Chancellor’s comments come as fiscal watchdog says disability benefits will cost £100bn a year before end of decade

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John Healey had said there will be a reduction in the welfare bill before the next election, with a “tough” approach to young people who do not accept support to get a job or training.

The chancellor was repeatedly pressed on the issue in broadcast interviews after documents from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggested sickness and disability benefits would cost £100bn a year before the end of the decade.

Few surprises as chancellor uses low-key speech blaming ‘global economic storms’ for stoking energy prices and cost of living crisis

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John Healey raised taxes on banks and landlords to fund a £100 winter handout for 20 million families as official forecasts made clear there is no end in sight for the cost of living crisis.

In his first budget, the chancellor blamed “global economic storms” for the grim outlook, as the war in Iran drives up oil and gas prices.

TUC will urge John Healey to order ‘root and branch’ assessment of watchdog amid claims its forecasts downplay investment benefits

The TUC is urging the new chancellor, John Healey, to order a “root and branch” review of the Office for Budget Responsibility, claiming the forecaster’s approach holds back investment.

With Andy Burnham promising “good growth in every postcode”, the union umbrella body is calling on Healey to use his first budget on 28 October to re-examine the assessments of the watchdog.

From Brexit to fiscal rules to living costs, diagnoses multiply. Steel policy points to a missing link – the need for a strategy to rebuild

The government has raised tariffs to protect the steel industry. It also nationalised the UK’s remaining blast furnaces last year to keep them running. Both moves point to the same conclusion: the current economic model is not working. A series of interventions from Labour’s Sir Sadiq Khan and Angela Rayner as well as the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, this week suggests that an economic debate on the centre-left and left of politics is under way. The disagreement is no longer about whether there is a problem. It is where the problem lies.

Sir Sadiq, the London mayor, is right that Brexit has raised costs for businesses and households. Closer EU alignment would improve trade, investment and market access. That matters. But rejoining the EU won’t on its own rebuild the UK’s domestic capability. Ms Rayner points to a real institutional problem. If the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) understates the benefits of public investment, the state may be constraining itself unnecessarily. That matters too. However, changing the OBR model is not a strategy.

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Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick has announced party’s plans to cut welfare spending

Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, is giving his speech now.

He has announced, or confirmed, three measures to cut welfare spending.

The number claiming disability benefits for an attention disorder has more than doubled since Covid. We all know a significant number of these claims are spurious …

We will stop those with mild anxiety, depression, and similar conditions from claiming disability benefits and instead encourage them into the dignity of work.

We will end the abuse of the Motability scheme, where expensive cars are handed out for conditions like tennis elbow, and paid for by working people who can’t afford them themselves.

Official figures better than expected after stronger receipts than a year earlier

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The UK government borrowed less than expected in December, official figures show, after stronger receipts than a year earlier.

Public sector net borrowing – the difference between spending and income – was £11.6bn last month, the Office for National Statistics said, compared with £18.7bn in the same month a year earlier.

Be it better prospects for consumer spending or the tentative signs of rising productivity, the doom and gloom of 2025 could be behind us

Stalling growth, sticky inflation and fragile bond markets, the UK’s economic record in 2025 has hardly been one to inspire cheer. But in the spirit of the festive season, here are a few reasons to hope for a happier new year.

The first is that, barring external forces, 2026 should not involve a repeat of this year’s fiscal drama.

Richard Hughes takes ‘full responsibility’ for watchdog error as Starmer attempts to secure chancellor’s position

The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility has resigned after a damning internal inquiry into the leak that threw Rachel Reeves’s budget into chaos described it as the “worst failure” in the institution’s history.

The departure of Richard Hughes, who said he took “full responsibility” for the watchdog’s failure to handle sensitive information, dragged the rolling recriminations over the budget into a fifth day.

Exclusive: Chancellor says she made ‘fair and necessary choices’ in budget, and was unwilling to make cuts

Britain’s wealthy must shoulder the burden of paying to rebuild the UK’s “creaky” public services, Rachel Reeves has said, as she warned Labour MPs that leadership speculation was bad for the country.

The chancellor said she had opted to increase taxes by £26bn in this week’s budget to improve schools, hospitals and infrastructure, rejecting calls to “cut our cloth accordingly” after a downgrade in productivity forecasts.

The chancellor’s statement will be remembered for the many taxes it raised, rather than the big one – income tax – it did not

Rachel Reeves’s chancellorship was already balanced on a knife-edge, even before the 2025 budget. After she delivered her second budget statement, it still is. Even more than usual, Wednesday’s speech was full of significant fiscal changes, altered spending commitments and adjusted economic forecasts, most of them accidentally (and, for journalists, conveniently) released a short while in advance by the obviously misnamed Office for Budget Responsibility. Politically, however, almost nothing has changed at all.

Reeves arrived in the Treasury last year offering what she, like Keir Starmer, had promised as the Conservative years ebbed: competence, stability and, above all, a focus on economic growth. Her problem, despite her upbeat assessments, is that she has delivered none of them. Nothing about the 2025 budget guarantees any early change in that, however defiantly Reeves spoke about reversing the OBR’s reduced new growth and productivity forecasts.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Rachel Reeves’s interventions will ease the cost of living and suggest a desire to revive growth and protect public services

Rachel Reeves’s budget contains many measures to make any social democrat cheer. Scrapping the two‑child benefit cap, putting up gambling taxes, freezing rail fares and implementing a mansion tax are not just sensible moves – they are long overdue. As is a “managed transition” for the North Sea that supports workers while pivoting to clean energy, without abruptly ditching oil and gas. The country will be a better, fairer place for these measures. They should also assuage backbench anger over self-inflicted damage by the chancellor’s proposed welfare cuts and secure Ms Reeves’s position – for now.

The dilemma at the heart of Ms Reeves’s fiscal strategy is that while individual policies may be progressive, the economic framework they sit inside is not. This is exposed by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Behind the signature policies lies a deeply conservative macro strategy. The budget will see £26bn in tax rises borne heavily by workers, falling investment, stagnant growth, flat wages and a fiscal debt rule met on a coin toss. The OBR warns that under Ms Reeves’s spending plans, unprotected services – councils, courts and police – will face Osborne-style cuts of 3.3% a year from 2029 to 2031 unless the Treasury finds £21bn extra. Her fiscal rule makes those cuts inevitable.

Chancellor axes two-child benefit cap and cuts energy bills paid for by mansion tax and freezing tax thresholds

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Rachel Reeves targeted Britain’s wealthiest households with a £26bn tax-raising budget to fund scrapping the two-child benefit policy and cutting energy bills.

On a chaotic day that involved key details of her budget accidentally being released early by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the chancellor defended the measures, saying she was “asking everyone to make a contribution to repair the public finances”, but that she wanted the wealthiest to pay the most.