Simon Harris

Sometimes they're called people who get up early in the morning.

Sometimes they're called the squeeze middle.

We know who they are.

People who are working their backside off and feel they just can't catch a break.

They have to be our priority and our focus.

But I should say this too.

People are paying less income tax now than they were over the last number of years.

That's true.

In the government 2020 to 2025, four of those five budgets reduced income tax.

We have four more budgets to go in this government and I expect there to be a personal income tax package as part of each of them.

And I fully acknowledge the cost of living crisis that people went through, the inflationary crisis had a real impact and we've got to try it now, I suppose, try and get ahead of that again.

And this war, which is outside all of our controls, has caused real challenges.

So I like to think I did a little bit more than float.

So I was invited to give a speech on the European Union and Europe's economy in Dublin at the weekend.

And I basically made the point that for the second time in a decade, we had found ourselves, sorry, for the second time in half a decade, we had found ourselves in basically a fossil fuel crisis.

You know, you all remember, you probably had lots of people in this studio or other studios at the start of the war in Ukraine.

Let's never find ourselves in this place again where we're so reliant on dirty fossil fuels from other countries.

And now here we are again.

So I made the point that both from a national level, and we've done some of this, but we need to do more, and from a European level, we need to now see how we can accelerate helping people who are trying to make the switch themselves, whether that's getting an EV, whether it's putting solar on their own homes, whether it's a business trying to transition to.

And I've specifically asked the economics team in my department to look at what policy levers are at our disposal.