Shadow Treasury minister repeats 25 tax rises claim

1 March 2024

On Times Radio [1:54] on Wednesday shadow financial secretary to the Treasury James Murray MP said there have been “25 tax rises in this Parliament alone”.

It’s not the first time Mr Murray has made this claim, and he’s also not the only Labour politician to have said it.

As we wrote last month, it’s unclear how Labour arrived at the specific figure of 25 tax rises. While Labour still doesn’t appear to have publicly published its workings or reasoning, in January Full Fact was sent the list of 25 tax rises by a shadow Treasury minister who is a Labour peer. It includes a range of tax changes that have occurred since 2019, but seems to miss out others, such as the energy windfall tax or the temporary rise in National Insurance that occurred in 2022.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies told us that counting the number of specific tax rises “isn’t very interesting or meaningful”. It said there have technically been hundreds of tax rises (and reductions) since this parliament began at the end of 2019, and what’s more significant is that this is “the biggest tax-raising parliament in modern times”.

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