Do you wanna tell us where we're at with it?

Yeah, so if you remember back in March, Rachel Reeves had twenty-four billion pounds of what we call headroom, so that was the amount compared to her aim to balance day-to-day spending and taxes, the amount she had.

She was sort of overachieving.

Now, we've had these huge moves in the cost of borrowing for all governments, and it looks like that will add about eleven or maybe twelve billion to that debt interest bill, but there will be lots else going on in the OBR forecast.

I would expect growth to be a bit lower, given the war in Iran, inflation a little bit higher.

There will be some good news.

Equity prices are up a bit, and you get some tax receipts from that.

What does he need to build it up to?

But give us a bit of background, please.

Yeah, so the Resolution Foundation, as you say, is a think tank.

We were 20 years old last year and we focused on living standards and particularly when Clive set it up, he's come from a background, he grew up in poverty and then has been a very successful businessman.

And there are a lot of charities and important groups out there that focus on the poorest in society.

perhaps the better off in society already naturally have a powerful voice.

But Clive felt there were a group of people in work but not earning enough to sustain a good life.

And that was the group that he really wanted to focus on.

So do we need to think differently in your view on minimum wage or are you happy that we're in the right place?

I caught up with her a few moments ago and just asked whether the whole thing wasn't just out of date.

Sort of as we expected, we saw the OBR make pretty small moves overall, growth down a bit, inflation down a bit, unemployment up a bit.

I think that's a bit more than we expected and we should come back to that But a surreal day because really all the moves we've seen in the last few days, all the developments in the Middle East, will probably prove to be more consequential than all the other news the OBR has taken on since November.

It feels like that's the speech the Chancellor wanted to deliver today.

She wanted to point to... lower borrowing, lower inflation in particular as a government that said it's focused on the cost of living and that's sort of the speech she gave but it jarred a bit more given that the biggest kind of impact most obviously from the Middle East will be effect on energy prices, effect on inflation and we know that that will feed through to the cost of living.

So in some ways I don't think we've learned very much today about where we'll be in the autumn because we've got these very small changes and these huge world events but we have been reminded of how uncertain things can be.

So She had good news in lower cost of borrowing from the OBR.

What were you hoping the government would do? As I say, take us back to that initial analysis.

Yeah, so as you say, Resolution Foundation did what we called the Economy 2030 Inquiry two years ago, and quite a lot of the diagnosis in that report and the things that we thought needed to do are things that are on the government's agenda.

So one of the reasons that the UK has languished behind other countries is its low levels of investment over at least 20 years.

That is something that the government has said it wants to address.

We talked in that report about need for greater stability.

That is another part of the government's ambition.

We'll come on to whether they've achieved it, I'm sure.

So what else is it you think that we need to do?

So at

the moment, if you're an employee, you pay a basic rate.

Let's say you're a basic rate taxpayer.

You pay 20% of income tax and you pay 8% in employee national insurance.

What that means is 28p in every... above a certain level is going to the taxman.

Now, what we're saying is we should change the balance of that so that you would pay 22p in income tax and 6p in national insurance.

But the money you're taking home is the same.

So talk us through why that is not in some senses regressive, your sugar tax proposal.

Do we need to have an honest conversation and say, "Actually, if this is what we want, if this is the kind of state we want, then we all just need to be paying more tax"?

So, I think, yeah, I would, I would add a couple of things to, to what you said, and then let me come to your question.

I mean, on your point about are we just demanding more from the state post, post-COVID, um, we may well be, but, um, as Paul says, this kind of rise in debt interest costs has also happened post-COVID.

And so, as a country, we've also just become structurally poorer.

The amount that we have to spend on debt interest has gone up, and that means what's available for everything else has gone down.

So, at the same time, as you say, as people's expectations perhaps going up, uh, what's available has also gone down.

And I don't think what we've seen post-COVID, to your question, is a conversation about what we want to do about that.

Do you think, forgetting, you know, his arguments, do you think that there is any appetite within this Labour government to have more oversight of, of central banking from within the Treasury rather than n- you know, how it's set up now?