FORMER Conservative Cabinet minister Sir John Redwood has called for the Government to introduce tax cuts to boost economic growth.

He told GB News: “Well, we need a tax cut. We need it for the economy. If we got taxes lower, we could get inflation down more quickly.

“We could take some of the taxes off expensive energy, for example, which are part of the reason why inflation is so high, we could get a bit more growth and then there’ll be more capacity and more services which would also be extremely helpful.

“I’m arguing the case based on sound economic principles. We could also reduce the rate of increase in public spending to make it even more affordable to have some tax cuts.”

Speaking to Martin Daubney, he continued: “I would take the 5% VAT off domestic fuel for the next year and I would take a similar 5% off the price of petrol and diesel at the pumps by cutting fuel duties.

“I would pay for that for one year by assigning all those NatWest bank shares that we still own.

“Now interest rates are so high and they should be making lots of money so there would be no extra charge on the Treasury. People would benefit from having a bit more spending money because their energy was cheaper, then I think you’ve got to go for business and let them expand.”

He added: “Small businesses and the self-employed need a much better deal. So I would sweep away the bad changes in 2017 and 2021, which lost us a lot of self-employed people. There are 800,000 self-employed fewer than there were in February 2020.

“On quite a lot of that is some very aggressive tax changes. Sweep those away and then you’ll have more people coming back into self-employment.”