Rachel Reeves has blamed a heavier than anticipated blow from Brexit and austerity for forcing her to take action to balance the books at next month\u2019s autumn budget.<\/p>\n
Speaking to business leaders in Birmingham for the government\u2019s first regional investment summit, the chancellor said leaving the EU had caused more damage than official forecasters had expected.<\/p>\n
Hinting that she was braced for sharply downgraded growth forecasts from the Treasury\u2019s independent watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBS), Reeves said action was needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know the OBR \u2013 I think are going to be pretty frank about this \u2013 [will say] that things like austerity, the cuts to capital spending, and Brexit<\/a> have had a bigger impact on our economy than was even projected back then.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is why we are unashamedly rebuilding our relations with the EU to reduce some of those costs that in my view were needlessly added to businesses since 2016 and since we formally left a few years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Reeves is widely expected to announce a package of tax increases and cuts to spending at the budget on 26 November. She is facing a shortfall against her self-imposed fiscal rules that require day-to-day spending to be balanced by revenues within five-year\u2019s time.<\/p>\n The Treasury watchdog is believed to be preparing to sharply downgrade its forecasts for the productivity growth<\/a> of the British economy, alongside taking into account rising borrowing costs and the financial cost of Labour\u2019s high-stakes welfare U-turns.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Business Today<\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n In comments to 350 business leaders, regional mayors and investors gathered at Edgbaston cricket ground on Tuesday, the chancellor acknowledged she was facing a \u201ctricky\u201d budget and would need to take steps to balance the books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rachel Reeves has blamed a heavier than anticipated blow from Brexit and austerity for forcing her to take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-215594","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}