Kemi Badenoch has promised to fight for working people as it emerged basic rate taxpayers will pay £220 more after Rachel Reeves’s budget. The Tory leader said millions of people who work hard, save hard, and do the right thing had been let down by the Chancellor’s £30 billion tax blitz.

Writing in the Daily Express, she said: “The whole story of this week’s budget can be summed up in one sentence: taxes raised on working people to pay for welfare handouts. It was a smorgasbord of new taxes that, when taken together with her budget last year, means Rachel Reeves has raised the tax burden to the highest on record. There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have now broken their manifesto commitment not to raise taxes on working people.”

Her comments come a day after Mrs Badenoch wowed the Commons with a barnstorming response to the Budget in which she accused the Chancellor of being “spineless, shameless and completely aimless”.

On Thursday the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) delivered a damning verdict on the Budget.

As well as the hike for those on the basic rate, the leading Think Tank confirmed those liable for the higher level of income tax will pay an additional £600.

Director Helen Miller said: “Rachel Reeves said she wouldn’t come back for more. She clearly did.”

The Chancellor’s decision to freeze income tax thresholds for an additional three years, which leads to higher bills due to inflation, means 700,000 additional people on low incomes will pay income tax by 2031, according to the IFS.

A million people on above-average incomes will find themselves paying the higher rate due to the change.

Ms Miller said: “By 2029, more than a quarter of all taxpayers are expected to be higher or additional-rate taxpayers. For a basic-rate taxpayer, the freezes will mean £220 more tax per year; for a higher-rate taxpayer it rises to £600 more per year.”

But she warned that the decision to introduce a “stealth” increase, rather than simply putting up the tax rate, means Ms Reeves cannot be sure how much money will come in because the sum depends on future inflation rates.

Threshold freezes also mean higher National Insurance bills. On top of this, some working people will pay additional National Insurance thanks to changes to “salary sacrifice” pension schemes – despite Labour’s general election promise not to increase National Insurance, income tax or VAT.

Ms Miller said: “I would call that a breach of the manifesto.”

Speaking on our weekday news show the Daily Expresso, shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride also hit out at the fiscal statement.

“It was just all the wrong choices, putting up taxes on hard working people with this extension of the income tax threshold freeze, which is something that she basically said she wouldn’t do.

“And quite a lot of the spending, of course, it’s just going into the welfare budget. So more on benefits.

“I think they’re the wrong choices. I think what she should have done is to concentrate on getting government spending down, to allow both herself to bear down on the debt a bit, but equally, to cut taxes to get the economy growing.”

The IFS praised the Chancellor’s decision to increase her “headroom” from £10 billion to £22 billion, which may allow the Treasury to avoid emergency Budget measures if there is an unexpected change to the economy.

However, it said her plan to balance the books depended on a vague promise to cut planned Government spending in the run-up to a general election, which may prove politically impossible.

Ms Miller said: “Perhaps the government really will be able to find new efficiency savings. Or, maybe, when the time comes, and as the election looms, it will find that the spending plans are unrealistically low.”

Ms Reeves is now planning to increase spending by just 0.5% per year in real terms in both 2028-29 and 2029-30, down from her previous planned increase of 1% per year.

In other analysis, the think tank warned that average disposable incomes will only grow by about half a percent per year up to the next election – a “truly dismal” rise, after incomes went up by more than 2% annually from the mid-1980s to mid-2000s.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has issued an angry defence of the Government’s decision to end the two-child limit on Universal Credit, which increases benefits for 560,000 families by an average of £5,310 at a cost to taxpayers of £3 billion.

He rejected suggestions the measure was designed to appease angry Labour backbench MPs and shore up his own position, saying: “It’s impossible to argue that this is a position that has been adopted just in the last few weeks. It is my long-standing ambition.”

Sir Keir said: “I’m not going to apologise for lifting half a million children out of poverty.”