Richard Tice confirms Reform abandoning firm commitment to most of the £90bn tax cuts in its 2024 manifesto – UK politics live | Politics

Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader, has confirmed that the party has dropped its commitment to most of the £90bn tax cuts it was promising in its election manifesto last year.

In a significant change of tack, the party is now saying that it will not implement tax cuts until it has cut government spending first.

Tice and Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, still believe that colossal cuts in public spending are achievable, and that these could be used to fund big tax cuts. But they have abandoned the bravado of the 2024 Reform manifesto, which implied rebalancing the economy in that way was relatively straightforward.

At their party conferences Labour and the Conservatives both claimed that Reform’s irresponsible economic policies would crash the economy just like Liz Truss’s mini-budget, and it is now clear that this line of attack seems to have had an impact.

In its manifesto, Reform proposed tax cuts worth £90bn, alongside spending commitments worth £50bn. The key tax cut would have been lifting the tax-free personal allowance to £20,000.

Today Tice told Times Radio that this was no longer a commitment, but just an “aspiration”. He said Reform remained committed to getting rid of net zero environmental levies, but he went on: “All the other details [in the manifesto] go because we’re in a different time.”

Tice explained:

A manifesto is based on a point in time. The principles behind it are absolutely rock solid. We said we’ve got to make very significant savings in order to fund a different way to run the economy.

What’s happened since then is that the state of the economy, because of the mismanagement by this Labour government, the numbers have got far worse. And we will be focusing relentlessly, as I’ve been saying, on the savings.

Tice was speaking after Farage told the Times in an interview that Reform would have a “rigorous and fully-costed manifesto” at the next election and that a Reform government could cut spending before it cut taxes. Farage said:

Reform will never borrow to spend, as Labour and the Tories have done for so long; instead, we will ensure savings are made before implementing tax cuts. I will have more to say on all this in the coming weeks.

The tax and spending policies in Reform’s 2024 manifesto were widely seen an unrealistic. Although the party claimed that its proposed cuts were affordable, the Economist published an analysis claiming that a more realistic assessment of the plans showed “the annual costs are in the region of £200bn and savings around £100bn”. The Economist said: “The gap between the two would amount to a colossal fiscal shock, blowing up the deficit and straining the gilt market to its limits.”

The Reform manifesto also including a commitment to abolish stamp duty. One irony is that, while this is no longer a firm Reform pledge, abolishing stamp duty for primary residences has now become an official Conservative party promise.