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Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is set to express his full support for Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s recent Budget in a speech scheduled for Monday. He plans to emphasize the government’s commitment to accelerating and expanding measures aimed at boosting economic growth. Starmer will highlight that Reeves’s Budget aims to ease the cost of living pressures on households, reduce inflation, and secure economic stability for the country.
This announcement arrives amid scrutiny over whether the Treasury was entirely transparent regarding the state of the public finances prior to the Budget. The Conservative Party has accused Chancellor Reeves of presenting an unduly pessimistic outlook on the economy, arguing that official forecasts offered a more optimistic view. However, Number 10 has dismissed these allegations, defending the chancellor’s honesty and the accuracy of her economic assessment.
Despite a downgrade by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) projecting slower growth starting next year, Starmer will contend that economic growth is currently outperforming expectations. Nevertheless, he stresses the need for the government to do more to stimulate this growth by safeguarding investment and public services. The prime minister also plans to address infrastructure challenges, vowing to reduce excessive bureaucratic hurdles, especially after a report revealed that the UK has become the world’s most expensive location for building nuclear power facilities. He will call for urgent reforms in this area, criticizing what he describes as “fundamentally misguided environmental regulation.”
Business Secretary Peter Kyle will be entrusted with applying insights from the nuclear power report to infrastructure projects more broadly. Although the prime minister’s address comes just five days after the Budget, raising speculation about possible concerns over public reaction, Downing Street insists that the timing was already planned. Since the Budget’s release, Reeves has received public backing from Number 10 following political criticisms that she had repeatedly cautioned about lowered economic productivity forecasts, which opponents say paved the way for tax increases. The OBR chairman disclosed in a letter to MPs that he had informed the chancellor on 17 September that public finances were in a better condition than generally believed. Conservatives accuse Reeves of deliberately painting a gloomy financial picture to justify tax hikes, with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asserting that the letter reveals Reeves “lied to the public” and demanding her dismissal. The Treasury, meanwhile, has declined to comment on the OBR’s internal processes, reiterating that the chancellor made deliberate choices to tackle the cost of living, reduce hospital waiting times, and increase fiscal headroom to reduce debt service costs. Both Chancellor Reeves and Badenoch are expected to discuss the matter further on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg program
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