This is Helen Miller's first week as
Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Tomorrow, in
her first speaking engagement as Director, she will discuss the
Labour Government's first year in office and the challenges ahead
at an event hosted jointly with the Institute for Government
(IfG): “Labour's first year in power: Is this still a
mission-driven government?”
Helen will stress the need to move
beyond debates about fiscal headroom and to adopt a coherent tax
strategy rather than tinkering around the edges of tax policy. In
advance of the event, she comments:
"Labour came to office with the
promise of a 'mission-driven' government – a commitment to
long-term thinking and systemic reform. The ambition that we
should be 'raising our sights as a nation' and finding ways to
tackle the big challenges we face is the right
one.
Despite this, we continue to limp from
fiscal event to fiscal event, obsessed with whether run of the
mill revisions to the economic and fiscal outlook have reduced
the fiscal headroom and whether tax or spend takeaways will
follow. We need to break out of this
cycle.
I think it's safe to assume that the
Chancellor will stick to her fiscal rules. But that alone doesn't
automatically equate to sustainable public finances. As the
Office for Budget Responsibility reminded us all last week, there
is a long list of adverse fiscal risks – put more bluntly, there
are lots of reasons that demands for government spending could
run far ahead of tax revenues. However much this, or any future,
government is willing to tax and spend, it won't be enough. We
need better designed policies. And we desperately need economic
growth: while that wouldn't eliminate the need for trade-offs it
would make them more
palatable.
Politicians need to level with voters
about the scale of the challenges and to make the case for bold
reforms. Lessons must be learned from the recent disability
benefits U-turn, and learned quickly, so that reform efforts in
other areas land more
successfully.
The rest of us should ask better
questions of government. In the run up to this autumn's Budget,
the key questions should not be simply how much taxes might need
to rise and which ones the Chancellor might turn to. It should be
how the government can reform taxes so that they achieve their
objectives while doing less damage to growth. How the government
raises over £1,100 billion each year is more important than
whether or how it raises a few more tens of billions. A
government with growth as its number one mission needs to use all
the policy tools at its
disposal.”
ENDS
Notes to Editor
Joint IFS/IFG event: Labour's first
year in power
On Tuesday 15th July from 10:30 to
11:30
Institute for Government, 2 Carlton Gardens, London SW1Y 5AA (and
online)
To attend in person please register
here.
If you won't be able to come in
person, the event will be live-streamed, and you can sign up to
watch online here.
To mark the first year of Sir becoming Prime Minister, the
Institute for Government and Institute for Fiscal Studies will be
hosting a joint event to explore what progress the government has
made and whether this Government is really doing things
differently to its predecessors. The expert panel will
include:
-
Helen Miller, Director of the
Institute for Fiscal Studies (in her first appearance in the
role)
-
Gemma Tetlow, Chief Economist of the
Institute for Government
- Stephen Bush, Financial Times columnist and associate
editor
The event will be chaired by Dr Hannah
White, Director and CEO of the Institute for
Government.
