Rachel Reeves MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 9 Dec 2025 · Low-income Households · Hansard source

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  The number of jobs has increased by 329,000 this year. That is the record of this Government in getting people back into work. The youth guarantee is dealing with the fact that when we took office last year, one in eight young people were not in education, employment or training. That is the Conservatives’ record; this Government are addressing it.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Low-income Households · Hansard source

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  The approach in the Budget provides significant support for low-income households, taking an average of £150 off people’s energy bills from April next year, freezing rail fares and prescription fees for a year, and expanding the free childcare offer. The steps that I have taken as Chancellor, including the removal of the two-child limit and the expansion of free school meals, will also lift about 550,000 children out of poverty.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Low-income Households · Hansard source

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  Since the Budget, the Co-op has cut or frozen the prices of 2,700 essential products at a cost of £1 billion, recognising the impact that the cost of living still has on families, but also reflecting the Budget package that supports our high streets, including our supermarkets.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Low-income Households · Hansard source

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  Through the financial inclusion strategy led by the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, we are extending Help to Save within the universal credit system, and working with banks and building societies. I know that, as a Labour and Co-operative MP, my hon. Friend works closely with the co-operative movement and with building societies to ensure that more people from low-income backgrounds can save for the future.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Low-income Households · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend may know that about 4,000 children in his constituency will benefit from the removal of the two-child benefit limit. That means 4,000 more children being able to go to bed in houses that are not cold and damp and waking up in the morning and being able to have breakfast, and parents being able to afford things that they cannot currently afford. This Government are also providing funds for free school meals in England and delivering free breakfast clubs in every state-funded primary school in England, and extending the warm home discount to 3 million more children. I am proud to be the Chancellor whose actions have led to the largest expected reduction in child poverty over a Parliament since records began.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Costs for Commuters · Hansard source

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  Transport costs represent 14% of household spending, so the Government took decisive action in the Budget to freeze all regulated rail fares in England for one year from March 2026—the first time that has happened in 30 years.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Costs for Commuters · Hansard source

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  In Tonbridge, as elsewhere, regulated fares will be frozen for a year from March next year. I know that many of the right hon. Gentleman’s constituents commute into central London every day, and our rail fares freeze will mean that commuters in Tonbridge and all our constituencies have a bit more money in their pockets.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Costs for Commuters · Hansard source

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  rose—

• 9 Dec 2025 · Costs for Commuters · Hansard source

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  I just want to talk about Stevenage, Mr Speaker. The Government’s action is saving commuters in Stevenage £285 a year on the cost of a five-day season ticket. With the uplift of £120 billion in capital spending, the Government have also committed to the sorts of projects that my hon. Friend mentions, particularly around transport hubs. I will arrange for my hon. Friend to have a meeting with the relevant Transport Minister.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I hosted an event last night for entrepreneurs. Speaking at it were the chief executives of Quantexa and Motorway, both of whom welcomed the changes that we made to support entrepreneurs at the Budget, particularly the changes we made around enterprise management incentives, the enterprise investment scheme, VCT, and the three-year stamp duty holiday for companies choosing to list here in Britain. We are backing entrepreneurs in Britain, and they are backing our changes.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend will know that when I was at secondary school, my school library was turned into a classroom because there were more students than there was space. We have put £10 million into primary schools to get a library in every single primary school in this Parliament, and next year, to celebrate the national year of reading, we are putting £5 million into having more books at secondary schools, and I am really proud to be doing that.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  No.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Covid fraud and error under the previous Government’s mismanagement cost the taxpayer £10.9 billion. They played fast and loose with the public purse and left the front doors wide open to fraud. That is why I have appointed a covid corruption commissioner to carry out the independent review. This Government are doing everything to recover taxpayers’ money. We have already got back around £400 million, with more to come. That money belongs to the British people in our communities and in our NHS. We welcome the publication of the commissioner’s independent report and will respond fully in the new year.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  As the right hon. Gentleman knows, we are backing Grangemouth and have put money into the Acorn carbon capture and storage project. We are taking £150 off people’s energy bills in Scotland. In England and Wales, NHS waiting lists are falling. I wonder why they are still increasing in Scotland.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I could not agree more. The previous Government failed to protect public money, while this Government have generated around £400 million by getting money back. We all know what happened: the Tories dished out contracts to their friends and donors—money that never belonged to them. This Government will leave no stone unturned because that money belongs to taxpayers, not with cronies or crooks.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for that question. We are backing building and getting Britain building with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which passed yesterday—I think without the support of Conservative Members, but frankly, we do not need them. We are backing our automotive sector with changes to employee car ownership schemes, the electric car grant and so much more. We are backing the British manufacturing industry—automotives, buses, trains and everything else.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I have huge respect for the Office for Budget Responsibility, and I reappointed Richard Hughes for a second term earlier this year. We deeply regret the publication of the Budget document ahead of the Budget. Richard Hughes has apologised for that and has resigned, but I thanked him for his leadership of the OBR. My hon. Friend is right to point to the longer-term risks that the OBR also points out. That is why at the Budget we took measures on electric vehicles and on high-value properties, because we need to reform the tax system so that it works for the future.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Employment is up since we took office, and part of the reason for the disparity between those numbers is the fact that people who were economically inactive are now seeking work. That is exactly what we want, for people to be seeking work and to get back into work, but there are more jobs in the economy today than when we took office.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  In its spring statement, the OBR was clear that productivity was coming in lower than forecast, and it was clear that it was reviewing that over the summer. The numbers that the OBR has since published showed that in the final pre-measures forecast the fiscal headroom was just over £4 billion. I was clear in my speech on 4 November that I did not want to reduce the headroom; I wanted to increase it. I increased it to bring back the stability that is much needed in our economy after 14 years of Conservative government.

