Mini-Budget latest: Kwasi Kwarteng scraps 45pc income tax rate – watch live

Simon Clarke, the Levelling Up Secretary, is on the morning media round for the Government as he sets the scene ahead of Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-Budget”. 

Mr Clarke was told during an interview on Sky News that the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank had described Liz Truss’s strategy for achieving economic growth as “a gamble at best”. 

He replied: “No, it is not. It is about asserting that if we want to get back to the trend growth that this country enjoyed before the 2008 financial crisis, the 2.5 per cent average that we used to see, then we need to get back to the measures that we know work and which of course we saw during the 1980s and the 1990s helped to stimulate a period of huge prosperity in the British economy. 

“That is to say making sure that alongside clearly a major programme of government investment that we focus on the real drivers of growth and that is to say reducing the burden of tax facing both businesses and families. 

“That is something which the Prime Minister put at the heart of her leadership campaign this summer and today we are going to see that translated into action through what I think will be a really important and game-changing financial statement.”