Axing national insurance ‘may take multiple parliaments’

ODN

The Conservatives’ ambition to eliminate employees’ national insurance contributions could take “multiple parliaments” to achieve, a minister has admitted.  Treasury minister Gareth Davies said that it is “unfair that if you have a job you pay two taxes, income tax and national insurance contributions,” and that it is the “long term ambition” of the chancellor to “remove that unfairness.” Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

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00:00 We've set out that we think it's unfair that if you have a job you pay two taxes,

00:05 income tax, National Insurance contributions. That's why we've reduced

00:08 National Insurance contributions by a third in the last six months. The

00:13 Chancellor has set out that it is our long-term ambition, it may take some time,

00:17 it may take multiple parliaments, but we want to remove that unfairness. So the

00:21 overall tax burden is still too high and we completely accept that taxes are

00:26 higher than we'd like them to be. But let's remember why they're high. They're

00:30 high because we need to pay back the debt that we accrued supporting families

00:35 and businesses through a global pandemic where we spent 400 billion pounds and

00:40 then when we had the invasion of Ukraine we effectively paid 50% of people's

00:44 energy bills. And so that cost money. It is not right that in a high-rate

00:49 environment we're paying significant amount of debt interest and so it does

00:53 mean that when you're in government you've got to make difficult decisions

00:56 and we've taken difficult decisions when it comes to taxation in the last couple of years.

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