PM stands by tax freezes despite £120bn Covid hit
Johnson reiterates manifesto ‘guarantee’ Comments come ahead of Sunak’s ‘update’
BORIS JOHNSON has said he still intends to honour a pre-election “guarantee” that income tax, VAT and National Insurance rates will not rise despite the coronavirus crisis requiring more than £120bn worth of emergency state spending measures.
Speaking during a visit to a construction site in Goole yesterday afternoon, the Prime Minister told The Yorkshire Post that he remains committed to what was one of the central promises of his December election manifesto, despite the unprecedented amount of public spending that has been necessary since then as a result of Covid-19.
A pledge that his Government would not raise the rate of income tax, VAT or National Insurance was one of six key guarantees personally signed off by Mr Johnson on the opening page of the Conservative manifesto in December which helped him win a Parliamentary majority.
But since then more than £120bn has been spent on state interventions such as the furlough scheme and bounce-back loans for businesses according to the latest figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility, with a further £1.5bn pledged yesterday to support the arts sector and try and save museums, arts galleries and theatres from closure.
A further £16.5bn has been lost to the public coffers as a result of tax reductions.
Mr Johnson said yesterday he still hopes to avoid raising income tax, VAT or National Insurance contributions despite the situation. “I don’t normally talk about fiscal stuff because I leave that to Rishi [Sunak], the Chancellor, but what is in the manifesto is in the manifesto,” he said.
“We were elected, we got a big majority from the British people to deliver on that manifesto and we are very, very sincere in wanting to do that. All other fiscal questions you’ll have to direct to the Chancellor.”
When pressed by The Yorkshire Post to confirm whether that meant the guarantee still stands, Mr Johnson replied, “Yes, it stands.”
His comments come ahead of the Chancellor giving a speech tomorrow which Mr Sunak has labelled a summer economic update in which he will set out “the next stage of our plan to secure the recovery”. It has been reported that Mr Sunak will exempt the majority of home-buyers from paying stamp duty by raising the threshold from £125,000 to as high as £500,000.
Mr Johnson made his remarks as he visited the construction of a new facility in Goole where Siemens will open a new £200m rail manufacturing facility in 2023 and create around 700 jobs.
During his site visit, Mr Johnson met apprentices as the Government pledged £111m towards a traineeship initiative for young people. Businesses offering the unpaid placements in England will receive a £1,000 bonus per trainee.
AT LEAST one in 10 hospital patients with Covid-19 acquired their infection while in hospital, according to a new study.
A report from the Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (Delve) group, which advises Government scientists, found that an estimated one per cent of all Covid-19 infections in England between April 26 and June 7 were acquired in hospital, representing 10 per cent of all hospital cases of Covid-19.
The experts predicted the true figure could be higher, adding that between mid-March and early May an increasing proportion of cases were coming from infections acquired in hospitals.
The team also estimated that at least 10 per cent of all Covid-19 infections in England across the same period were among healthcare workers who deal with patients, and social care workers looking after care home residents.
Some six per cent of all Covid-19 infections were also among care home residents, the team found.
It comes as daily hospital admissions of people with Covid-19 dipped to single figures in most regions of England, new figures have shown.
The Delve team pinpointed issues that contribute to the spread of Covid-19 between hospital staff and from staff to patients, including inconsistent use of face masks, a lack of social distancing between staff and in communal areas such as canteens, and a failure to rapidly identify new infections.
Dame Anne Johnson, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at University College London, and a member of the Delve committee, said: “In the beginning, we really we didn’t understand the extent of the asymptomatic issue… and the difficulties of staff social distancing.
“They were aware they were using PPE – once it got going –
in these very acute settings but because there was less recognition of infection that was in other parts of the hospital, then of course there was transmission going on in those environments.”
She said measures such as the mandatory use of face masks among hospital staff should now have an effect, although data was not yet available.
Separate modelling in May by Public Health England (PHE) suggested that a fifth of coronavirus infections among hospital patients, and almost nine in 10 infections among healthcare workers, could have been acquired in hospital.
The PHE study concluded that placing suspected Covid-19 patients in single rooms or bays has the potential to reduce hospitalacquired infections by up to 80 per cent.
Meanwhile, 16 new deaths were recorded of people who had previously tested positive for coronavirus yesterday, bringing the UK total to 44,236.
In Yorkshire, three new deaths were recorded yesterday, bringing the total number of deaths in the region to 2,848.