Spring Statement 2025
In mid-March 2024, the then Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves gave the Mais lecture to the good and the great of the City. In it she set out her broad fiscal framework, including goals to:
• Balance the current budget, i.e. match day-to-day government expenditure with revenues; and
• Have a single fiscal event (i.e. Budget) each year, in the autumn
The speech was designed to give its audience confidence that a Labour government – then looking close to a certainty – would bring financial stability.
Just over a year later Rachel Reeves is both where she hoped she would be – 11 Downing Street – and where she hoped not to be – trying to avoid a parliamentary set piece less than five months after her Autumn Budget morphing into a Spring Budget.