Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollas, and after Jeremy Hunt unveiled a host of tax cuts in his autumn statement,

amid accusations of pre-election giveaways funded by a fiscal fiction, this week we'll run the rule over the Chancellor's plans to

kickstart the economy.

Joining him, you have a stellar panel of guests with Darren Jones, Labor's shadow

chief secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Hammond, former minister and leading figure in the

One Nation group of Tory MPs, Cara Pachiti, senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, and

Ben Zaranko, senior research economists at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

So I'm going to start with you, Ben. You hot-footed it over here from your statement,

hot-cycled it over here, I should say. What did the IFS overall make of what Jeremy Hunt said in

the Chamber yesterday? It was a much bigger fiscal event than I think we were expecting, but I think the headline

story isn't too complicated.

I think, in effect, higher inflation has pushed up tax revenues by quite a significant

amount, and rather than bank those revenues in order to get debt falling by a significant

margin or compensate public services for the additional costs they're

facing, he chose to announce tax cuts. That's the crux of yesterday's statement. Now, if you were

going to cut taxes, some of the options he opted for, pretty sensible. There's definitely one eye

on the longer term, thinking about the UK's growth prospects and so on. But overall, it was a stealthy cuts to spending, tax cuts now sort of fiscal event.

Yeah, your director said that it was sort of paid for by planned real cuts in public service spending.

So if you're sort of taking the headroom because of that inflation,

you should also be taking into that account for your spending plans.

And perhaps there wasn't so much of that in the autumn statement.

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