George Osborne fired the first salvo in one of the next election’s key battles yesterday by vowing to avoid further tax rises to plug the deficit. In a move designed to steal a march on both the Liberal Democrats and Labour, the Chancellor said that he would eliminate the £23 billion hole in the public finances after the election by cutting spending. “I’m clear that tax increases are not required to achieve this,” he told the Treasury Select Committee. “This can be achieved through spending reductions. I don’t think we have reached the end-point in reforming welfare.” Mr Osborne immediately threw down the gauntlet to Labour. “I’m not sure whether they would do big tax increases,” he said. “I suspect they would, but that is for them to explain.” The initiative signals a fresh assault on the welfare budget should the Tories win a majority in 2015. It will also force Tory ministers to make even deeper cuts in their departments, which have just lost £11.5 billion in last month’s spending review. The Government’s austerity programme is mapped out until 2017. Independent experts have calculated that about £6 billion in tax rises would be needed to maintain the current balance between spending cuts and tax increases. But laying down an election pitch yesterday, Mr Osborne said that he would not need tax rises in 2017 and 2018 to make the Government break even. Speaking at a Westminster lunch yesterday, he also turned his

After a day in which London, much of Britain and at least some people around the world watched six women scale Europe’s tallest building, the end was something of an anti-climax. Six female Greenpeace activists climbing the Shard in protest at Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic were forced to abandon plans to unveil a huge artwork — of a polar bear — at the top. Just before 6pm they decided that they would not be able to display the image, which they had hauled up the building, because putting it together was going to take four hours and it would have been finished in the dark. In the end Wiola Smul, 23, from Poland, was the only protester to reach the top of the building “to show her determination” to oppose the drilling. She unfurled a blue banner to cheers of support from the ground. She and Liesbeth Deddens, 31, from the Netherlands, were the t

The Serious Fraud Office was called in yesterday to investigate how the Government has been overcharged by up to £50 million on contracts for tagging offenders. A review found that G4S and Serco, the two biggest private sector companies providing government services, had both overbilled taxpayers. There were instances of charging for tags on offenders who had died, been returned to prison, left the country or never been put on a tag, Chris Grayling told MPs. Although there were typically 15,000 offenders on a tag at any one time, G4S and Serco had been charging for 18,000, Whitehall sources said. In one case the Government was charged for more than two years for a person who had never been tagged. Mr Grayling told MPs that officials in the justice ministry first became aware of some of the problems in 2008 but failed to take substantive action. Some may