How I'd make Britain rich again: Ex-Chancellor JEREMY HUNT says it's vital we transform our crippling welfare system, escape the tax and debt doom loop... and cut taxes to lure go-getters to our shores

Published: 00:10, 7 June 2026 | Updated: 00:13, 7 June 2026 Throughout my time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the unravelling of Liz Truss's mini-Budget, the chaos of the markets and her subsequent fall were never far from my mind. Those dramatic events shaped the way many people viewed Britain and our economy. When I met fellow finance ministers, there was pity. How the mighty have fallen, their eyes seemed to say, with barely disguised schadenfreude. At home there was an insidious defeatism. Left-leaning commentators blamed Brexit. Right-leaning newspapers thought we had blown our prospects with too much tax. Many, from all sides, pointed out that despite taxes being high, we had poorer public services than elsewhere. Can Britain ever be rich again? That is the tantalising question I am asking in my new book. And my perhaps surprising answer, given the gloom we are surrounded by, is yes. Despite our recent woes, I believe the UK's economic challenges are solvable, as long as we are prepared to make the lasting change the economy needs. Only radical policies will get us out of the straitjacket in which we find ourselves. Growth is the key to a brighter future. But a combination of the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic and an energy shock stalled the healthy levels of growth we as a nation had become used to. Productivity – which crucially links to living standards – has grown at a measly 0.5 per cent a year. Since the pandemic it has been just 0.1 per cent a year. Many people hoped things might be better under the new Labour government, but taxes have risen to their highest ever level, business confidence has fallen and it has become riskier and more expensive to employ people. Growth remains anaemic and a Middle East energy shock could wipe it out altogether. Many entrepreneurs and investors have concluded they are better off moving abroad. For all of my political lifetime, centre-Right chancellors have been able to cut taxes and protect public services, sometimes with a little borrowing to help the numbers add up. Centre-Left chancellors have been able to increase funding for public services, again oiled by borrowing to avoid hefty tax rises. But not any more. The bond markets have effectively taken additional borrowing off the table, making choices much starker. Spending rises have to be funded by tax rises of equivalent size. Tax cuts, too, have to be paid for with spending cuts. Former chancellor Jeremy Hunt arrives on stage to address delegates at the annual Conservative Party Conference in Manchester on October 2, 2023 Pictured: A Britannia Statue with a lion at Plymouth Hoe, Devon We desperately need the economic growth that lower tax and lower debt will bring on, but instead have fallen into a dangerous doom loop of ever-higher debt interest payments causing ever-lower growth. There are, though, ways to boost growth relatively quickly, such as getting more people into work and making it easier to build things. We need to make public services more efficient, help innovative companies to scale up quickly, make it easier to raise capital, easier to get permission to build things and easier to keep factories and offices going with lower energy bills. Above all, we need to hang a huge sign on Britain's front door encouraging entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors to go for it. The UK isn't struggling because of a lack of talent, innovation or stable institutions. But we need to change our attitudes towards risk and wealth creation. Economic growth is about mindset as much as individual policies. We must rediscover British can-do entrepreneurialism in government as well as in the private sector. Ministers and civil servants need to swap their traditionally cautious focus for a much more ambitious one. That means optimism – but a credible optimism, which keeps our feet firmly anchored to the ground. For a Chancellor, that means being honest about the many things over which you have no control: unpredictable markets, technology shifts, energy shocks. But it also means knowing where you do have influence, most importantly, through the tax system. Few policy areas are more ideologically charged than tax. It is far more than just the mechanism by which we pay for public services. It defines the social contract between state and citizen. For those on the Left, it is a tool of social justice which rebalances wealth and opportunity between rich and poor. For the Right, it shapes our attitude towards effort and work. And it has a more direct impact on economic performance than nearly anything else. If you tax work, there will be less of it. Tax profits, and there will be less investment. Tax savings, and people will put aside less. Tax consumption, and spending goes down. Tax wealth, and you drive entrepreneurs abroad. Mr Hunt pictured outside Downing Street with his ministerial box before delivering the 2023 spring budget in March 2023  A dynamic, energetic economy needs to send positive signals about risk and reward, but the more the state takes away in tax, the weaker those signals are. But it is equally true that taxes pay for infrastructure and public services. They not only matter in their own right but play a key role in economic growth. Invest in nuclear power and energy bills should come down. Keep people healthy and they can go to work. Educate them and we will have more productive workers. The fundamental question to ask, then, is do we want to try to reduce the overall tax burden or are we content with it as it is? And the evidence from economies around the world is clear: if we want entrepreneurs to take risks, if we want ambitious people to put in extra hours, if we want businesses to invest, then we have to embark on the difficult road of lowering tax. But that does not have to mean inferior public services – quite the opposite, in fact, because economic growth is the only sustainable path to improving them. When you look at where tax is lower, it becomes clear that there is no simple trade-off between the level of tax and the quality of public services. Many countries – Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Singapore for example – have lower taxes and better public services. Norway has better-quality healthcare than the UK despite spending a lower proportion of its GDP (gross domestic product) on health. The reason is that such countries make sure that funding for public services comes as a dividend of economic success and not ahead of it, ensuring it is both affordable and sustainable. This cannot be achieved overnight given the immediate pressure to fund health, pensions and defence. The process of bringing down tax levels will take time. But the first step has to be to control the growth of public spending. Welfare reform is the area where significant savings can be found in the medium term. The total cost of welfare is currently a little over 10 per cent of GDP, with about half spent on pensioners and half on working-age adults. Its costs have ballooned – and are still growing. The cost of pensions has risen to an unsustainable level. Some of the increase is unavoidable because of demographics. Some of it is also necessary if we want to stop the poorest pensioners falling into poverty. But with the triple-lock guarantee – the commitment to uprate pensions by the highest of inflation, earnings growth or 2.5 per cent – we have chosen a very expensive way to do so. Pensioners are now the only group with a guarantee from the government that their basic income will increase significantly more than inflation or earnings. Ultimately, it is a fake guarantee. Because of the pressures on the rest of the public purse, we effectively end up funding the triple lock by additional borrowing. In other words, its costs will ultimately have to be repaid by the children and grandchildren of the very pensioners who benefit from it. If they knew that their own family was incurring debt to pay for their pension, many would not support it. Far better to replace it with a more modest but still generous guarantee that pensions will increase by either earnings or inflation. That would give pensioners cast-iron protection against prices going up as well as saving up to £13 billion a year. I didn't bite the bullet on this when I was in office and I know it's easy for me to say this with the benefit of hindsight. But we cannot go on ducking a moral and economic necessity. Proper welfare reform – covering both pensions and working age benefits – is therefore our best hope of getting out of the tax and debt doom loops that are doing so much damage to our prospects. It would also allow us to commit to a new fiscal rule that really would bring down our debt burden – unlike the current rules, which pretend to reduce debt but don't in practice. That fiscal rule should state very simply that overall growth in public spending will always be less than the growth in the economy. In other words, we will never increase spending beyond our capacity to pay for it. None of these policies are easy. We have accumulated high levels of debt over many decades. Weaning ourselves off the habit won't happen overnight. Incumbent Chancellor Rachel Reeves pictured at a Treasury meeting in Janaury  But ultimately, following a path to lower debt will be easier for any chancellor than the alternative, which is being forced into continuous tax rises and spending cuts in Budget after Budget. When I was in No 11, I faced something previous chancellors had not had to deal with – the massive cost of the interest payments on our rising national debt. In two years, the debt had gone up by £350billion and the total cost of servicing it had soared to more than £110billion a year – or nearly 4 per cent of GDP. That's roughly double what we spend on defence and five times the cost of running the police. It means the average household now has to pay nearly £4,000 in tax every year just to fund debt interest payment. How fair is that on young people? How motivated will they be to work hard, take risks and innovate if huge chunks of their earnings will be taken away to service debts generated by their parents and grandparents? Why has debt grown so much? The root cause has not been a single economic shock but a succession of them – the global financial crisis, the need to fund families and businesses during the pandemic and the Ukraine energy crisis. Each of these was treated as once-in-a-lifetime emergencies, deserving of special treatment when it comes to borrowing. But if you increase debt in an emergency, you need to pay it back in the good times. With crises coming thick and fast, that hasn't happened. On the contrary, nearly two decades on from the global financial crisis we are still in a low-growth trap. Our net debt has risen from 32 per cent of GDP at the turn of the century to 95 per cent today. We need a new commitment that public spending will never – outside emergencies – grow faster than the rate at which the economy expands. One of our priorities to achieve this should be to increase the number of younger adults in employment rather than on welfare. If we raised employment levels in the UK to Scandinavian levels, an additional 4 per cent of the adult population would be in work. Poverty would be lower and public finances less stretched. Getting there over 10 years would add a hefty 0.4 per cent a year to annual economic growth. In a period of instability in the Middle East, energy policy takes on particular importance. Alongside welfare reform it is probably the area that would have the most immediate impact on economic growth. Our energy prices have doubled in a decade, but some relatively straightforward changes could bring them back down without compromising on our climate change responsibilities. We need to tackle the many distortions and inefficiencies in the UK energy market such as 'constraint payments' on a windy day when the National Grid can't cope with surges of wind and has to ask wind farms to switch off their supplies – but pays for them anyway. More than half of the income of our biggest wind farms now comes not from supplying electricity but from constraint payments And we need to be more pragmatic when it comes to Net Zero ideology. The 2030 target date for decarbonising the grid is entirely arbitrary but it increases energy costs by forcing through expensive, hurried investment. Instead of cancelling new licences