The Spring Statement shouldn’t be a big thing, but it’s increasingly feeling like it could be. Laurence Field and Robert Marchant write what the Chancellor should do, but won’t

Predictions on government fiscal policy are notoriously difficult, but 2025 feels like a year where that challenge is even more acute. Political and economic uncertainty has continued, there is an ever-increasing threat of global trade wars emanating from US tariffs and the UK’s economy has stubbornly refused to grow.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves tried to cut a confident figure last October. Her Budget message? We are sticking to a path of plugging (alleged) black holes through an increase in taxes, but it’s currently just this one NIC rise, and we are unrelenting in our focus on growth.

So now we have a Spring Statement. It’s probably not going to be a Budget, although there have been whispers it may include some fiscal changes. It should be an update on how things are going since we last heard from the Treasury – we all know that there is a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty is the enemy of investment, and, therefore, growth.

What are the uncertainties facing the Chancellor? As Neils Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist highlighted, forecasting is hard, especially when it’s about the future. The ONS forecasts appear to have been........

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