Corporation tax should be cut to below 19 per cent, says Liz Truss

Liz Truss says business pressures must ease to make Britain more competitive. Photo: CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER FOR THE TELEGRAPH Planet Normal Podcast Episode 166 with Liz Truss

Liz Truss said corporation tax should be cut to below 19 per cent to make the UK a more attractive base for big business.

The former prime minister said she would like to see the tax cut from 25 percent to 19 percent — or «really lower» — as she warned the UK was relying on subsidies to entice firms put off by excessive taxes.

Reducing the rate to below 19 per cent would go further than Ms Truss's pledge to control the tax when she was in 10th.

She vowed to scrap former chancellor Rishi Sunak's plans for a six-point rise, from 19 to 25 percent, but did a 180-degree U-turn in the face of the market turmoil that followed her ill-fated mini-Budget.

Mr. Sunak continued to raise taxes when he took over as prime minister, with the rate now standing at 25 per cent.

In an interview with the Telegraph Planet Normal podcast, Ms Truss said the burden needed to be reduced to make the UK more competitive business level.

She said: “We need to bring corporate tax back to 19%, as it was before… or even lower.”

“We need to make Britain competitive. We want to attract big business, and now we have to give subsidies to businesses to come to the UK, whether it's Tata [Steel] or other companies, because the tax levels are too high. That's why we need to lower the level of corporation tax.”

Indian conglomerate Tata Steel will receive £500 million of taxpayers' money to fund the transition to net zero at its Port Talbot steel plant.

Ms Truss also said the UK needed to simplify its planning system to speed up the process for companies wanting to invest.

“We need to make our planning system much simpler,” she said.

p>“If you want to build a plant in the UK, it will take you at least two years. Other countries offer and build it right away. What will you choose if you are a company that wants to open a new factory to produce goods? So all these things need to be made simpler and easier.»

A 'scapegoat' for the problems 

Reflecting on her 49-day tenure in the leadership role, which earned her the status of shortest-serving Prime Minister British History Secretary , Ms Truss said she needed more «time to prepare» for the role.

She won the first Conservative leadership race in 2022 by promising to embrace a low-tax, high-growth agenda.< /p>

But after sweeping tax cuts were announced last autumn, the pound fell sharply and the Bank of England was forced to intervene urgently to calm the market chaos.

Ms Truss has since said that her mini-budget became a scapegoat for problems that had been brewing for months.

< p>In a conversation with Planet Normal, she denied crashing the economy, insisting that rising borrowing costs were not were «unique» to her tenure.

«Key indicators when I was in office such as interest rates, people's mortgage payments, government bond levels have since been exceeded» , she said.

“So nothing that happened during that period was unique to that time at all.”

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