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

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and with me to discuss Jeremy Hunt's first budget as

Chancellor is Harriet Baldwin, Tory MP and chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Ben Zoranco,

senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal

Studies, as well as Nick Thomas Simmons, Labor's shadow secretary of state for international

trade, and Kevin Foster, Tory MP, former minister and a leading member of the Conservative

Growth Group. So it was dubbed a budget for growth and the Chancellor said in the Commons

the economy was proving the doubters wrong. Ben, the IFS obviously have done their review into the budget so far. I just

wondered what you kind of made about Hunt's comments about proving the doubt is wrong on the

economy, discussing on kind of inflation and whether the economy is going to go into a sort

of technical recession. What were your kind of take on

the macroeconomic level in terms of what the economy looks like in the next year and beyond?

Well, the Chancellor was quite fortunate in that the OBR were not just considerably more

optimistic than they were back in the autumn, but they're now considerably more optimistic

than the Bank of England and most other independent

forecasters.

And that gave him some room for manoeuvre.

And he chose to use that on a broadly sensible set of things on growth-friendly things, like encouraging

employment, encouraging investment.

But he's fortunate that he had the OBR's forecasts to deal with and not the banks.

And we also shouldn't lose sight of the fact that even though things now look not quite so

bad as it did previously, this is still an enormously difficult period for households.

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