National insurance increase will be reversed from 6 November, says Kwasi Kwarteng – UK politics live | Politics

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The Treasury has just announced the national insurance increase introduced earlier this year will be reversed from 6 November.

It put out a press release announcing the change to coincide with the introduction of the health and social care levy (repeal) bill. It said:

The 1.25 percentage point rise in national insurance will be reversed from 6 November, the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, has announced today.

Delivering on the prime minister’s pledge to slash taxes to help drive growth, scrapping the rise will reduce tax for 920,000 businesses by nearly £10,000 on average next year as they will no longer pay a higher level of employer national insurance and can now invest the money as they choose.

The government will also cancel the planned health and social care levy – a separate tax which was coming into force in April 2023 to replace this year’s national insurance rise. This will help almost 28 million people across the UK keep more of what they earn, worth an extra £330 on average in 2023-24, with an additional saving of around £135 on average this year.

The health and social care levy (repeal) bill, legislating for the tax change, has been introduced into the House today. As part of the cancellation of the levy, the chancellor is also set to confirm that the increases to dividend tax rates will be scrapped from April 2023 in his growth plan tomorrow. The increased dividend tax was introduced in April 2022 to ensure those who gained income from dividends contributed the same amount to help fund health and social care.

The levy was expected to raise around £13 billion a year to fund health and social care. The chancellor confirmed today that the funding for health and social care services will be maintained at the same level as if the levy was in place, protecting the NHS through the winter and ensuring long-term investment in social care.

The Treasury press release confirms what had been expected to be a key feature of the “emergency budget” coming tomorrow. The decision to put it out now will reinforce suspicions that Kwarteng has a surprise announcement saved up for tomorrow – possibly a stamp duty cut.

During the statement Thérèse Coffey also told MPs that she would look into the case for introducing tax relief on private health insurance. She was responding to the Tory MP James Cartlidge who said:

[Coffey] will be aware figures show that as many as one in 10 adults in England have used the private sector in the past 12 months. Does she agree without them, waiting lists will be even higher and will she therefore consider the reintroduction of tax relief on private medical insurance, first introduced by Ken Clarke in 1989, and scrapped by the party opposite?

Coffey said she would “look into that for him and respond to him”.

In her statement Thérèse Coffey told MPs that she gave up trying to get A&E treatment in a hospital over the summar after waiting almost nine hours. The next day she went to a different hospital, and was seen quickly, she said.

She told the story as she said she would not change the four-hour waiting time target for A&E. She said:

I can absolutely say there will be no changes to the target for a four-hour wait in A&E.

I believe it matters, and I’ll give you a personal experience recently. Just in July I went to A&E, I waited nearly nine hours myself to see a doctor and I still didn’t get any treatment.

I was asked to go back the next day, so I went to a different hospital just three miles away and I was seen and treated appropriately.

That’s the sort of variation that we’re seeing across the NHS.

In the Commons Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative chair of the health committee and former health secretary, told Thérèse Coffey that he welcomed much of what was in her plan. But he criticised the proposal to tell GPs that they had to offer people an appointment within a fortnight, one of the headline elements in the package. (See 9.43am.) Hunt said:

If targets were the answer, we would have the best access in the world in the NHS because we have more targets than any other healthcare system in the world.

GPs alone have 72 targets. Adding a 73rd won’t help them or their patients because it’s not more targets the NHS needs, it’s more doctors.

Hunt also asked when Coffey would provide “hard numbers’” setting out how many extra staff the NHS would need in the future.

In response, Coffey said she remembered supporting Hunt from the backbenchers when he was health secretary. She said this politely, but in the light of his criticism of her announcement, it sounded as if she was making a point.

On workforce planning, she said her department was looking at this. But she said she wanted to make it more straightforward for qualified people to come and practice in the NHS in England. She went on:

Frankly, I was astonished to learn we can’t even have people who are accredited in Scotland to come straight away and be dentists in England. It’s those sorts of things where we will be laying regulations the first day we are back after the recess, and that will enable the General Dental Council to accelerate this sort of aspect of streamlining.