UK's Hunt says November tax cuts 'virtually impossible'

British finance minister Jeremy Hunt said tax cuts would be "virtually impossible" to include in his November budget update, LBC reported on Thursday, citing an interview. Hunt is due to give his Autumn Statement on Nov. 22 alongside the latest set of independent forecasts for the public finances.

British finance minister Jeremy Hunt said tax cuts would be "virtually impossible" to include in his November budget update, LBC reported on Thursday, citing an interview.

Hunt is due to give his Autumn Statement on Nov. 22 alongside the latest set of independent forecasts for the public finances. With the governing Conservatives trailing badly in opinion polls ahead of a national election expected next year, Hunt is under increasing pressure from his party's lawmakers to announce vote-winning tax cuts.

But Hunt gave the strongest indication yet that he had no such plans, saying that Britain's high debt interest payments - driven by a surge in inflation over the last two years - left him little room for giveaways. "If you look at what we are having to pay for our long-term debt, it is higher now than it was at the Spring Budget," Hunt said, according to a transcript of an upcoming interview.

"It makes life extremely difficult, it makes tax cuts virtually impossible and it means that I will have another set of, frankly, very difficult decisions. "If we do want those long-term debt costs to come down, then we need to really stick to this plan to get inflation down, get interest rates down. I don't know when that's going to happen. But I don't think it's going to happen before the Autumn Statement."

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