Sunak says Truss’s anti-handout approach to cost of living crisis ‘won’t touch the sides’ – UK politics live

Rishi Sunak has said that, in addition to the help with energy bills he announced as chancellor, he would cut VAT on domestic fuel if he became PM. He says this would save an average family £160.

This policy is open to the same accusation he has made about Liz Truss’s proposed national insurance cut; it is not targeted at those most in need, and, for poor families, it would only cover a fraction of the extra costs they will face as energy bills go up.

But Sunak has also signalled that as PM he would do more, with a further package of energy support measures that would be announced in the autumn. In an interview with Sky News this morning Oliver Dowden, the former Conservative party co-chair and a leading Sunak supporter, said this package would be “on a considerable scale” – hinting that it would match what was announced earlier this year. He said:

I think there is no doubt that we do need an intervention of a considerable scale to deal with this, because we have to be honest with people about the scale of the challenge that they are facing.

As chancellor, Sunak made three major announcements this year, all involving massive “handouts” (as Liz Truss would call them) intended to help people with the cost of living: a £9bn energy support package in February, the spring statement in March involving further giveaways worth about £10bn, and a £15bn package of support announced in May.

Brandon Lewis, the former Northern Ireland secretary and a leading Liz Truss supporter, has been giving interviews this morning, which mostly have focused on Truss’s approach to dealing with the cost of living crisis. (See 8.56am.) Here are the main points.

• Lewis admitted that the tax cuts announced by Truss already would not on their own “fully solve” the cost of living crisis for people. But he said there would be further measures in an emergency budget. In an interview with the Today programme’s Nick Robinson, he said:

Apart from the specific details that Liz has already outlined that give some help to people – I appreciate it doesn’t fully solve the problem, this is a big, international, global inflation and energy price change that we’re facing – she also wants to bring forward an emergency budget.

• He indicated that Liz Truss was not ruling out using handouts to help people with rising energy prices in the emergency budget she wants to hold if she becomes prime minister in September. This is from the Mirror’s Dan Bloom.

• Lewis was reluctant to confirm Truss’s plan to reverse the national insurance increase would provide minimal help only for people on the national living wage. He repeatedly dodged the question in a testy interview on the Today programme. Robinson eventually answered his own question, saying the national insurance cut would be worth only £59 to someone on the national living wage – when the energy price cap was set to rise by about £1,600. Kate Nicholson at HuffPost has a full write-up of the exchanges here. This is from the consumer journalist Paul Lewis.

Good morning. At the end of last week Liz Truss, the clear frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest, gave an interview to the Financial Times in which she appeared to rule out using benefits or one-off payments to offer further help people with their energy bills this winter. She told the paper:

Of course I will look at what more can be done. But the way I would do things is in a Conservative way of lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts.

This triggered a backlash and, for the second time in a week, her campaign responded by claiming that she had been “misinterpreted”. But this controversy is probably much more significant than the one about her proposal for regional public sector pay, which she was able to bury with a hasty, on-the-day U-turn. As my colleague Aubrey Allegretti reports, the Truss campaign now say they are not ruling out any further handouts to help people with the cost of living crisis this autumn. But Truss has not resiled from the main point she was making in the FT interview, which was that she believes that the priority should be cutting tax. When she talks about “the Conservative way” (a phrase she also used in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday), she is referring to the long-standing Conservative belief that, rather than have the state take money from people through tax and then give it back to them, it is generally preferable to let them keep it in the first place.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work when people are facing dire poverty and in need of urgent financial support to buy food and stay warm during the winter. This is a point that Rishi Sunak has been making, and he has done so forcibly this morning in an article in the Sun. It is worth quoting from it at some length. The former chancellor says:

Families are facing a long, hard winter with rising bills.

Yet Liz’s plan to deal with that is to give a big bung to large businesses and the well-off, leaving those who most need help out in the cold.

Worse still, she has said she will not provide direct support payments to those who are feeling the pinch most.

Scrapping the health and social care levy will give the average worker around £170.

But someone on the national living wage will get less than £60 for the year.

Pensioners will not get a penny.

And her corporation tax cuts don’t benefit small businesses – they just put money back in the coffers of the biggest companies with the largest profits.

These tax cuts simply won’t touch the sides.

We need clear-eyed realism, not starry-eyed boosterism.

Much of this sounds like a Labour party press release. That may help to explain why Truss, not Sunak, is on course to win, but it also illustrates how damaging this leadership contest has been for the reputation of the Conservative party as a whole. The candidates have been writing the scripts for Labour’s next campaign adverts.

This row is likely to carry on through the day. Brandon Lewis, the former Northern Ireland secretary, has been giving interviews this morning on behalf of Truss, and Oliver Dowden, the former Tory co-chair, has been doing the same for Sunak. I will summarise what they have been saying shortly.

There is not much in the diary today, but Truss and Sunak are both holding campaign events with Tory members, and Downing Street is holding a lobby briefing at 11.30am.

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