Labour accuses Jeremy Hunt of ‘dirty dozen’ stealth taxes in Autumn Statement

Taxes set to hit post-war high

Labour has accused Jeremy Hunt of hiding a “dirty dozen” of stealth taxes – costing households £800 a year – in the autumn statement.

The chancellor is already under fire after it emerged the UK’s tax burden will still hit a post-war high despite his trumpeted cuts to national insurance.

A freeze on personal tax thresholds brought in by Rishi Sunak to pay for the pandemic will hand the Treasury £45bn by 2028, up from £8 bn a year in 2021.

Other changes hidden in the small print of the autumn statement include increases to a host of smaller taxes including vehicle excise duty, gaming duty, environmental levies and tobacco, part of what Labour described as a “dirty dozen” of stealth taxes.

The Treasury will also take in billions more than initially forecast from freezes to ISA limits and inheritance tax thresholds, the tax-free amounts allocated to each worker before they start to pay income tax and national insurance. The overall take from council tax will be £12.7bn more five years from now.

Labour said that overall the changes added up to an extra £23bn, or £800 per UK household.

Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said the autumn statement was a “Trojan horse packed with stealth taxes”.

“After 13 years under the Tories, growth is on the floor and the public finances are in a mess. The chancellor has resorted to picking working people’s pockets to foot the bill of the government’s economic failure.”

The Lib Dems Treasury spokesperson Sarah Olney also hit out at the ISA rates. She said: “This is yet another act of deception from an autumn statement that was packed full of tax rises and raids on people’s wallets.”

She added: “It adds insult to injury for working people that ministers cannot be honest about it.”

A Treasury spokesperson said that as part of the autumn statement the government had just introduced a National Insurance tax cut “for 29 million working people worth £9bn a year, meaning that personal taxes for the average person are lower than every other G7 country” as well as business tax cuts.

He added that the government was committed to incentivising greater saving and investment “to help hard-working people save for their future goals and build greater financial resilience and around 90 per cent of people pay no tax on their savings income”.