Then, finally, there is the question of what sort of chancellor Reeves will be; tax-raising, redistributive and pouring funding into public services, or slashing regulation in the name of growth. She insists she can be both, but her critics — especially among conservatives — believe she has gravitated to the former.
While Britain’s growth projection was revised up to 1.5 percent in 2025, it was revised down for every future year. Inflation is now projected to fall to the Bank of England’s 2 percent target only in 2027, a year later than previously thought. And while real spending on government departments will continue to rise, the increase slows down from 4 percent in 2025/26 to 0.7 percent by the end of the decade.
“Britain remains in a bind,” Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, an economic think tank, told POLITICO. “On the one hand, the political system continues not to have a serious conversation about how to pay for an aging and ailing population. On the other, both parties have now significantly raised personal taxes.”
Adrian Pabst, deputy director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a nonpartisan research institute, added: “While [Reeves] has built a larger fiscal buffer against shocks, it’s not clear how her budget will raise economic growth based on higher business investment.
“Higher tax, higher spend, no significant reduction in the ballooning welfare bill and no path of people who are inactive into work. There is as yet no clear bold plan to get the UK economy firing on all cylinders.”
Reeves perhaps put it best herself, surrounded by nurses in a small room in London’s University College Hospital. “If you are asking, is this a budget I wanted to deliver today? I would have rather the circumstances were different,” she told journalists. “But as chancellor, I don’t get to choose my inheritance, and I have to live in the world as it is.”