Economy

This afternoon’s spending review mostly consisted of rehashed announcements, and in fact Tory plans that had been quickly rebadged. But there was one commitment that stuck out. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is planning to spend £39 billion – serious money even by the standards of an organisation as extravagant as the British state – on ‘affordable’ and ‘social’ housing. Following her announcement, the scaffolding will almost certainly be going up in Blackpool, the spades will be turning over the ground in Preston, and the cement mixers will be churning in Swindon. But there’s just one problem: the UK doesn’t need more ‘affordable homes’ – it just needs more places for

Rachel Reeves will apparently tell us today that she has chosen stability over chaos. It is one of the Chancellor’s standard lines, but it is very much beyond her control. Bond markets will have the ultimate say. They didn’t much like her Budget in October – indeed, long-term borrowing costs are higher now than they were in the wake of Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini Budget in September – and they might not like the spending review much more. That is a potent mixture for economic gloom – it is the economy’s mental health we should be worried about most The underlying synopsis behind today’s fiscal event is that the government is

Ed Miliband has suddenly realised that you cannot run an electricity grid on intermittent renewables alone. The Energy Secretary’s announcement this morning of £14.2 billion worth of funding for a new plant at Sizewell C, together with cash for Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) and continued research into the holy grail of nuclear fusion, is an admission that energy policy so far has been far too concentrated on wind and solar. Ed Miliband has promised that his green energy policy will reduce our bills by £300 a year by the end of this Parliament But nothing that Miliband has unveiled does anything to help the energy and climate secretary achieve his

The unemployment rate has risen to 4.6 per cent, the Office for National Statistics has revealed. This morning’s figures mark the first proper reading of the jobs market since April, when the minimum wage was hiked and the £25 billion raid on employer National Insurance started. It’s not just the joblessness rate rising: the number of payrolled employees fell by 55,000 between March and April, and by 115,000 compared to a year earlier. A flash estimate for May (which will be revised) shows an even starker picture: down 109,000 in a single month and 274,000 year-on-year. In other words, a city the size of Southampton has effectively been wiped off

Rachel Reeves has shown just how spineless this government is by U-turning on her flagship policy of cutting winter fuel allowance. Instead of sensibly offering only the poorest pensioners help during the coldest months, nine million pensioners on total incomes less than £35,000 will receive it. When a government with a majority of 174 seats can’t cut government spending by £1.6 billion, or, less than 0.2 per cent of its budget, there is little hope for sorting out the nation’s finances with impending demographic disaster on the horizon. In U-turning on her flagship policy, Reeves has shown just how spineless this government really is No doubt on the doorstep many

‘The ONS apologises for any inconvenience caused’ is becoming an all-too-familiar refrain from Britain’s statisticians. The latest mea culpa came after a blunder involving vehicle tax data led the Office for National Statistics to overstate April’s inflation figure. Initially reported as 3.5 per cent, the true figure was 3.4 per cent – only revealed once the Department for Transport corrected its own error on the number of cars subject to increased vehicle taxes. The latest mea culpa came after a blunder led the Office for National Statistics to overstate April’s inflation figure While civil servants at the DfT are to blame, it raises serious questions about the ONS’s quality assurance

When the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she was withdrawing the Winter Fuel Payment from most pensioners on the same day, last July, when she awarded fat pay rises to many public sector workers she perhaps imagined herself as striking a blow for inter-generational fairness. Working people would get more money – at least if they worked in the public sector – and wealthy retirees a little less. Yet it is fast becoming the an issue which could prove her undoing. The tragedy of the Winter Fuel Payment fiasco is that it leaves the far bigger problem untouched We now learn that the government’s partial U-turn will involve pensioners effectively

When the fintech giant Wise floated its shares on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 it was widely seen as proof that the City still had a future as a centre for equity trading. This was London’s largest-ever tech listing: it was one of only a handful of new British companies with a global presence and it was hailed as the perfect example of how the London stock market could still be an effective home for growing businesses. Against that backdrop, its decision today to move its primary list to the United States is a crushing blow. Has Wise just killed the London stock market? A stock market needs a