What Reeves didn’t tell you in today’s Spring Statement ...Middle East

Today we heard a lot about the “right plan” and the “right choices”. The Chancellor shouted that she was right at least 12 times in her definitely-not-a-Budget speech.

That was only beaten by Rachel Reeves mentioning working people 14 times in the 22 minutes of one of the shortest Spring Statements of all time.

Yet business was mentioned just three times. And tax was swerved by Reeves as was the topic that fills at least half of every news bulletin and which could scupper every success she claimed – war.

All the things we hoped she might say, even if it was just to announce a consultation, were missing. Where were the clothes to dress the huge hints that have been dropped about the reform of student loans?

There has been recent uproar over the four million Plan 2 graduates in England that are paying interest linked to a discredited (and always higher) measure of inflation.

These graduates need to generally earn more than £65,000 a year before the extra 9 per cent tax they pay – over the repayment threshold – is added to their debt. Where was this mentioned? Nowhere.

And how will she fulfil her Budget promise that retirees just getting the new state pension – which will be more than the tax threshold from April 2027 – will be let off paying income tax on it?

The Treasury has not worked that out yet but four months ago promised more detail this year.

She also didn’t explain why she invented a new pay-per-mile tax that will apply to every electric car from April 2028 when the Government wants to encourage us to buy one.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had been given the strongest “nothing to see here” pill.

In a major embarrassment it wasn’t even allowed to publish its own Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

After the premature reveal of its contents in autumn Budget last year, today for an hour after the Chancellor sat down it could only be found on the Treasury website which wanted to ensure the right people were in control – and no leaks were allowed.

Unlike the Chancellor the OBR was at least allowed to mention tax. And it predicts the total tax take will rise from 34.5 per cent of the total economy to a new record of 38.5 per cent by 2030-31.

Nine tenths of that will come from income tax paid through PAYE by those very working people the Chancellor loves.

Reeves’s speech also failed to mention that HMRC now predicts that a million more people will start paying income tax for the first time by 2030-31 due to the continuing threshold freezes which the Chancellor has extended to then.

The Treasury take from inheritance tax will rise slightly compared with its prediction just four months ago – driven by rising equity and house prices.

The OBR’s tables of detail – in which the devil lies – won’t be out until later. But not much change is in the figures we do have.

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Its comparisons of what it predicts now compared with last November shows the base rate is but a smidge lower, shares are up a lot, growth is down a scintilla and real GDP growth is up marginally.

Inflation in 2026 and 2027 is expected to be a tiny 2.3 and 2 per cent. And – say it very quietly – unemployment then will be 5.1 per cent not the 4.8 per cent it warned us of four months ago.

Probably rather sooner than he expected, Mel Stride, the shadow Chancellor, stood up for a full-dress Reeves rebuttal. If a shadow is the absence of light, Mel is certainly not the absence of sound. I shout therefore I am.

There was little substance in his abuse, and summed up, his response was – you say right right right, I say wrong wrong wrong. But he did have one good line.

Did she, he asked, fail to make any announcements to save herself the embarrassment of a U-turn later in the year?

Spot on Mel.

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