Liz Truss calls for the ban on the sale of new petrol cars by 2030 to be delayed and says the tourist tax should be axed

Liz Truss will today back the Mail’s campaigns to scrap the ‘tourist tax’ and delay the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel car sales.

The former prime minister will make the calls in a speech as part of a wider plea for tax cuts to get the economy growing and ease the pain on hard-pressed families.

The intervention will pile pressure on her successor, Rishi Sunak, and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to find the fiscal headroom to announce tax cuts before the next election. It could also force Mr Sunak, who is conducting an audit of his net-zero policies, to think harder about which targets could be softened or ditched ahead of it.

In her speech at the Institute for Government think-tank, Ms Truss is set to say: ‘We should – as many other Western countries are already doing – delay implementing net-zero commitments such as the ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030.

‘Other environmental regulations which are hiking the cost of living, like enforcing the replacement of gas and oil boilers, should also be abandoned.’

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss talks to Glen Owen of the MoS about her new book in her office in Portcullis House

The intervention will pile pressure on her successor, Rishi Sunak (pictured together), and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to find the fiscal headroom to announce tax cuts before the next election

And she will urge the Government to ‘be bold’ and set out a ten-year trajectory for reducing the size of the state as a proportion of the UK economy.

Outlining policies that she will argue would help to deliver a 3 per cent boost in annual economic growth within a decade, she will add: ‘Ministers need to explain the why as well as the how – making the case for free market economics and admitting that the state has got too big, partly as a result of the excess spending during Covid.

‘We need to reduce Corporation Tax back to 19 per cent [after Mr Sunak increased it to 25 per cent]…We also need to reduce marginal tax rates to make it worthwhile to work at every income level. Further changes like abolishing the tourist tax, abolishing the windfall tax [on oil and gas firms] and IR35 [for off-payroll workers] need to be made.’

Tory heavyweights, including Dame Priti Patel, have also backed our campaign to scrap the ‘tourist tax’. Prior to 2021, visitors to Britain from outside the EU could claim back VAT charged on their shopping purchases. 

The arrangement was scrapped to save the Treasury £2billion a year.

But there are fears that wealthy international shoppers are ditching London in favour of cities in the EU, where the tax-free shopping scheme is still in place.

The Mail has been campaigning for a rethink over the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel car sales after the cost of insuring an electric car surged 60 per cent this year and charges rose 20 per cent at some on-street connectors.

n Ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has hit back at Ms Truss over her sacking of him, saying she was ‘just not wired to be a prime minister’.

Mr Kwarteng was sacked 38 days into Ms Truss’s short-lived and chaotic premiership last year.

But in a new book about Tory leaders – The Right To Rule by Ben Riley-Smith – he said: ‘I just don’t think her temperament was right. She was just not wired to be a prime minister.’