The criticism comes a day before Finance Minister Rachel Reeves is expected to outline a £20 billion ($26 billion) shortfall in the government’s finances in a speech to the House of Commons.

“We will not hesitate to be honest with the public about the reality of what we have inherited,” Pat McFadden, a senior member of the new cabinet, said in a statement. “We are ending the false promises the British people have had to endure and we will do what it takes to fix Britain.”

Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide election victory earlier this month after a campaign in which critics accused both major parties of a “conspiracy of silence” over the scale of the financial challenges facing the next government.

Labour pledged during the campaign not to raise taxes on “working people”, saying the policy would boost economic growth and generate the extra revenue the government needs. The Conservatives, meanwhile, promised further tax cuts in the autumn if they returned to power.

As evidence that the previous government was not honest about the challenges facing the country, Starmer’s office pointed to recent comments by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, who confirmed that he would not have been able to cut taxes this year if the Conservatives had returned to power.

Hunt made the comments in an interview with the BBC, in which he also accused Labour of exaggerating the situation in order to raise taxes now that they have won the election.

“The reason we’re getting all this fuss about this terrible economic legacy is because Labour wants to raise taxes,” Hunt said on July 21. “If they wanted to raise taxes, all the numbers would have been crystal clear before the election. … They should have been honest with the British public.”

The government on Sunday released a summary of the spending review Reeves commissioned shortly after taking office, and will hand the full report to parliament on Monday.

The findings led the new government to accuse the Conservatives of making significant financial commitments for this budget year ‘without knowing where the money would come from’.

It said the military had been “hollowed out” at a time of increasing global threats and the National Health Service was “broken”, with around 7.6 million people waiting for care.

And despite billions spent on housing migrants and tackling criminal gangs who ferry migrants across the English Channel on dangerous inflatable boats, the number of people making the crossing is still rising, Starmer’s office said. Some 15,832 people have already crossed the Channel in small boats this year, a 9% increase on the same period in 2023.

“The review will show that Britain is broke and broken, and expose the shambles that populist policies have made of the economy and public services,” Downing Street said in a statement.

According to Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent think tank that focuses on British economic policy, it is no surprise that the government is in a difficult position.

At the start of the election campaign, the institute said the UK was in a “comfortable financial position” and that the new government should raise taxes, cut spending or relax government borrowing rules.

“For a party to come into office and then declare that things are ‘worse than expected’ would be fundamentally dishonest,” the IFS said on May 25. “The next government does not have to come into office to ‘open the books’. Those books are published transparently and are available to everyone.”