Will school fees and farmers be a roadblock for Reeves?

The mantra, repeated by the prime minister at PMQs, is that the first Labour Budget in 14 years is “fixing the foundations”.

- SEAN O'GRADY

That means the short-term pain of higher taxes is justified by the need to put the public finances on a more sustainable basis – because without that there can be no business confidence, investment or growth.

Impeccable logic, but many of the measures in the Budget have stirred controversy and attracted considerable resistance notably the imposition of VAT on private school fees and the reduction in tax relief for inherited farms. “Working people” were plainly affected by the changes to employers’ national insurance contributions, and the earlier cuts to pensioners’ winter fuel payments are still resented. So how is the Budget going?

What’s the latest?

The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has given Rachel Reeves a useful boost by attacking her predecessors.

Richard Hughes told the Treasury select committee that in March, the OBR asked the Treasury – at the time overseen by Jeremy Hunt – what information had been held by civil servants and ministers when the independent watchdog was compiling its March predictions. This request uncovered “£9.5bn of net [spending] pressure which they did not declare to us, which under the law, and under the act, they should have”.

Had the Conservative government been open about this figure, the Treasury would have been revealed to be at risk of breaking its target to bring down debt over the next five years.