Rachel Reeves news live: Reeves targets civil service in spring statement as she is expected to seek £10bn in cuts – UK Times

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver the Spring Statement on Wednesday.

Rather than a formal budget, as Labour pledged to only deliver one per year, the statement is set to be an update on the health of the British economy and any progress since her last fiscal statement in October.

So far, Ms Reeves has ruled out any “tax and spend” policies, as she said: “We can’t tax and spend our way to higher living standards and better public services. That’s not available in the world we live in today.”

She has also talked about axing 10,000 civil service jobs in a hope to cut running costs by 15 per cent.

Albert Toth reports on what to expect here:

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said she didn’t have “anything further to add” about Chancellor Rachel Reeves accepting free tickets to see Sabrina Carpenter live, but noted that she herself has not accepted free tickets to any concerts since becoming an MP.

She told Times Radio: “I haven’t taken any tickets, to be honest, since I was elected back in (July) as a new Member of Parliament, and going straight into the Ministry of Justice and then coming straight into the Department for Transport.

“I actually, sadly, haven’t been to see any concerts at all over the last nine months, partly because I’ve been very, very busy.

“As a Member of Parliament, I have never accepted tickets to any concerts or anything like that.”

When pressed on the issue, she said she has not been to concerts because she has “a very busy diary and I’ve got to prioritise my time”.

She added: “When I’ve got time off, actually, spending some time with my family and my husband is actually a more attractive option to me, if I’m honest.”

Will Durrant reports further on Ms Reeves’ concert tickets here:

Ms Alexander told Sky News: “Clearly the fire that happened at a substation on the outskirts of Heathrow late on Thursday night, early on Friday morning, was an unprecedented situation and very significant in terms of its magnitude.”

The busiest airport in Europe was forced to close due to a fire at an electrical substation nearby which not only caused a power outage at Heathrow, but in the surrounding area of Hayes in West London.

Up to 300,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted before the airport managed to get a number of flights running in the evening.

“I had a conversation with the chief executive of Heathrow on Friday morning.

“He told me that whilst there are multiple power supplies into the airport, the fire had created a very significant problem with respect to Terminals 2 and 4 specifically, and that there had to be some reconfiguration of power supplies into the airport.”

This meant “all the systems had to be turned off, and all the systems had to be restarted again in a safe way”.

While there were backup generators available, these were designed to protect the critical systems within the airport, not power it entirely.

More than 200,000 jobs could be lost because of the government’s so-called tractor tax, according to new research.

The move would also cost the economy £14.9bn, according to a study by the independent consultancy CBI-Economics, which was commissioned by the group Family Business UK and looked at more than 4,000 businesses and farms across the country.

Nearly a quarter of family businesses – 23 per cent – and almost one in five family farms – 17 per cent – said they had cut jobs or halted recruitment since the planned tax was announced in the October budget.

Transport secretary Heidi Alexander has said the Government is “not setting a target” for Civil Service job cuts.

She told Times Radio: “We have made a commitment to reduce the administrative costs of the Civil Service by 15% over the next five years.

“We haven’t set any head count reduction targets on that.”

When asked how many jobs will be lost, she said: “We’re not setting a target. (Then-prime minister) Boris Johnson did that and said that he wanted to reduce the number of people working in the Civil Service, and the numbers went up by 130,000.

“What we want to do is make this state more agile. We do think it should be leaner, and we think we can make better use of technology, AI, in how we provide public services.

“That is true for central Government departments, as much as it’s true for other parts of the public service.”

Union boss Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union, has warned Rachel Reeves against cutting civil service running costs by 15 per cent.

She said: “The impact of making cuts will not only disadvantage our members but the public we serve and the services they rely on.

“We’ve heard this before under Gordon Brown when cuts were made to backroom staff and consequences of that was chaos.”

Chancellor Rachel Reeves told Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips that she is “confident” that 10,000 civil service jobs can be axed, after numbers increased during the pandemic.