Autumn statement 2022 – live: Jeremy Hunt insists tax hikes and spending cuts needed to weather economic ‘storm’

Patients could face years of long waits for treatment on the NHS, as the National Audit Office (NAO) warned that the plan to reduce extensive waits for elective and cancer care services by 2025 is at serious risk, reported The Guardian.

“There are significant risks to the delivery of the plan to reduce long waits for elective and cancer care services by 2025. The NHS faces workforce shortages and inflationary pressures, and it will need to be agile in responding as the results of different initiatives in the recovery programme emerge,” said Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO.

An NHS spokesperson said that the healthcare provider is currently on track to deliver recovery milestones.

“Despite concerns about what is likely to be a very challenging winter, the NHS is currently on track to deliver on its next recovery milestones – after already virtually eliminating two-year waits for care and reducing 18-month waits by almost 60 per cent in a year,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying.

“Staff have achieved this despite higher staff absences, more Covid patients in hospital this summer than the last two combined, reduced hospital capacity caused by social care issues discharging patients back into the community, and increased demand on urgent and emergency care services.”

Brexit has added 6 per cent to UK food prices, a Bank of England official has said as inflation hit a 41-year high.

“It’s undeniable now that we’re seeing a much bigger slowdown in trade in the UK compared to the rest of the world,” said Dr Swati Dhingra, who is also an associate professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), told MPs.

Living standards are under immense pressure around the globe this year due to record inflation, particularly in food and energy prices, but Dr Dhingra said Britain would suffer more as a direct result of having left the EU.

Most food banks are now helping people who have never turned to them for support before as the cost of living crisis continues to take its toll, a new survey has found.

Two thirds of Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) members polled said they had been helping people who are completely new to food banks over the last few months.

As chancellor Jeremy Hunt gets set to present the autumn Budget on Thursday, the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) figure has been recorded as the highest since October 1981 and marks a full percentage point rise last month, nearly double what economists had expected.

Inflation has reached a 41-year-high of 11.1 per cent.

Mr Hunt blamed the impact of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine for the spike in prices, which he warned was “thwarting any chance of long-term economic growth”.

Liam James, Aisha Rimi report:

“Rishi Sunak and co are not as bad as the idealogues that went before them. But the lingering effects of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng – the dreadful duo – and their disastrous mini-Budget is still there too. It will be written all over Hunt’s statement. It has resulted in increased mortgage costs and other pain.

So yes, the government clearly deserves to pay a high political price for the high prices the nation is experiencing.”

Greenpeace activists have beamed a documentary film about a community struggling to support themselves through the cost of living crisis onto Rishi Sunak’s Yorkshire mansion.

In a statement, Heather Kennedy, a community organiser from the New Economics Foundation who works in the Rother Valley and helped produce the film said: “The Cost of Living shows communities in South Yorkshire, but the circumstances they face will be familiar to people right across Britain.

“After the longest fall in incomes on modern records, and over a decade of underfunded, crumbling public services, we are being hit with inflated energy costs that are making fossil fuel companies rich and us poor.”

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is set to lay out a package of sweeping spending cuts and tax hikes in a plan he promises will shore up Britain’s defences against an economic “storm”.

During a round of media interviews on Sunday morning, Rishi Sunak’s chancellor warned that everybody in the UK will end up “paying a bit more tax” as a result of what he will unveil on Thursday.

Joe Sommerlad has the details on what we can expect from the autumn Budget:

Britain’s economy is facing a “lethal combination of recession and runaway inflation” without intervention in tomorrow’s budget, a leading business group has warned.

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) called on Jeremy Hunt to take targeted measures to ease inflation and boost growth in his autumn statement on Thursday.

It comes as the chancellor warned that soaring inflation was “thwarting any chance” of economic growth in the long run, as he hinted of tough tax hikes to come.

Our policy correspondent Jon Stone has more: