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John Healey, the chancellor, delivers the first budget of Andy Burnham’s government six weeks today and speculation about what it will contain is starting to intensify. Here are some of the budget-related stories around today.
Steven Swinford and Oliver Wright in the Times say Healey may have to find around £10bn. They report:
Andy Burnham is facing a significant deterioration in the public finances that will leave him needing to find about £10 billion in either tax rises or spending cuts in his first budget.
The Times has been told that the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, has entered its critical ten-day forecast period when it assesses the state of the economy. The findings are used to calculate the cost of debt interest that underpins the budget.
Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England chief economist, has said Burnham needs to reassure the financial markets that he can cut spending. In an interview on LBC’s Tonight with Andrew Marr last night, Haldane said:
Ultimately, it’s only by taking actions that come with a political cost that you convince financial markets that you are serious. The fiscal Achilles’ heel of this government, thus far, has been its unwillingness and/or inability to cut public spending. Within financial markets, we’ve gone from the cautious optimism of the summer months to the studied scepticism of September …
Show us it’s for real. The markets now suspect that this is a traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok videos.
I think the plan had been a low drama, no drama budget. I think that’s been torpedoed by events over the past couple of weeks, and that will make next month on the 28th for some hard choices from this government.
A few hard choices so far, but one is looming on the horizon now, about how any hole to the budget headroom is made good on.
Arj Singh in the i looks at what trade unions want to see in the budget, and says one ask is for an increase in the income tax allowance. He says:
So what do the unions want?
A key demand is to raise the personal tax allowance. Tax bands have been frozen since 2022, which has dragged more and more people into paying more tax as wages rise – dubbed a “stealth tax”.
Sam Coates at Sky News says there is a change in the way the budget process is happening this year.
+ Budget process has changed for this time round giving HMT less prep time
+ Treasury will only be given one economic forecast ahead of submitting measures, not two or three
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