Reform UK has pledged to cut more than £100bn from public spending within its first 100 days in government, as Robert Jenrick attacked Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s economic record and promised an emergency Budget shortly after any election victory.
Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesman, said the party would seek to reduce welfare spending by £50bn, cut a further £20bn-£30bn from other government departments and save £28bn in debt interest.
The proposals were unveiled ahead of Reform’s annual conference at Birmingham’s NEC, where the party is presenting a programme for its first “100 days of Reform” should it win a majority.
Jenrick told reporters: “We won’t make the same mistake as Rachel Reeves”, referring to the former chancellor’s delay in holding her first Budget.
The Newark MP said Reform would move rapidly to implement its fiscal agenda rather than allow uncertainty over spending and taxation to persist after an election.
He told the Telegraph: “If you are, for example, someone who works in a distribution centre, like a lot of people in my constituency, you get up early, get your kids ready for school, work hard and then come home where you are struggling to cover your bills that keep going up.
“But you might be living next door to someone living on benefits whose curtains are closed, maybe has a Motability car on the drive and has Just Eat bringing a takeaway to them.
“That can’t be right and, under Reform, there will be no more something for nothing.”
Jenrick has also sought to turn rising government borrowing costs into a political attack on Burnham.
Writing in City AM, he mocked the prime minister’s earlier pledge not to be “in hock to the bond market”, arguing that the claim had “aged like milk” only six weeks into Burnham’s premiership.
He pointed to the rise in 10-year gilt yields to their highest level since the financial crisis and 30-year borrowing costs to levels not seen since 1998.
Jenrick attributed the market turbulence to persistently high inflation and rising government borrowing, noting that Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts for borrowing in 2028-29 had increased from £39.4bn to £86bn since Labour entered office.
“It turns out that putting on a T-shirt and being a jovial northerner isn’t enough to convince the markets you have got a strategy for the British economy, and they are taking fright,” Jenrick said.
Reform’s plans come alongside a separate Conservative campaign to reduce welfare spending.
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, has accused Burnham’s government of being “addicted to welfare” and argued that reducing benefits expenditure should form part of a broader strategy to restore fiscal credibility.
She told a press conference: “Whether it is Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves or Andy Burnham, the instinct is always the same spend more, tax more, borrow more.
“We Conservatives believe in something different. We believe in fiscal responsibility. We believe in improving living standards, and we believe in simplifying and removing taxes that distort the economy and kill growth.
The Conservatives have proposed saving at least £4bn through reforms to housing benefit, alongside a further £3.1bn from restoring the two-child benefit cap.
The party also wants to halt a £1bn annual increase in the British Business Bank’s industrial strategy capital and save a further £1bn by ending VAT exemptions for Motability vehicles.
Labour has attacked both opposition programmes, arguing that neither Reform nor the Conservatives have produced credible plans to finance their competing tax and spending commitments.
A Labour spokesman said: “Dodgy Tory economics won’t fund Britain’s defences. The British people won’t forget Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives hollowed out our armed forces and blew holes in the UK’s proud international reputation.
“This proposal uses the same money they’ve already spent on other things and appears to break the Tories’ so-called golden economic rule.
“This is just days after Kemi Badenoch promoted a key architect of the Liz Truss mini-Budget as her shadow chancellor. It’s the same old Tories. they haven’t listened and they haven’t learned.”
The competing programmes illustrate the growing pressure on Britain’s political parties to demonstrate how they would reconcile tax cuts or higher spending with a deteriorating fiscal outlook.
For Reform, the £100bn target is intended to demonstrate a willingness to make rapid and substantial reductions in government spending. But delivering the savings would require detailed decisions on welfare eligibility, departmental budgets and the assumptions underpinning projected debt-interest reductions.
The Conservatives are pursuing a more targeted programme of welfare savings while presenting fiscal restraint as a prerequisite for stronger economic growth.
For the government, the intensifying debate is taking place against a backdrop of elevated gilt yields and rising debt-servicing costs, making the credibility of competing fiscal plans increasingly important to investors.
The result is a political contest in which the opposition parties are seeking to turn pressure in the bond market into evidence of Labour’s economic weakness, while ministers face the more immediate challenge of demonstrating that their own borrowing and spending plans remain sustainable.
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