NUMBER 10 has suggested no new money will be provided to tackle the cost of living crisis in the coming months after Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned against rising public debt or inflation.
Ministers discussed “a number of ideas” to tackle the crisis at Cabinet on Tuesday after Johnson asked them to bring “innovative” and "non-fiscal" schemes to tackle soaring costs.
He accepted Britons were facing “real pressures” but blamed external factors such as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “crazed malevolence” in Ukraine and lockdowns in China - despite experts having warned of the impending crisis since long before those global events.
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The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said Johnson told ministers “there was more to do, including in areas like childcare, to further ease pressures for those who need it most and to get even more people into high-skilled, high-wage jobs”.
He declined to give more details about the plan, saying it was “live policy work taking place and I’m sure we’ll have more to say in the future”.
Sunak “underlined the importance of not feeding in to further inflation rises and emphasised that the UK is currently spending £80 billion servicing our debt”, No 10 said.
This meant no new money to alleviate the crisis until a further financial announcement from the Chancellor, Johnson’s spokesman suggested.
He told reporters: “Certainly, the budgets for departments are set and there are no plans to go outside what’s been agreed.”
The refusal to take action comes as 90% of UK households reported seeing increasing costs, with escalating fuel and food costs taking their toll alongside higher bills.
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Nine in 10 people told the ONS that they’d seen costs shooting up, while a quarter of those surveyed said they were struggling to pay their bills. Some 17% had resorted to credit card borrowing or loans to get by.
According to analysts at the Bank of America, households across the UK face the biggest annual decline in living standards in 70 years.
Commenting, the SNP's shadow chancellor Alison Thewliss MP said the Government is "too engulfed in scandal" to focus on what matters.
"With new research revealing that people face yet another hit with the average food bill potentially increasing by a staggering £271 this year, families need action not more hot air from this out-of-touch Tory government," she said.
"The reality is that the Prime Minister's remarks are all talk and no action."
Thewliss called again for the Government to deliver an Emergency Budget in response to the severity of the situation.
"That Emergency Budget must include at the very minimum converting the £200 energy loan into a more generous grant, scrapping the National Insurance tax hike, reversing the £1040 cuts to Universal Credit, matching the Scottish Child Payment UK-wide, introducing a Real Living Wage to boost incomes, reducing or removing VAT on household energy bills, and following the Scottish Government’s 6% uprating of benefits.
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"On May 5, people in Scotland can send a message to Boris Johnson and prioritise action to tackle the cost of living by voting SNP in the local elections."
Meanwhile, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer echoed the call for “an emergency budget, not a Cabinet meeting” to address the cost-of-living crisis.
He told reporters in Stevenage: “The cost-of-living crisis has been staring us in the face for six months now and it’s a real problem for people struggling with their bills – and the Cabinet meeting this morning isn’t going to change any of that.”
The Government has done “very little in relation to energy bills” and “made a bad situation worse by choosing to put taxes up”, he said.
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