Barry Ward
speaker
554 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Barry Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yes, we're talking about the top rate.
You're talking nurses, guards, teachers, they are in the top rate.
So it affects a huge cohort of hard-working people.
How do you pay for it?
Well, there's lots of ways of paying for it.
As I say, it's not quite as expensive as Barra makes out.
But the first thing is... Okay, let's call it a billion.
Yeah, the desire to do it is always there.
The ability to do it is not always there.
And it'll depend on what comes out of the Summer Economic Statement as to how feasible it is or isn't.
But the reality is that every budget...
The government makes political choices and economic choices that have to be balanced.
And I'm not suggesting that we would cut the top rate of tax and just borrow that money, for example, or massively increase the instability of the economic projections for next year.
That's not what we're talking about.
What we're talking about is a policy where we recognise the fact that hardworking people are paying more tax here in income tax at the top or marginal rate than they need to.
And we should be setting out a priority to reduce that.
Not necessarily.
No, again, it depends on what the Summer Economic Statement says.
But you're absolutely right insofar as the government must balance the books.
And what you're talking about there at the moment is where there's an overspend in one department, the Minister of Public Expenditure said, look, that's going to have to come out of the budgets of other departments.
Showing 321–340 of 554 · page 17 of 28
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