By Enyichukwu Enemanna
New UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham has announced an £850 million tax cut on electricity bills, telling his ministers he will lead a “cost-of-living Government”.
The tax cut on energy will take effect October 1, making electricity bills VAT free, saving households about £45 a year. It is part of the new Burnham’s promise to help ease cost-of-living pressures.
But Darren Jones, a key ally of former Prime Minister Keir Starmer who lost his Cabinet post on Monday when Mr Burnham took office, said the policy was “unfunded”.
Mr Burnham used the first meeting of his Cabinet on Tuesday to say that ministers must give people “a sense that help is coming”.
He vowed to always “show how we’re going to pay” for policies to help hard-pressed people.
The Government said the electricity bill VAT cut would be funded in part by scrapping Starmer’s digital ID project, which had been estimated to cost about £600 million a year over three years.
But that is still less than the estimated £850 million hit to tax revenues from the VAT cut, and funding for digital ID was meant to have come from unidentified Whitehall savings.
Mr Jones, who was the minister in charge of the digital ID scheme, said in a post on X: “Good news that VAT will be cut on electricity bills. It’s a simple way for families to save a few quid, and to mechanically help to keep inflation that little bit lower.
“But the DigitalID program was unfunded.
“The government will have to set out how it will pay for its new policies at the budget.”
His public criticism is a sign that Mr Burnham’s premiership could face problems from Starmer loyalists.
The Government said the £1.8 billion cost of the digital ID scheme over three years had been “scored” by the Office for Budget Responsibility, meaning the money would have had to be found.
The money that would have been used has been reprioritised to fund the tax cut, ministers said.
Mr Burnham told the Cabinet that they needed to examine “all possible ways” to help families struggling with high costs.
After arriving to applause, the Prime Minister told his new-look top team in Downing Street they needed to consider “What can we do just to take that little bit of pressure off people’s shoulders, just to give them that little extra sense that help is coming so that they can have that bit of hope that things are getting better”.
He asked his colleagues to look into what measures “big and small” their departments could do to help.
“We need to be a cost-of-living Government, getting that cost of living down, looking at all possible ways of doing that.”
The Labour leader said the Cabinet he had assembled, after purging allies of Mr Starmer, “reflects the party, the country, all backgrounds”, and told those who had survived the clear-out to take it as a “major vote of confidence”.
He said the Government needed to demonstrate its commitment to the fiscal rules, which would “require us to be disciplined together”, as he expressed confidence he had appointed a “team who will back me in doing that”.
