My Priorities for Stone, Great Wyrley, and Penkridge: Protecting Your Pennies
I’m proud to have represented Staffordshire for the past fourteen years and it would be an honour to continue being a voice for our region. As the Conservative candidate for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge, here’s where I stand on the issues that matter to you.
Taxes, pensions, personal finances – these are not the most glamourous of topics. But whether you’re a retiree who has saved all their life, or a hard-working younger family, money does matter. So, what will I do to keep your pockets full and ensure your future is secure?
Firstly, I will protect your pension. Under the current “Triple Lock” system, the state pension increases each April in line with whichever is the highest out of inflation, average earnings or 2.5%. However, unlike the state pension, the personal allowance for tax-free income is frozen at £12,570, which, by 2027-28, will be lower than the state pension. That’s why we will implement the “Triple Lock Plus”, which means that the tax-free personal allowance will rise in line with the Triple Lock and will stop pensioners from having to pay tax on their state pension.
We will also guarantee that hard work is rewarded by cutting National Insurance by a further 2p. This means that the average worker will see their taxes cut by £1,350 by April 2027. Furthermore, we won’t make any changes to council tax and there will be no new green levies or charges.
Meanwhile, official forecasts show that Labour’s plans will take our overall tax burden to the highest percentage of national wealth ever seen. But it’s not what has been officially revealed by Labour that we should be worried about – rather, it’s what they won’t tell us that we should be scared of.
Fundamentally, Labour are not being honest about what they have planned. According to Shadow Cabinet leaks, Sir Keir is planning an emergency budget for this Autumn, where he will claim that finances are worse than expected and will launch a tax raid on the British public’s pockets.
Pensioners will be first in the firing line. Sir Keir has refused to rule out changes to pension tax relief and will not match our “Triple Lock Plus” policy. It seems that Labour will happily stand by as pensioners are forced to start paying tax on their state pension as early as 2027.
In their manifesto, Labour also claim that they will “undertake a review of the pensions landscape”. What might this entail, I hear you wonder. Well, wonder no more: when asked whether he would preserve the option for people to take a 25% tax-free lump sum from their pensions, Sir Keir said “we’re not going to renew it”. He later claimed he misspoke and that it was an “old fashioned mistake” – personally, I would prefer to call it a Freudian slip.
I know that many of you build your retirement plans around being able to take 25% of your pension free of tax. It allows hard-working families to pay off their mortgage so that they can retire without any debt and with the financial security that they deserve. That Labour not only seek to remove this option, but will also not come clean about their plans, is quite frankly an insult to savers across the country.
Unfortunately, Sir Keir’s slipperiness does not stop there. In recent days, leaked audio messages from Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, have confirmed what we all feared: Sir Keir’s Net Zero plans will cost “hundreds of billions”. Jones told a meeting of activists that the reduced funding promised in the manifesto “made it sound as if [they] basically junked the whole thing but [they] definitely haven’t”.
While we’re on the subject of Net Zero, let’s take a look at Labour’s sums (spoiler alert – they don’t add up). The want to “revolutionise” our energy sector by creating a state-run entity called GB Energy, towards which they have set aside £8.3bn in funding over the course of five years. However, experts have already warned that this funding simply won’t be enough for what Labour hope to achieve.
For comparison, in 2022 alone, £16.7bn was invested in the energy industry – double what Labour says it will invest over the course of five years. Similarly, National Grid are setting aside £30 billion for the same period just to maintain our country’s infrastructure. So, if the money for our “green energy revolution” won’t come from government subsidies, where will it come from? You guessed it – it’s going to come from increasing your energy bills.
And there’s more. Industry experts are already calling Labour’s goal of achieving Net Zero by 2030 “unrealistic” and saying that it will require a “huge sacrifice”. What sort of sacrifice? Anything and everything from your hard-earned money to British jobs to your ability to drive places. It’s all deeply disappointing, but at this stage, hardly surprising.
I could go on and on, but I’m sure you get the message by now. Labour aren’t being honest about their spending plans. As I write, they are holding a match to our country’s pockets and are ready to burn the biggest hole ever seen. There is only one way to stop them – and that is by getting out and voting Conservative on July 4th.