Chancellor Rishi Sunak confirms 11 March Budget

New chancellor Rishi Sunak has confirmed that the Budget will go ahead on 11 March.

Morning Wire understands Sunak, who was parachuted into the role after his former boss Sajid Javid quit last week, will not attend this weekend’s G20 meeting of finance ministers, in order to focus on preparations for the fiscal event, the first since Boris Johnson took the reins last summer.

Instead his first time on the world stage as chancellor will be the IMF in April.

The government had refused to confirm the date of the Budget after the shock departure of Javid as chancellor in last week’s reshuffle.

Javid was forced out after refusing to sack his special advisers in order to create a joint economic unit that sits between Number 10 and Number 11.

However under Sunak that plan has gone ahead.

It is not clear how different a Sunak Budget will be to a Javid one, although the former chancellor had already signalled his willingness to bring austerity to an end and turn on the spending taps, in order to meet the Tory manifesto pledges and satisfy some of the party’s new voters.

But it comes as the ONS revealed a bigger-than-expected slowdown in wage growth, to just 2.9 per cent in the last quarter of 2019.

Ian Stewart, chief economist at Deloitte, said: “The message from the government is that austerity is over. The fiscal taps are being turned on, and for the first time since the financial crisis, the public sector is hiring at a faster pace than the private sector. Government consumption spending is growing at more than twice the rate of the economy.

“Yet the scale of fiscal easing is largely dependent on whether the new Chancellor dispenses with his predecessor’s fiscal rules, which, while leaving room for investment in public infrastructure, kept a tight grip on day-to-day costs. The chances of greater spending on health, education and social security seem to have risen after the cabinet reshuffle. But without an easing of the government’s fiscal rules, constraints on core services will remain as real as ever.” 

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.