UK faces decades of tax rises after coronavirus crisis

Britain faces decades of tax rises to repair its battered public finances in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, economists have warned.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said managing the elevated debt from the pandemic would be a task “for not just the current Chancellor, but also many of his successors”.

Commenting on the Chancellor Rishi Sunak's statement yesterday, IFS director Paul Johnson said that a “reckoning, in the form of higher taxes” would have to come eventually.

At the same time deputy director Carl Emmerson warned that the economy will shrink.

“If that’s the case, and it’s very likely to be the case, revenues will still be depressed, and if we want to try then to bring the deficit back to where it would have been absent the crisis, we will need to do some spending cuts, or given a decade of austerity, perhaps more likely some tax rises,” he said.

“It’s going to take decades before we manage that debt down to the levels we were used to pre this crisis.”