Good morning. Officially Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will unveil Labour’s first budget on Wednesday next week. But in practice budget announcements are now two-week news events, because the Treasury knows that it is bad idea to spook the markets with lots of surprises on the day and so this government, like past governments, has been engaged in elaborate pitch-rolling, ensuring that there are plenty of reports in advance giving a broad idea of what is coming.
Not all the stories you might read this week about what will be in the budget will be accurate, or Treasury-sanctioned, but quite a lot of them are. One of the measures subject to a lot of pitch-rolling is the proposal to change the official definition of debt used in the government’s fiscal rules. Reeves has been hinting for a while that she will change this and today, at a meeting of the IMF in Washington, she will confirm this.