the first budget of a Conservative administration will focus of cuts to taxes and help for homebuyers.
He told GB News: “Our very first budget will be a tax-cutting budget. We’ve already laid out taxes that we will cut: the family farm and family business death tax, cutting stamp duty on every primary home, so that people can go and buy a home in the confidence they won’t be paying a huge amount of that tax to the government.
“And we’ll go further, but only as and when we can, living within our means. I’ll be setting out again today some of the choices that I would make as Chancellor in order to save taxpayers’ money and allow them to keep more of what they earn.
“So we can do those things really quickly. As I say, we will have done our homework. We’ll have prepared our plans. Our first budget will be a tax-cutting budget, and we can get the country growing again really fast.”
On helping home buyers, Griffith said: “This is all about making the cost of that home to the end user cheaper, and it’s not government money, it’s not taxpayers’ money. It’s about removing all of the gold-plated regulations. Many of them came through net zero.
“The idea you have to have an expensive heat pump, you have to have an electric charger. These are all choices that people can make, but they shouldn’t be forced on them by the state, pushing up the cost of every new home, making it really hard to get the homes that the country needs, and we’re going to cut through a lot of the bureaucracy around this as well.
“We’ve talked about Natural England and Environment Agency being reformed. We’ll be cutting back the number of bureaucrats that work all of the things that make society just very slow, make it really expensive in this country to build anything.”
On the latest mega-dinghy arrival, he said: “Conservatives, having done the work, having commissioned the legal reviews, will leave the ECHR. That’s a big unlock to once again Parliament deciding its laws, deciding who can come to this country, who can stay in this country.
“Our borders plan will make sure nobody who arrives illegally ever has a path to citizenship; that they are returned to overseas and not allowed to stay here, not allowed to get a life on benefits.
“We’ve got very clear plans to do this. We’re a different team than we were in government. We’re a united team, and we will tackle that problem. And I share the absolute frustration of your viewers.
“This is not far from my own constituency near the south coast, and it’s absolutely incomprehensible that the government can’t apprehend and see boats coming as far west as Gosport.”
