“We want Scandinavian quality alongside Singaporean efficiency – both better outcomes for citizens and better value for taxpayers”, the chancellor says.
“That doesn’t mean asking people on the frontline to work harder, but rather asking challenging questions on how to reform all public services for the better,” he adds.
There are clear attempts here by the chancellor to avoid some of these political decisions being framed as “tax rises”.
Instead, for taxes like income tax and national insurance he is freezing the threshold at which people start paying certain levels of tax.
What this means in practice, though, is that if people’s wages go up but the tax levels stay the same, they may not feel as big an impact from that wage rise.
That’s because they’re paying more in taxes than they otherwise would have.
Hunt says: “Because we want school standards to continue to rise, we’re going to do more than protect the school budget – we’ll increase it.”
He says in 2023 and 2024 the government will invest an extra £2.3bn in schools.
He says that the government’s message to school staff is: “Thank you for your brilliant work… the Conservative government is investing more in the public service that defines all our futures.”
Turning to education, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt says “providing our children with a good education is not just an economic mission, it’s a moral mission”.
He says the UK has “risen nine places in the global league tables for maths and reading in the past seven years”.
He says he is “concerned” that school leaders don’t always have the skills they need to enter the workplace.
He says he has appointed Sir Michael Barber as an advisor to work on implementing a “skills reforms programme”.
Source: BBC.com