Rachel Reeves is said to want the Office for Budget Responsibility to take more account of the long-term benefits of capital expenditure.Rachel Reeves is said to want the Office for Budget Responsibility to take more account of the long-term benefits of capital expenditure.is in a hurry. After 14 years in the wilderness for Labour, and several centuries of Britain awaiting its first female chancellor, it’s not surprising she is keen to get on with the job.
In the scramble to look busy, ministers have been hurriedly working behind the scenes to reshape the institutions of Whitehall and get the government machine aimed at Reeves’s primary objective.Sources say we can expect a big announcement on infrastructure, too. The government is keen to show it is committed to getting mega-projects built after the stop-start failures of the Tory years.
This time Labour is preparing to rely heavily on the private sector, in acknowledgment of tight constraints on the public finances. After the Tories’ Brexit-era “” approach, there is obvious latent potential to unlock. However, the government ought to be realistic about how far this might go.show total investment in the UK has shrunk from 26% of GDP in the late 1980s to 18% today – a bigger decline than the rest of the G7.