Up to a third of Rishi Sunak’s £30bn Covid package was ‘old money passed off as new’

IFS says chancellor’s spin on recycled cash is ‘corrosive to public trust’

Rishi Sunak
Rishi Sunak visits a Jobcentre Plus in east London
(Image credit: Anthony Upton/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Rishi Sunak has been accused of “twisting the figures” by rechannelling up to £10bn of planned government spending to pay for his new deal to save jobs threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.

The chancellor last week unveiled an economic aid package that that Treasury said was worth “up to £30bn”. But an analysis of the Sunak’s summer statement by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that at least £8bn and up to a third of the pledged cash would come from trimming back or cancelling previously planned projects.

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Joe Evans is the world news editor at TheWeek.co.uk. He joined the team in 2019 and held roles including deputy news editor and acting news editor before moving into his current position in early 2021. He is a regular panellist on The Week Unwrapped podcast, discussing politics and foreign affairs. 

Before joining The Week, he worked as a freelance journalist covering the UK and Ireland for German newspapers and magazines. A series of features on Brexit and the Irish border got him nominated for the Hostwriter Prize in 2019. Prior to settling down in London, he lived and worked in Cambodia, where he ran communications for a non-governmental organisation and worked as a journalist covering Southeast Asia. He has a master’s degree in journalism from City, University of London, and before that studied English Literature at the University of Manchester.