BORIS Johnson will cut taxes for millions of Brits if he wins the next election, he said today.
The Prime Minister confirmed he would hike thresholds for National Insurance from 8,600 to 12,500 on a visit to Teesside today.
Claire Cartlidge, 35, a worker at a factory on the River Tees, asked him: “”You said low tax, do you mean low tax for people like you or low tax for people like us?”
And he told them: “I mean low tax for working people.
“We are going to be cutting National Insurance up to 12,000… we are cutting tax for working people.
“We want to have a high skilled, high wage, low tax economy so people can take their lives forward.”
Aides said afterwards that the threshold would in fact be raised to 12,500 – not the 12,000 level he said in the Q&A.
It means anyone earning under 12,500 on Pay As You Earn (through an employer) will be taken out of paying National Insurance altogether in five years.
Everyone earning more than that could see a tax cut of around 460 a year by the end of that time.
He said it would be raised to 9,500 next year, with the “ultimate ambition” to increase it to 12,000 if they win the December 12 poll.
That will see a tax cut of 100 next year for everyone paying them.
The IFS said it will cost 3billion a year for every 1000 that the threshold goes up – a total of 11billion in future.
But it will take 2.4million low-paid workers out of paying NI contributions altogether.
The Tory manifesto is expected to come out within the next week, outlining the party’s full plans for the country.
The cut would help the lowest paid workers the most, who have already benefited from the Tories’ raising of the limit they start paying income tax over the last five years.
Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom dropped a huge hint that the move was coming last month, saying: “A Conservative government will always be a tax-cutting government.
“We will set out more in the manifesto about our ambition for income taxes.”
The PM was due to reveal tax cuts in the Budget –but that’s now been scrapped because of the impending election.
Back in June before he became PM he said he was prepared to increase the public debt to cut taxes.
He suggested he would take anyone earning12,000 or less out of national insurance.
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