Key events
Reeves interviewed on Today programme
Rachel Reeves is being interviewed on the Today programme.
Nick Robinson is asking the questions.
He starts by playing the clip from Reeves’s budget speech last year when she said freezing tax thresholds would breach the manifesto.
Q: The OBR said you were £6bn short. But you have raised taxes by £26bn. These are your choices?
Reeves accepts they are her choices.
Q: So it is not the Tories’ fault, or Donald Trump’s fault?
Reeves says her choices are defined by the context she faces. She says under the Tories there were false assumptions about productivity.
Q: You did not tell people the truth about what would be necessary.
Reeves does not accept this. She says she is asking working people to pay more. But she is keeping their contribution to a minimum. And that will come in from 2028. She says she is also cutting energy bills from next year.
Q: During the election every day the thinktanks said the numbers did not add up, and that taxes would have to go up. You denied that. Why won’t you apologise?
Reeves says she has to operate within the forecasts she has been given.
‘External person’ may have been involved in accidental, early release of OBR’s budget reports, says its chair
Richard Hughes, chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has said that “an external person” may have been involved in the accidental release of its budget report yesterday.
In an interview on the Today programme, he said that he had written to the chancellor apologising for the fact that the document became public about 40 minutes before she announced the budget – allowing people to learn all the details in advance.
He also said that that Prof Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, will be involved in the OBR’s investigation into what happened.
Hughes told Today:
The documents weren’t published on our webpage itself. It appears there was a link that someone was able to access – an external person.
We need to get to the bottom of what exactly happened. We’re going to do a full investigation. There’ll be a full report to parliament.
We’re going to do that work quickly so people can have assurance in our systems and that can be restored.
Working people would have been better off if Reeves had broken manifesto promise on income tax, thinktank says
Good morning. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has been speaking to broadcasters and defending her budget. It has not been easy because, although it went down relatively well with Labour MPs and the financial markets (no mean feat – those are two groups whose wishes don’t normally align), it is being hammered by the rightwing papers. Today is the day when the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation, the two leading public spending thinktanks, publish their detailed assessments, and they have reservations about some of the budget decisions too.
Reeves has been facing questions about breaking Labour’s manifesto promise on tax, which she insists she has not done. But the Resolution Foundation says would be better off if she had broken it. It explains:
The manifesto tax pledge has cost working people. Having previously hinted at raising income tax rates, the chancellor chose instead to freeze personal tax thresholds for three more years. But raising all rates by 1p would have been less costly than freezing thresholds for anyone with an income below £35,000. Indeed, all but the top 10% of the income distribution are worse off because of opting for threshold freezes over rate rises (which raise similar amounts of revenue).
I will be covering what Reeves has been saying shortly. Graeme Wearden already has some of her lines on his business live blog.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: The Resolution Foundation holds a press conference to discuss its budget analysis.
9.30am: The ONS publishes net migration figures for the year end June 2025. And, separately, the Home Office publishes asylum figures for the year ending September 2025.
10.30am: The Institute for Fiscal Studies holds its post-budget briefing.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in Warwickshire. In the afternoon he is visiting a synagogue in London.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
