Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Hannah White.

So, Budget Day is over and Halloween is here. And suitably enough, Rachel Reeves came up with some pretty

scary numbers. So, will the Chancellor's plans, this is one of the biggest tax-raising budgets

in modern history, come back to haunt her? Will her new rules for borrowing spook the markets?

Or will yesterday's announcements begin the process of bringing economic growth

back from the near dead? Well, that's enough tortured Halloween metaphors for one podcast introduction,

I think. Joining me in the RFG studio, our two colleagues who sat through every minute of the

Chancellor's statement, and that's Chief Economist Jermatello and Nick Davies, who leads our

public services team. Hi, both. Hi, Hannah. Hello. And I'm delighted that we're joined

today by Stuart Wood, Labour Peer, and formerly a special advisor to Gordon Brown at both the

Treasury and number 10. Hi, Stuart. Hello, I should say, I sat through it as well. I was in the

gallery watching us. I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. Did my duty.

So you've been involved in preparing many budgets over the years, I guess. Do you miss the big

days like this or are you sort of quietly relieved that you don't have to go through the sort

of nerve-wracking process of exposing your thinking to the public in the markets?

I do miss it, actually.

I particularly miss the run-up to it.

Of course, when I did budgets for Gordon Brown,

he stopped doing those in 2007.

That was before the Office of Budget Responsibility process was invented, of course.

So the budget was being written literally the night before.

And so you had much more control of the whole process then,

...