Budget 2025 is a big risk for Labour's election plans

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Day two after a budget is always an important moment.

This is when the nerds and boffins of Britain’s fiscal thinktanks assemble to deliver their snap verdict on the chancellor’s decisions.

The moment is more important than ever when, as was certainly the case this time, the budget is a big one.

So what did the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and the Resolution Foundation make of this year’s budget?

Well, as you’d probably expect, they both fell short of distilling it into a single soundbite, but in broad terms, they both sounded somewhat positive.

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Yes, there were plenty of big provisos. The head of the IFS, Helen Miller, said Labour have broken their manifesto pledge not to raise National Insurance.

The Resolution Foundation argued that if only the chancellor had raised the basic rate of income tax instead of freezing personal allowances, it would have made the tax rise considerably fairer and more progressive.

And that’s before one gets into the criticism of some of the other bits and pieces from the red book – the structure of the EV tax, for instance (why doesn’t it try to penalise congestion?), or of the mansion tax (why not just overhaul council tax altogether?).

But for the most part, these closely-followed institutions seemed pretty supportive of this year’s budget – more so, certainly, than they were last year.

Primarily, that’s because while the last budget left only a very thin bit of headroom against Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, this one was far more cautious, doubling that fiscal insurance policy to just over £21bn.