Taking advantage of our Brexit “freedoms” will boost prosperity and counter claims of economic “gloom”, Jeremy Hunt has said in a major speech today.
Speaking at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London, the Chancellor said that “Structural issues like poor productivity, skills gaps, low business investment and the over-concentration of wealth in the South-East have led to uneven and lower growth”
The speech set the scene for the upcoming Spring Budget due on 15 March.
Mr Hunt said: “Our plan for growth, is necessitated, energised and made possible by Brexit. The desire to move to a high wage, high skill economy is one shared on all sides of that debate. And we need to make Brexit a catalyst for the bold choices that we’ll take advantage of the nimbleness and flexibilities that it makes possible”.
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It comes as the chancellor is expected to announce new post-Brexit reforms in the coming months which he suggests could unlock £100 billion of private investment in the UK this decade.
The chancellor is struck an optimistic tone, saying that “declinism about Britain is just wrong. It has always been wrong in the past – and it is wrong today. Some of the gloom is based on statistics that do not reflect the whole picture”
“Like every G7 country, our growth was slower in the years after the financial crisis than the years before it. But since 2010, the UK has grown faster than France, Japan and Italy. Not at the bottom, but right in the middle of the pack. Since the Brexit referendum, we have grown at about the same rate as Germany.
The chancellor will called for a new focus on “four Es” — namely, enterprise, employment, education and “everywhere”. The latter being a code for levelling up.
He said: “For ease of memory the 4 pillars all happen to start with the letter ‘E’ . The Four ‘E’s of economic growth and prosperity. And they are Enterprise, Education, Employment and Everywhere.
“So let’s start with the first ‘E’ which is enterprise. If we are to be Europe’s most prosperous economy, we need to have quite simply, its most dynamic and productive companies….
“The next ‘E’ is Education. This is an area where we have made dramatic progress in recent years thanks to the work of successive Conservative education ministers …
“Let me now turn to the third ‘E’ which is Employment. If companies cannot employ the staff they need, they cannot grow. …
“I conclude with my final ‘E’ – Everywhere. That means ensuring the benefits of economic development are felt not just in London and the South-East but across the whole of the UK”.
In the run-up to Mr Hunt’s speech, Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s shadow public health minister, accused the Conservatives of “running down the country” as he rejected the claim that some people are guilty of “talking down the country”.
Asked about Hunt’s suggestion that people should be more optimistic about the UK, Mr Gwynne told Sky News: “It is all fine and well saying that people are talking down the country, I don’t believe that anybody is talking down the country, it is the Tory Government that is running down the country. We have had 13 years of the same messaging.
“Tory chancellor after Tory chancellor has talked about the need for growth, the need for productivity, the need for investment over the long-term, the need for infrastructure, the need for levelling up.”
The speech follows an all-day cabinet summit at Chequers, the prime minister’s Buckinghamshire country house, amid political uproar over Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs. The Times hears that the priority stressed at the summit was to bring down inflation and that the Government would continue to take “tough decisions” to do so.
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