LABOUR will urge Rishi Sunak to set out a “responsible plan” that puts Britain on the path to a “better, more secure future” today, condemning “twelve months of irresponsible decision making.”

The party will deliver its scathing attack in advance of the Chancellor’s Budget announcement this week.

Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds accuses the government of presiding over a year of “last-minute scrambles, U-turns, waste and mismanagement.”

She will call for a plan to protect jobs and businesses, giviving families certainty and recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic — not a “triple hammer blow of council tax rises, social security cuts and pay freezes.”

It comes after yesterday’s accusation by Labour that Mr Sunak was “playing politics” with the post-pandemic economic recovery by focusing his tax policies on helping the Tories win the next general election. Labour has controversially opposed corporation tax rises, despite Britain’s rate being the lowest in the G7.

Ms Dodds’s speech at Bloomberg’s London headquarters will condemn the government’s spending “£22 billion on a test-and-trace system that for months wasn’t delivering, £150 million on personal protective equipment that wasn’t safe and couldn’t be used, and almost £2 billion in contracts to businesses with clear links to the Conservative Party, with no tender at all.”

Ms Dodds will also condemn plans for more public-sector pay freezes, saying: “The Chancellor’s message to our key workers — our teachers, our police officers, our armed forces personnel — at the end of one of the hardest years in living memory is to say: you deserve a real-terms pay cut. 

“That is spectacularly unjust. It’s also economically illiterate.”

Labour is calling for an extension of the furlough scheme and funding of business support, training, creation of green jobs and “investment [that works] for every part of our country.”