Reader Q&A: Our money and economics correspondents answer your Budget 2026 questions – live
· theguardian.com · popularity 30/100 · 0 similar stories today · Reference & How-To (Discovery & Research)
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Summary
The 2026 budget has been revealed; how will it affect you personally, will it change the country and has chancellor John Healey done enough to prepare for the challenges ahead? Our money and economics editors Hilary Osborne and Heather Stewart are on line now answering your questions Sign up or sign in to join the discussion. Post your questions in the comments below. manicmid asks: This budget was always going to consist of multiple instances of tinkering around the edges and deferring big unpopular choices. Labour sealed that position by sticking to their previous manifesto that removed rises on the biggest revenue raisers such as income tax. Heather says: That’s a really good question: Labour strategists are adamant that they wouldn’t. I can’t help thinking that voters were so convinced the public services were in a dire state, they could have accepted the argument that taxes needed to rise. Certainly, the Tories didn’t seem to get much electoral credit for Jeremy Hunt’s desperate cuts to national insurance contributions in his last couple of Budgets. But we’ll never know. Another question is whether Labour should have bust the manifesto promises - either when they first got in, on the basis the public finances were worse than they thought; or at some point in the last year, given the impact of the Iran war (which has added £14bn to the government’s interest costs this year alone). Heather says: Well John Healey’s not going to tell you how to spend your £100, so I suppose you could blow it on the horses instead - but yes, we can’t really get away from the fact that higher energy prices make the UK, an energy importer, poorer – hence the government’s rhetoric of, we can’t offset this completely but we’ll try and help you out a bit. He could of course have decided to go a little, or a lot, further: taxing banks more heavily for example to fund a more generous package. He has also announced some longer-term changes aimed at bringing down energy costs to insulate us better from future shocks; but these look unlikely to bear fruit for a long time. Continue reading...
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