Friday Briefing: The UK economy may be more fragile than Rachel Reeves set out

Friday Briefing

Last Wednesday (26 March), UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves stepped up to the dispatch box to deliver her highly anticipated fiscal update in the House of Commons.

When the Treasury scheduled the event in December, it called it a ‘Spring Forecast', where the chancellor was going to provide an updated snapshot on the state of the UK economy, following revised data from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It was hard to foresee what could have been set out in the Forecast, as the chancellor herself vowed to only hold "one major fiscal event a year", namely in the Autumn. But in recent weeks, the narrative around the event started changing, and even the Treasury itself began to refer to it as a ‘Spring Statement', suggesting Reeves may...