Does Reeves's war on waste signal a return to austerity?

As a sort of softening-up exercise in advance of next year's comprehensive, first principles "zero-based" spending review, the chancellor of the Exchequer is taking her self-styled iron fist to government waste.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Rachel Reeves, who’s had a busy few weeks, is demanding that her hard-pressed colleagues come up with “efficiency savings” in their annual budgets that will accumulate to an annual saving in public expenditure of 5 per cent by 2029. Whitehall is wondering if she can do it...

Has she hired some muscle?

Yes. Apart from having the prime minister firmly on her side – the most important relationship in government – Reeves has assembled a sort of star chamber of bankers, no doubt armed with the fiscal equivalent of knuckle dusters to rough up the spending departments.

The “challenge panels” of private-sector experts will be drawn from the likes of Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, and the Cooperative Group. Only the most defiant victims of the Treasury “treatment” might remind the bank executives that they didn’t exactly cover themselves in fiduciary glory during the global financial crisis.

Is this a return to austerity?