for North Sea oil and gas, we should continue to source domestic fossil fuel while we still have it. A 20 per cent reduction in energy prices would be the single policy most likely to lift us quickly out of our low-growth trap, adding around 0.2 per cent to annual growth. The attitude we adopt towards risk and the role of entrepreneurs is vital if our economy is to bounce back. Most of my Oxford classmates chose the law, the civil service or the City for a career but their American counterparts from Stanford, Harvard and Yale think less cautiously about their futures. We need the same hunger here, as I had when I started up my own business by finding a gap in the market for a directory of college and university courses. My business partner and I had a number of false starts, such as trying to sell marmalade to Japan, but eventually found our niche. We ended up with 70 employees in London and more than 200 in India. I didn't become a millionaire before I was 30 but did very well when the company was sold in 2018. Lots of things made it easier to take the risks we took. Being young meant we had nothing to lose. We had a fantastic team, many of whom stayed with us for decades. When we hit a brick wall, we remorselessly followed the motto, attributed to Churchill, that 'success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm'. The then business climate helped. It was a golden period for start-ups, with governments of both parties trying to make things easier for entrepreneurs. And the UK still has plenty to offer entrepreneurs today. A big financial services sector makes it easier to raise capital. Innovation from our universities nurtures exciting spin-outs in the industries of the future. A respected legal system means people are confident that wealth created will be secure. But though we have lots of entrepreneurs, we still don't make it easy enough for them to turn their fledgling companies into global giants. BUT, I hear you say, if what you are now proposing is the way to economic growth, why didn't you do it when the Tories were in power and you had the chance? I have to admit we tried, but the results were mixed. There were mistakes (high energy costs, for example), successes (raising standards in state schools). Sometimes there was too much timidity (on planning reform), sometimes roadblocks (the pandemic). Learning from previous attempts at reform is vital if we are to get things right this time. Three lessons stand out in particular: firstly, radicalism is more likely to work than incrementalism. If I was advising a new cabinet minister, I would strongly urge them to choose one big thing to change rather than multiple smaller ones. Pictured: The Bank of England on Threadneedle Street in the City of London  The problem with more marginal improvements is that you need a lot of them to make a difference. Unless a minister is there for a decent period of time, reforms tend to sink without trace – and in British politics ministers rarely stick around. The average tenure for a cabinet minister is just two years. Since 2019, it has been just eight months. Junior ministers have an even shorter shelf life. Better, then, to focus on a few big changes – and be politically savvy enough to push them through. But that is difficult, in a system that rewards caution at every stage. As a cabinet minister, your career – and your survival in a reshuffle – generally depends on keeping things calm rather than stirring the pot. No 10 wants things to be quiet so they can pick a limited number of battles for the Prime Minister to fight. But reducing noise and keeping countless 'stakeholders' happy leads to less radicalism and often no change at all. A second lesson is the need to make implementing decisions easier and quicker. Why does it take a decade or more to get a shovel in the ground for a new nuclear power station or airport runway? We need big reforms to the plumbing of government, including to the structures of the civil service. Micromanagement from Whitehall has hobbled decision-making at our largest public service, the NHS, and made it much harder for local leaders to innovate and find solutions on the front line. The final lesson is a more personal one for the Prime Minister. Too often our leaders are obsessed with 'the narrative'. Throughout Mr Hunt's time as Chancellor, the unravelling of Liz Truss's (pictured) mini-Budget was never far from his mind, he said Of course you need to be able to tell voters a story. You need to explain your policies and often also the need for short-term pain. If you can, it helps to come across as a human being in the process, although that can be easier said than done. But the reputation of a government ultimately depends on just one thing: what it changes for the better. That means leaving ministers in post long enough to deliver big reforms. It means backing them when things get difficult. It means making sure delivery teams – and not just media teams – work 24/7 in Whitehall. It means making sure your own diary is focused on the big changes you want posterity to remember, rather than the weekly grind of Prime Minister's Questions or international summits. Leaders need to be able to explain why ducking difficult choices is ultimately more painful than embracing them, not least in a period of international instability and energy price fluctuation. Leaning into problems is better for politicians as well as voters: if governments don't do what it takes to secure prosperity, taxes go up, public services get worse – and they get thrown out. Much, therefore, hangs on us turning things around. But we are not starting from scratch. We face profound and unsettling challenges, but few would swap out the cards Britain holds. With a good education system, a large technology sector and a long-standing tradition of entrepreneurialism, the UK is already predicted to rise from the sixth largest economy in the world to the fifth by the end of the decade. With a bit of leadership and our famously pragmatic approach to problems, there is all to play for. Adapted from Can We Be Rich Again? by Jeremy Hunt, which is published by Swift Press priced £25. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to June 13; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? 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