Spending review 2025 – live: Rachel Reeves to unveiling plans for £600bn budget – UK Times

As we expected, defence spending will rise to 2.6 per cent by April 2027.

In delivering the announcement, chancellor Rachel Reeves quoted Sir Keir Starmer who said the global security situation meant a “new era for defence and security” was needed.

Increased spending would lead to jobs across the UK, she added.

The Independent’s Political Correspondent Millie Cooke reports:

Within the first five minutes of Rachel Reeves’ 45 minute spending review address, the chancellor had already made not one but two references to Liz Truss.

It comes just minutes after Sir Keir Starmer made a similar reference at PMQs.

“In their clamour to cut taxes for the rich, the Conservatives crashed our economy. They sent mortgage rates spiralling and they put our pensions in peril. I will never take those risks”, she told MPs.

Minutes later, she added: “The Member for Clacton [Nigel Farage] may be playing the friend of the workers now, but some of us are old enough to remember when he described the disastrous Liz Truss budget as, I quote, ‘the best conservative budget since the 1980s’”.

Reeves is scrambling to reignite bad memories of the Tories’ time in office as part of an attempt to deflect from the difficult choices she is about to unveil – and the pain she is about to inflict on public services.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves says the Labour government will be stopping the cost of hotels for asylum seekers “in this Parliament”.

She says her party will cut the asylum backlog and return people who have no right to the in the UK.

This, she says, will save the taxpayer £1bn a year.

The chancellor has confirmed a boost to the defence budget as part of her spending review.

Defence spending will rise of 2.6 per cent of GDP as Reeves sets out the Government’s priorities for the next three years.

This means an £11bn increase in defence spending.

“That investment will deliver not only security but renewal,” Reeves said.

The Independent’s Political Editor David Maddox reports:

Just five minutes into the spending review statement we are already on to three references to “working people”.

Rachel Reeves watchers also looking for for “fixing the foundations”, “economic renewal” and “plan for change”.

She is also running out a phrase she first tried last week in The Independent: “My choices are Labour choices.”

That last one is no doubt a message to ministerial colleagues like Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper who fought her all the way over cuts.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves says her spending review sees a 2.3 per cent rise per year in real terms for department budgets.

She says this is in contract to Tory “austerity”.

She says austerity was a destructive choice for the fabric of society, shaking off investment and creating a lost decade for growth and living standards.

Watch live: Rachel Reeves delivers her much-anticipated spending review as the chancellor pledges to make working people “better off”:

Chancellor Rachel Reeves says she wants working people in all parts of the country to benefit from a rebuilt economy, and become “better off”.

She says: “We are renewing Britain”.