These past few weeks I have met dozens of businesses from across the United Kingdom. Pub and restaurant owners in Cornwall and Kent. Defence manufacturers in Belfast and Moray. Investment opportunities in Aberdeenshire and Port Talbot.

I have seen an economy that has the ingredients for success – a skilled and committed workforce, world-class universities, innovative businesses. You don’t hear Reform or the Conservatives talk of this success. They want you to believe the economy is broken. That our best days are behind us and that the path of decline is inevitable. I fundamentally reject that. It is not the country I see around us, and it is not the future I believe in. Britain’s economy is not broken, but I know that in recent years it has got stuck.

Austerity, a chaotic Brexit and Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget led to more than a decade of stagnation. Our economy became trapped in a cycle of low growth, repressed investment and stagnant income that weakened our competitiveness on the global stage.

The months and weeks before any budget are filled with people speculating about – or claiming to know – what tax and spend decisions I will take or what the Office for

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