Mr Hunt also revived the idea of »Britcoin»; Cryptocurrency at a conference policy event Photo: Paul Grover for The Telegraph
Business taxes should be cut in line with personal taxes, Jeremy Hunt said, but any spare money would be used first to reduce the size of the national debt.
< The Chancellor said the government was “not in a position to have this discussion”, warning that tax cuts would be “absolutely insane” while inflation was so high.
Speaking at the Center At a Policy Research event at the Conservative Party conference, Mr Hunt was asked what he would do with £5 billion if he was told to spend it on tax cuts.
He said: “If «If I were to put on my Chancellor's hat, my first priority would be to cut business taxes because the job of a Conservative government is to make the economy competitive, to make money for everything we care about, for our public services.» and so on.
“Obviously, in the run-up to the election, I would like to pass tax cuts that ordinary people think will show people our values and that we believe that money is better when it stays in people's pockets than when the government takes it away.
“At this point, we are not in a position to have this conversation or even think about the “what if” scenario, because any tax cuts will lead to inflation, and we are halfway through reducing the inflation rate. It would be absolutely crazy to give people money through tax cuts and then see all that money taken away by inflation grow again.»
The national debt currently stands at £2.5 trillion, and debt servicing costs the country £110 billion a year — more than 10 per cent of total government spending and more a larger bill than for anything other than the NHS.
Mr Hunt said: «The reason why talk of tax cuts this autumn is somewhat academic is that… also because our interest payments on debt have risen so much over the last six months that I think It is incredibly unlikely that we will have any reserve for such actions. something like that.» Asked whether he had in mind a figure for how much debt would have to fall before he would consider tax cuts, the Chancellor said: «We have fiscal rules that What I'm asking for is budgets and autumn statements that will set the country on a path to debt reduction.»
He also revived the idea of the Bank of England's «Britcoin» cryptocurrency — a proposal first floated by Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor.< /p>
Mr Hunt said: “This is something that the Governor of the Bank of England and I are thinking about. I will suggest that we will probably need a central bank digital currency, but we need to structure it in such a way that it doesn't crowd out everyone else [in the cryptocurrency market].»
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