Sunak: Jobs must be protected to boost economy
CHANCELLOR Rishi Sunak will only attempt to balance the books once the country is through the worst of the coronavirus crisis, he insisted.
Saving jobs and creating new employment opportunities is the Treasury’s top priority in the short term, he said.
Spike
Borrowing to prop up the country during the pandemic is at unsustainable levels but will be dealt with “over time”, Mr Sunak added. Job losses are expected to spike once the furlough scheme ends later this month, with warnings that millions of jobs now hang in the balance. Employers planned 58,000 redundancies in August, pushing the total for the first five months of the crisis to 498,000.
Nearly 1,000 firms or organisations gave notice to the Government of plans to cut at least 20 jobs compared with 214 operations for the same period last year.
But the levels were down on the 150,000 job cuts a month planned in June and July.
Mr Sunak insisted that plans to rebuild public finances will have to be achieved in the longer term and said keeping people in work helps to make that happen.
He said: “My overall focus at the moment is trying to protect as many jobs as possible. What is happening in our economy at the moment is significant and severe, many people are losing their jobs.
“So the focus of my intention in the short term is doing what we can to support as much employment as possible.
“Over time we need to have sustainable public finances. That is important to me, it is important to the Government, but in the short term the best way to have long- term sustainable public finances is to protect as much employment as possible.”
Mr Sunak refused to discuss future tax increases and would only say that election manifesto promises not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance were “very important to us”. He added: “It is the right
approach in the short term to try and protect as much of the economy’s productive capacity as possible so that we can recover strongly.
“But you can’t sustain that level of borrowing. So once we get through the crisis we need to take stock.”
‘ Nuts’
The 40- year- old faced a celebrity backlash after he appeared to suggest people in the arts may need to retrain if they cannot work. Former Great British Bake Off host Sue Perkins said it was “shameful” and crime writer Ian Rankin said it was “nuts”.
But Government sources said comments made in a television interview had been “completely misrepresented” and pointed out a £ 1.5 billion bailout package has been set up to protect the country’s struggling culture sector.
Mr Sunak warned against more “blanket national interventions” to deal with the pandemic as the economy recovers.
He said: “I think that clearly wouldn’t be appropriate and we should try and avoid that if we can, given that there are areas of the country which aren’t seeing either this level of growth or absolute level of transmission, and therefore in those areas we can afford to take a slightly different approach. That is a better way to go – this more targeted, localised approach.”