The Chancellor's Report Card: Grading Five Economic Promises Against the Evidence

Every Chancellor writes a report card for their predecessors. Fair enough — it is the taxpayer's turn to write one for Rachel Reeves, measuring the five headline promises of the October 2024 Budget and the manifesto that preceded it against the data now published by the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Office for National Statistics.

Promise One: The Fastest Growth in the G7

Verdict: Abandoned. The pledge to secure the fastest sustained growth in the G7 was the Government's signature economic claim. The OBR's successive downgrades — with growth forecasts for 2025 and 2026 revised down markedly from the Spring 2025 forecasts to the Autumn 2025 Budget — have hollowed it out. Business investment has been dented by the employer National Insurance rise and the employment rights package, and the OBR itself attributes a measurable hit to output from those measures. The claim survives only as a slogan.

Promise Two: Borrowing to Fund Day-to-Day Spending

Verdict: Diluted. The current budget balance was presented as a fiscal rule with real teeth. Yet the Autumn 2025 Budget was accompanied by a loosening worth tens of billions of pounds a year by the end of the forecast, and the OBR judged that the Chancellor's fiscal targets were met with less headroom than at any recent Budget — a margin so thin that routine forecasting error could erase it. A rule met by a rounding error is a rule in name only.

Promise Three: Inflation and the Cost of Living

Verdict: Abandoned. CPI inflation was meant to be gripped and subdued. Instead, the ONS has shown inflation running above 3% through much of 2025 — well above the Bank of England's 2% target and above levels seen when the pledge was made. The Governor of the Bank of England has pointed to regulated price rises and the Budget's cost pressures as contributors. Working people were promised protection; they received a wage packet that buys less.

Promise Four: Taxes on Working People

Verdict: Abandoned — and then redefined. The manifesto pledged not to raise National Insurance, income tax or VAT. The April 2025 rise in employer NICs broke the spirit of that pledge in the most direct way possible: employers' costs are employees' wages forgone, as the OBR has noted. The Autumn 2025 Budget then froze income tax thresholds for a further three years, pulling millions into higher brackets through fiscal drag — the quietest tax rise in the book. When a promise survives only because the definition of 'working people' was renegotiated after the election, the promise is dead.

Promise Five: Debt Falling as a Share of GDP

Verdict: Diluted. The debt rule was met, but only after the target date was quietly pushed back and the measurement basis adjusted. The OBR projects debt as a share of national income at levels not seen since the 1960s for years to come, with debt interest costs running at roughly £100 billion a year — more than the defence budget. Meeting a rule by moving the goalposts is not fiscal discipline; it is fiscal theatre.

The Counter-Argument, Taken Seriously

Ministers will say they inherited the worst economic inheritance since the war, that global headwinds — energy prices, tariffs, bond markets — would have battered any government, and that investment in the NHS and infrastructure takes time to bear fruit. Some of this is fair. But the Government set its own tests, on its own timetable, and asked to be judged against them. The OBR's verdict on the policy choices — the NICs rise and the employment legislation specifically — is that they damaged growth. That is not inheritance. That is decision.

Why Competence Is Now the Ballot Question

The political lesson is stark. Voters will forgive a government they disagree with if they believe it is competent; they will not forgive an incompetent one they agree with. Five promises, five failures of delivery or definition, and a fiscal watchdog documenting each step. At the next election, the question will not be which party cares — every party claims to care. It will be which party can be believed when it writes a number on a piece of paper.

You can argue with Conservative philosophy. You cannot argue with an empty promise made to people who wrote it down.