Autumn statement latest: Priti Patel among Tories urging Jeremy Hunt to cut fuel tax

Nothing much seemed to happen at Prime Minister’s Question time. The exchanges between Angela Rayner and Dominic Raab, deputising for Rishi Sunak who is on an overnight flight back from Indonesia, were surprisingly flat. It was only later that a backbench Conservative let off a firecracker, writes John Rentoul.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will deliver his Autumn Budget to Parliament on Thursday 17 November, finally offering clarity on how Rishi Sunak’s government plans to restore order to Britain’s public finances.

Having succeeded Kwasi Kwarteng on 14 October following the debacle of the latter’s ill-conceived and ill-timed “mini-Budget” of 23 September – which tanked the pound and brought a swift end to the premiership of Liz Truss – Mr Hunt postponed a statement originally intended for Halloween to buy himself more time.

He is now widely expected to unveil a package of tax rises worth £25bn and spending cuts of £35bn in order to plug a £60bn funding black hole in Treasury coffers and reassure global markets that Britain remains a trusted trading partner.

A member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting body has said the record-breaking recession that the UK is thought to be entering could be longer or shorter than the Bank predicted earlier this month.

The Bank has forecast that the country could already be at the start of an eight-quarter recession, the longest since reliable records began in the 1920s.

“The last two or three quarters of that projected decline in GDP (gross domestic product) are pretty small, so it wouldn’t take much of a tilt to shave a couple of quarters off the projected length of the recession,” Monetary Policy Committee member Ben Broadbent said.

“So, I would not stand squarely behind the length and say this will definitely happen, it could easily turn out to be a little bit shorter or a little bit longer,” he said.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will finally deliver an Autumn Budget this week to lay out precisely how he plans to restore order to Britain’s public finances.

Having succeeded Kwasi Kwarteng on 14 October following the debacle of the latter’s ill-conceived “mini-Budget” of 23 September – which tanked the pound and brought a swift end to the premiership of Liz Truss – Mr Hunt postponed an announcement originally intended for Halloween to buy himself more time.

Mr Hunt will now address parliament from the House of Commons on Thursday 17 November.

Joe Sommerlad has the details:

Martin Lewis has posed a package of four consumer finance measures he expects will feature in Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Budget.

The chancellor is widely expected to unveil a raft of tax rises and spending cuts in order to to plug the £50bn black hole in the nation’s finances.

Posting on Twitter, the MoneySavingExpert shared his own guess as to “what’s coming” in tomorrow’s statement.

He said: “Tax thresholds frozen

“Benefits & State pension up with inflation.

“Energy back to price cap but with new support similar to last May (ie benefits, pensions, disability help).

“Mortgages help consultation.”

Real wages are more than 2 per cent lower than they would otherwise have been due to the impacts of the Brexit vote, a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee has said.

Dr Swati Dhingra, who is also a professor at the London School of Economics, said: “It’s undeniable now that we’re seeing a much bigger slowdown in trade in the UK compared to the rest of the world.”

She added: “The simple way of thinking about what Brexit has done to the economy is that in the period after the referendum there was the biggest depreciation that any of the world’s four major economies have seen overnight.

“That contributed to increasing prices and reduced wages – and I’m not talking simply through real wages, but also through nominal wages – we think that number is about 2.6 per cent below the trend that real wages otherwise would have been on.”

She said this was followed by reduced business investment and trade numbers are now reacting to the impact of the Brexit deal that the UK signed with the EU.

Andrew Bailey has revealed to MPs that the Bank of England was not made aware of the contents of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget before it was announced.

The Bank’s governor said that, even had it known, it would have been at a disadvantage as there was no analysis from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

Liz Truss’s mini-budget damaged the UK’s reputation abroad, the Governor of the Bank of England has said.

“We have damaged our reputation internationally because of what happened,” Andrew Bailey told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee.

“I was in Washington … at the IMF (International Monetary Fund) annual meeting, which is one of the biggest events of the year internationally. People were saying ‘we didn’t think the UK would do this’.

“It will take longer to rebuild that reputation than it will be to correct the gilt curve, so we have to tread carefully.”

The Bank of England has not changed its forecast for how much damage that Brexit will do to UK gross domestic product (GDP), governor Andrew Bailey has said.

Speaking to MPs on the Treasury Select Committee, Mr Bailey said the Bank had thought that the economy would be somewhat smaller due to the decision, taken in 2016.

“This (estimate) was done pretty soon after the referendum, it essentially assumes that there is a long-run downshift in the level of productivity, a little over 3 per cent,” he said.

“As a public official I’m neutral on Brexit per se, but I’m not neutral in saying that these are what we think are the most likely economic effects of it.”