Chancellor George Osborne says he is “comfortable” with tax credit cuts
Chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne said this morning he is "comfortable" with his plans to cut tax credits, despite mounting pressure for him to U-turn on the proposals.
“This is fundamentally a judgement call, and I’m comfortable with the judgement call that I have made, and that the House of Commons has supported this week,” Osborne told MPs on the influential Treasury Select Committee.
Osborne's comments came one day after Prime Minister David Cameron said he was "delighted" MPs had backed the cuts.
MPs debated the tax credit cuts in the House of Commons on Tuesday, with new Tory MP Heidi Allen drawing attention for accusing government of “betray[ing] Tory values”.
MPs voted 317 to 295 in favour of the government on Tuesday but it is looking increasingly likely that the bill containing the tax credit cuts could be torn up in the House of Lords, as Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron confirmed earlier this week he was urging his party’s peers to back a cross-party effort to stop the new law.
Baroness Meacher has said she will table a motion on Monday calling for the government to respond to analysis done by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) which calculated that the proposed cuts to working tax credits will cost poor working families, on average, £1,300 each year.
Meacher told the BBC the reforms will not go forward until the government has produced a report responding to the think-tank’s study.
“The motion that I am planning to put down on Monday delays consideration of the regulation by the House of Lords until the Government responds to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, when of course they were showing major losses to very, very poor people,” she said.
Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the Treasury Select Committee, told Osborne this morning that he wants the Treasury to provide a distributional analysis of how the government's proposed cuts will affect people on varying incomes.