• 9 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for this question and for all the campaigning work she has done on it. Removing the two-child limit, combined with the changes we are making around free school meals, the warm home discount, capping the cost of school uniform and rolling out more childcare to more families, will lift more families—more children—out of poverty. It is worth noting that around 70% of kids growing up in poverty are in a family where someone works.

• 9 Dec 2025 · EU Exit: Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  The Office for Budget Responsibility has produced an independent analysis and confirmed that it believes that 4% is the correct number, and the OBR continues to maintain that in its forecasts.

• 9 Dec 2025 · EU Exit: Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  Since we came to office last year, we have reset our relationship with the EU, which is why last May we agreed with the EU an expansive set of changes to our relationship, including on food and farming, on electricity and energy trading, and on youth mobility and Erasmus. We are taking all that forward, but at the same time we are taking opportunities to trade more with fast-growing economies around the world, including India, and we also got the first, and the best, trade deal that anybody has secured with the US. That is how we are going for growth, alongside passing the Planning and Infrastructure Bill last night in this place.

• 9 Dec 2025 · EU Exit: Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that productivity will be 4% lower than it would have been had the UK not withdrawn from the EU. However, alongside the trade deals struck with the US and India, the Government are resetting our relationship with the EU to get better deals on, for example, food and farming, as well as on electricity trading. The hon. Member’s party talks about how leaving the European Union has been costly and disruptive, but somehow thinks that Scotland leaving the UK and its internal market would be magically effortless and cost free. I must say that the SNP is no better than those who promised the public an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. It is all talk, but no delivery.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Financial Statement and Budget Report · Hansard source

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  Those are my choices, not austerity and not reckless borrowing, but cutting the debt, cutting waiting lists and cutting the cost of living. Those are Labour choices, promised and delivered by this Budget—promised and delivered by this Labour Government. I commend this statement to the House. Provisional collection of taxes Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 51(2)), That, pursuant to section 5 of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act 1968, provisional statutory effect shall be given to the following motions:— (a) Stamp duty reserve tax (UK listing relief) (motion no. 60); (b) Rates of tobacco products duty (motion no. 65).— (Rachel Reeves.) Question agreed to.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Financial Statement and Budget Report · Hansard source

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  The Leader of the Opposition supported these freezes when her party made them; she might want to forget about that, but the British people never will. At the same time, we are ensuring that people only in receipt of the basic or new state pension do not have to pay small amounts of tax through simple assessment from April 2027. I will also keep the plan 2 student loan repayments threshold at its 2026-27 level for three years. I know that maintaining the thresholds is a decision that will affect working people. I said that last year and I will not pretend otherwise now. I am asking everyone to make a contribution, but I can keep that contribution as low as possible because I will make further reforms to our tax system today to make it fairer, and to ensure the wealthiest contribute the most. The Conservatives knew that our tax system did not work. Time and time again, they ducked the necessary reforms, leaving a system unfit for a changing economy, with unfairness that they refused to address. Currently, a landlord with an income of £25,000 will pay nearly £1,200 less in tax than their tenant with the same salary, because no national insurance is charged on property, dividend or savings income. It is not fair that the tax system treats different types of income so differently, and so I will increase the basic and higher rate of tax on property, savings and dividend income by 2 percentage points, and the additional rate of tax on property and savings income by 2 percentage points. Even after these reforms, 90% of taxpayers will still pay no tax at all on their savings. I also believe that, as well as narrowing the gap between the tax on income from assets and income from work, a fair society is one where the wealthiest pay their fair share. The reforms I made last year will raise an additional £8 billion a year by 2030 from wealth. I increased taxes last year on private equity, private schools and private jets, and I abolished the non-dom tax regime. This year I will make two changes to cap trust charges and prevent avoidance. I reformed inheritance tax on agricultural and business assets and this year— [Interruption.] This year I am aligning those reforms with wider inheritance tax rules by allowing the transfer of the 100% relief allowance between spouses, balancing the taxation of these valuable assets with the realities of family life. In this Budget, I will take further steps to deal with a long-standing source of wealth inequality in our country. A band D home in Darlington or Blackpool pays just under £2,400 in council tax, nearly £300 more than a £10 million mansion in Mayfair, and so from 2028, I am introducing the high value council tax surcharge in England, an annual £2,500 charge for properties worth more than £2 million, rising to £7,500 for properties worth more than £5 million. This will be collected alongside council tax, levied on owners, and we will consult on options for support or deferral. This new surcharge will raise over £400 million by 2031 and will be charged on less than the top 1% of properties. Reliefs in our tax system cost the taxpayer billions of pounds a year, but many of them no longer serve their original purpose. The Government rightly provides generous tax relief for people paying into a pension, relieving income tax on all contributions and on the investment itself, as well as national insurance relief on employer contributions, at a cost of over £70 billion a year to the Exchequer. This Budget makes no changes to those reliefs or to the tax-free lump sum. However, salary sacrifice for pensions, which was intended to be a small part of our pensions system, is forecast almost to treble in cost to other taxpayers, from £2.8 billion in 2017 to £8 billion by 2030, with the greatest benefit going to the highest earners, or to those in the financial services sector putting their bonuses into pensions tax-free, while those on the minimum wage or whose employers do not offer salary sacrifice do not benefit at all. That is not sustainable for our public finances, putting pressure on the tax that everyone else pays. I am therefore introducing a £2,000 cap on salary sacrifice into a pension, with contributions above that taxed in the same way as other employee pension contributions. It is a pragmatic step so that people, especially on low and middle incomes, can continue to use salary sacrifice for their pension without paying any more tax than they do now. To give individuals and employers time to adjust to these new arrangements, these changes will come into effect in 2029. The coalition Government introduced 100% relief from capital gains tax on business sales made to employee ownership trusts, creating a route for gains to go completely untaxed when businesses are sold. I will reduce that relief to 50%, retaining a strong incentive for employee-owned companies. As we work towards doubling the size of the co-operative economy, the Department for Business and Trade will launch a call for evidence on how we can better support co-ops to grow. As a result of the changes that I have made to capital gains tax this year and last year, receipts are forecast to increase from £14 billion this year to £30 billion by 2030. To support our high streets, I am announcing a package of regulatory changes, as called for by UKHospitality and the British Retail Consortium. I will support the great British pub through our new national licensing framework, encouraging councils to back our pubs and to back late-night venues with greater freedoms. For business rates, I will introduce permanently lower tax rates for over 750,000 retail, hospitality and leisure properties—the lowest rates since 1991, paid for through higher rates on properties worth more than £500,000, such as the warehouses used by online giants. Alongside this, I will introduce a package of support worth over £4.3 billion over the next three years for a property of any size seeing a large increase in their bill. To support a level playing field in retail, I will stop online firms from undercutting our high street businesses, by ensuring that customs duty applies on parcels of any value. I will reform our motoring taxes, exempting search and rescue vehicles from vehicle excise duty, as called for by my hon. Friends the Members for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Torcuil Crichton) and for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister). All cars contribute to wear and tear on our roads, so I will ensure that drivers are taxed according to how much they drive, not just by the type of car they own, by introducing the electric vehicle excise duty on electric cars. That will be payable each year alongside vehicle excise duty at 3p per mile for electric cars, and 1.5p for plug-in hybrids, helping us to double road maintenance funding in England