John Healey has a choice to make. Higher inflation and bigger defence ambitions make the spending plans he inherited tighter yet. Raising public service spending means tax rises or benefit cuts; sticking with current plans means worse public services. The choice will be central to the coming Budget.

Great thread from Bee

“If the Chancellor simply pencils in implicit cuts that he knows he would never be willing to deliver, his plans to cut borrowing, and thereby meet the fiscal rules, won’t be realistic.” @helenmiller.bsky.social outlines John Healey's choices as part of the IFS Green Budget 2026, out today.

The government’s proposed ‘Your First Home’ scheme would offer eligible first-time buyers in England 20% equity loans on new-builds, with deposits as low as 2.5%. What could it mean for buyers and the housing market? 🧵 below:

congrats Alex and the whole team!

Shout out to my @escoeorg.bsky.social colleague @joshmartinecon.bsky.social and to ONS researchers for all their work to improve the measurement of our economy. This is just one example that shows that how we measure things matters!

Productivity puzzle still remains but is a bit more muted. Trend output per hour growth fell from 2.0% in 1997-2007 to 1.3% a year in 2009-2019 on new measures rather than from 2.1% to 0.7% on previous measures

Why is output per hour higher than previously estimated? Because ONS think we are working fewer hours than previously estimated. Estimated output is unchanged.

This really should be bigger news. Most important driver on long-term changes in living standards is productivity and recent revision to how it is measured suggests output per hour actually grew almost twice as fast from 2009 to 2019 (up from 0.7% a year to 1.3% a year)

This is one of the key charts from our report out today. PIP only provides 2 levels of support for daily living costs. This means people with very different levels of assessed disability get the same amount of cash.

If it wants to improve disabled people's lives more broadly, there may be a stronger case for redirecting some support towards services, especially those proven to deliver improvements in quality of life

The case for this change will depend on what the government wants to achieve with disability benefits. If it wants to contribute to disability-related costs, cash is the obvious (although not only) way to do this.

The Timms Review has provided some 'emerging recommendations' for the future disability benefit system to replace PIP. Biggest news: currently PIP is just cash. In future they suggest that while cash will still be foundation of the award, some awards will also include non-cash support.