What Is Chancellor Rachel Reeves Cutting To Deal With The "Black Hole" She Inherited?

Winter fuel allowance payments will become means tested and hospital and transport projects scaled back, as Rachel Reeves laid out her plans to tackle a "£22billion hole in the public finances".

Reeves repeated the mantra “if we cannot afford it, we cannot do it” several times during her House of Commons speech on Monday afternoon.

In her speech, the Chancellor said billions of pounds of undisclosed spending by the last government had forced her into "difficult" decisions.

Here are some details on the projects and schemes that are set to be scaled back by the Chancellor in an attempt to balance the books:

In 2020, the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson announced plans for 40 new hospitals to be built by 2030, but this will now be subject to a “complete review” Reeves said, after constituents were given “false hope” about the projects. 

She told the Commons that the National Audit Office believed the plans for delivery of the promise were “wildly off track” and since she became Chancellor, it had “become clear that the previous government continued to maintain its commitment to 40 hospitals without anywhere close to the funding required to deliver them".

The Chancellor also confirmed that it will “not be possible” for the Government to take forward reforms to adult social care charges. 

She said that the last government had “delayed” the changes when “local authorities were not ready and their promises were not funded”. The move will save over £1 billion by the end of next year, Reeves claimed. 

Last year, the then-government led by Rishi Sunak announced plans for a new qualification, the Advanced British Standard, which an official release said  would “bring together the best of A Levels and T Levels into a single