Afternoon summary
Keir Starmer will be speaking to international leaders this weekend to discuss how they should respond to the Trump tariffs, Downing Street has said. (See 12.54pm.)
Downing Street has refused to confirm President Trump’s claim that Keir Starmer was “very happy” about the treatment the UK is getting under the new US global tariff regime. (See 12.34pm.)
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has suggested that President Trump has taken US economic policy back almost 100 years with his “return to protectionism”. (See 9.499am.)
The FTSE was down almost 5% at close of play today, representing the biggest daily drop since early in the Covid pandemic, amid ongoing concern about the impact of the Trump tariffs, the business live blog reports.
Downing Street has criticised the Unite union for its conduct in the ongoing bin strike in Birmingham – and Unite has hit back. (See 1.32pm and 3.45pm.)
IFS gives its verdict on how Gordon Brown's tax credits, finally being phased on on Sunday, changed welfare
Sunday marks the start of a new tax year. It will be the day the employer national insurance contribution rise takes effect. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies says it will be significant for another reason too; it says the new financial year will mean the end of the working tax credit and the child tax credits – two important benefits that are being phased out, and replaced by universal credit.
Tax credits were created by Gordon Brown when he was chancellor. It is often alleged that he did not disclose to Tony Blair quite how much money they were going to cost, and they had a big impact reducing child poverty. The IFS has published a good briefing on how they worked and what they achieved. Anyone who thinks politicians never change anything should give it a read.
Here is the IFS’s conclusion.
The tax credit system, and subsequent increases to benefit entitlements in the 2000s, significantly boosted benefit income for families with children, reducing child poverty. It was able to do this without drastically harming work incentives by implementing higher benefit entitlements for families in and out of work – meaning that the cost of the benefit system increased substantially. Since 2010, there has been a partial reversal of direction, with benefits for larger families in particular significantly reduced. But the legacy of a larger welfare system, more targeted at children and low-income working families, lives on in universal credit.
