Nigel Farage has been accused of leaving a multibillion-pound black hole at the heart of his party’s spending plans after unveiling a series of expensive policy pledges to be paid for by cutting nonexistent items of government spending.
The Reform UK leader laid out a series of economic promises at a speech on Tuesday designed to take advantage of disquiet among Labour voters at the government’s policies on taxes and benefits.
But while Farage promised up to £80bn worth of new spending – including scrapping the two-child benefit cap and increasing winter fuel payments – he did not explain exactly how they could be paid for.
Helen Miller, the deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “The risk is that we hear much more about sizeable giveaways on tax and benefits while getting nothing like the same amount of specificity about the big cuts to spending on public services that would be needed for the plan to be implementable.”
One of Farage’s main revenue-raising policies is to scrap the government’s commitment to reaching net zero by 2050, which he said would save £45bn a year, citing calculations by the Institute for Government (IfG). But Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the IfG, said the Reform leader had used a figure that included both public sector and private sector investment.
“The bulk of spending on energy infrastructure is going to come from the private sector – but closing private sector projects won’t generate money for the government,” she said.
Labour accused Reform of making “fantasy promises”, while the Liberal Democrats called his speech “Trussonomics on steroids”.
The Climate Change Committee says net zero will require investment of £26bn a year, more than two-thirds of which will be provided by the private sector. That will be offset, however, by about £22bn a year of savings the policy will enable.
Tim Montgomerie, a political commentator and Reform supporter, told the BBC: “I wouldn’t say the numbers do add up yet, I readily concede that.” He said it was too far away from the election to demand the party deliver a fully costed policy platform.
Farage himself admitted his sums might not add up, but insisted they gave “an idea of direction, policy, of priorities, of what we think is important, of what we think it is going to cost”.
The Reform leader set out his latest policy pledges during a speech in central London at which he made three main policy announcements: ending the two-child benefit cap, reversing the cuts to winter fuel payments and increasing tax breaks for married couples. He refused, however, to guarantee keeping the pensions triple lock, which ensures the state pension rises by the highest of inflation, earnings growth or 2.5% a year.
The IFS calculated that when added to a separate promise to increase the threshold at which people start paying income taxes to £20,000, the policies could cost between £50bn and £80bn a year.
Farage said his policies were in part about fairness, but also designed to encourage families to have more children, a social policy frequently espoused on the right.
“We believe lifting the two-child cap is the best thing to do, not because we support a benefits culture but because we believe for lower-paid workers this actually makes having children just a little bit easier for them,” he said.
He also promised more generous tax breaks for married people should he win the next election, saying he would raise the amount of tax-free allowance that someone can transfer to their spouse from £1,260 to £5,000.
He added that he wanted more stringent controls on abortion as well.
“I think it’s ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous, that we can allow abortion up to 24 weeks, and yet, if a child is born prematurely at 22 weeks, your local hospital will move heaven and earth and probably succeed in that child surviving and going on and living a normal life,” he said.
