A response to this morning's Reform UK policy announcements

Responding to Nigel Farage's speech earlier today, IFS Deputy Director Helen Miller said:

'The broad thrust of Nigel Farage’s speech echoes Reform UK’s manifesto: very large tax cuts to be paid for with very large spending cuts. Three high profile giveaways  – scrapping the two-child limit on benefit payments, reinstating the winter fuel allowance in full, and introducing a more generous transferable marriage tax allowance – are dwarfed in size by the manifesto pledge to increase the income tax personal allowance to £20,000 a year, a substantial increase on its current value of £12,570. Without more detail it’s not possible to put a precise number on the cost of this promise, but it could easily be in the range of £50 to £80 billion a year.

Today’s announcements did not set out fully developed plans for government – but that’s perhaps not surprising this far out from the expected date of the next general election. At this point, the key debate is not whether specific numbers, based on unspecified policies, add up.

Stepping back, Reform UK is proposing a very different vision for the role of government. Most notably, it is a vision that that involves much lower taxes, paid for with large, unspecified cuts to public services that would go far beyond a crackdown on waste. It would include ‘scrapping net zero’ – whatever that means in practice. The debate should be about the vision of the state and what role the government should play in coming years. 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.'