The chancellor, Philip Hammond, hinted on Sunday that the government would ease up on its austerity programme, saying the Conservatives were “not deaf” to the message delivered by the election result.

In interviews in which he also criticised Theresa May’s team for sidelining him during the election campaign, Hammond said that he accepted that “people are weary of the long slog”.

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But he also insisted that, with the deficit still at 2.5% of GDP, government borrowing was “not sustainable in the long term” and he left open the possibility of raising taxes to fund more generous public spending.

Asked whether he would go ahead with £3bn of cuts to local government funding, he replied: “We’ve set out a series of measures that are already legislated for. We have other proposals that we will now have to look at again in the light of the general election result and in the new parliament.

“I will be delivering a budget in the autumn and you will find out then what we are proposing. There’s not going to be a summer budget or anything like that.”

Pressed on whether the government would have to change direction, particularly if it did a deal with the DUP, which is opposed to cuts to the winter fuel allowance and the end of the triple lock on pensions, he replied: “We will look at all these things. Obviously we are not deaf. We heard a message last week in the general election and we need to look at how we deal with the challenges we face in the economy.

“I understand that people are weary after years of hard work to rebuild the economy after the great crash of 2008-09, but we have to live within our means. More borrowing, which seems to be Jeremy Corbyn’s answer, is not the solution.

“We have never said we won’t raise some taxes. Overall, we are a government that believes in low taxes and we want to reduce the burden of taxes overall for working families.”

In interviews on the Andrew Marr Show and Peston on Sunday, Hammond stressed that he had already taken some steps to relax the austerity programme set by his predecessor, George Osborne. He said that when he became chancellor last summer he pushed back the target date for the government getting the budget into surplus “into effectively the middle of the next decade”.

Hammond played a relatively low-key role during the Conservative election campaign, with May refusing to confirm that she would keep him as chancellor if she won, although she retained him in his post, along with all her other most senior cabinet ministers, after her failure to obtain a majority left her without the authority to reshape her team.

In a sign of the new confidence he feels in his role, Hammond said three times that the decision to sideline him during the campaign – or keep him “not quite in a cupboard”, as joked – was “a mistake”.

He explained: “We didn’t talk about the economy as much as we should have done.

“We didn’t put enough energy into dismantling Jeremy Corbyn’s economic proposals and his spending plans, which would be catastrophic for this country. We will now do that ... which I would like to have done during the campaign.”