over the course of this Parliament. Alongside that, I am providing support to boost our British car industry: increasing the threshold for the expensive car supplement on electric vehicles to £50,000, saving over a million motorists £440 a year; providing £1.3 billion additional funding for the electric car grant, extending it to 2030, taking total funding to £2 billion; and delaying changes to the employee car ownership scheme. In addition, we are investing a further £200 million to accelerate the roll-out of EV charging, as well as 100% business rates relief for EV charge points for the next decade, with thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon) for his representations on that policy. I will improve competition in our taxi industry by ending ride-hailing companies’ use of a discount scheme intended for coach tours, as called for by Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association: legislating to restrict access so that everyone pays fairly, and protecting £700 million of tax revenue each year. I am responding to our consultation on landfill tax, and listening to representations particularly from our house building industry. I will not converge towards a single rate, but I will prevent the gap between the two rates from widening, to balance the need to address tax avoidance in the current structure. I will today publish Ray McCann’s report into the loan charge, along with the Government’s response, setting out a new settlement opportunity that will finally allow people to finalise their position and draw a line under this long-standing issue. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) for her representations on this subject. I will continue with the planned uprating for tobacco duties that I set out last year, and uprate alcohol duties by inflation, alongside our plans to introduce a vaping products duty in 2026, and the changes to the soft drinks industry levy announced by my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary yesterday. I thank the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury for his work on all the tax measures in this Budget. I will also reform gambling taxes in response to the rise in online gambling. Remote gaming is associated with the highest levels of harm, and so I am increasing remote gaming duty from 21% to 40%, with duty on online betting increasing from 15% to 25%. I am making no change to the taxes on in-person gambling or on horseracing, and I am abolishing bingo duty entirely from April next year. Taken together, my reforms to gambling tax will raise over £1 billion per year by 2031. As a result of the tax reforms I have made today, I can confirm that I will not be increasing national insurance, the basic, higher or additional rates of income tax, or VAT. I have kept everyone’s contribution as low as possible, through reforms to make our tax system stronger, closing loopholes, ensuring that the wealthiest pay their share, and building a tax system that is fairer for the future as our economy changes. On the day I became Chancellor, I said that I would judge my time in office a success if I knew that ordinary children from working-class backgrounds were living more fulfilling lives—their horizons expanded; their potential realised. I joined the Labour party, I came into politics, because I believe that every child has equal worth and deserves an equal chance to achieve their promise. The biggest barrier to equal opportunity is child poverty, because for every child that grows up in poverty, our society pays a triple cost. The first and heaviest is to the child: going to school hungry; waking up in a cold home, or in another B&B. While other children enjoy the advantages of parents with time to help with homework, or a quiet space at home to work in, too many go without. There is also the cost of supporting a family in poverty, which ends up in the lap of overstretched councils that can do no more than shunt them into temporary accommodation, at huge cost to local taxpayers. Then there is the future cost to our economy and our society, of wasted talent, and a welfare system that bears the cost of failure for decades to come: young people with so much to contribute, but whose potential is suffocated early by limited life chances and missed opportunities, struggling to make their way in a society that did not look out for them. I do not intend to preside over a status quo that punishes children for the circumstances of their birth and demands that we all pay three times over for it. Since last July, we have rolled out free breakfast clubs in schools, and we are expanding free school meals to half a million more kids, lifting 100,000 children out of poverty as we do it. We have passed the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, and we have extended the childcare offer. I am proud of all that, but it is not enough, because there is one policy that pushes kids into poverty more than any other. It was introduced by the Conservatives. They said it would save money, and that it would bring about “behavioural change”, disincentivising poorer families from having more children. Even on its own terms the policy failed: the welfare bill has continued to rise, and there has been no difference in the size of families. What it has done since it was introduced is push hundreds of thousands of children into poverty. They said they were punishing parents’ choices, but it is the kids who have paid the price. They have paid the price for the policies of a party that opted for cynical gimmicks over real savings in our welfare system. I understand that many families are finding times hard, and that many have had to make difficult choices when it comes to having kids. There are many reasons why people choose to have children and then find themselves in difficult times: the death of a partner, separation, ill health, a lost job. I do not believe that children should have to bear the brunt of that. And neither can I in good conscience leave in place the vile policy known as the rape clause, which requires women to prove their child has been conceived non-consensually, to receive support. I am proud to be Britain’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer and I take the responsibilities that come with that seriously. I will not tolerate the grotesque indignity to women of the rape clause any longer. It is dehumanising, it is cruel and I will remove it from the statute book. So because I am tackling fraud and error in our welfare system, cracking down on tax avoidance and reforming gambling taxation, I can announce today, fully costed and fully funded, the removal of the two-child limit in full from April. [ Interruption. ] It is amazing what people get so angry about. We have seen the Conservatives’ true colours today—the thing they get angry about is lifting children out of poverty— [ Interruption. ]