How far will Truss’s ‘growth plan’ go?

It was only a few weeks ago that Liz Truss was talking about holding an ‘emergency’ fiscal event towards the end of September, mainly to address rising energy bills and how the government would support people through the winter. This targeted approach helped to justify the speed at which her new government would announce some major policy, and even more importantly was used to justify not commissioning analysis from the Office for Budget Responsibility to go alongside it. Energy bills were too time sensitive for the government to wait for the OBR to run all the numbers and produce forecasts, Team Truss’s argument went. The independent assessment of her plans (which must be run at least twice a fiscal year) would come later in the autumn, next to a comprehensive Budget.

Depending on who you’d ask, this was smart – or short-term – politics. The Truss government is set to pledge a lot of money to the new Energy Price Guarantee – which caps the average household energy bill around £2,500 – and conservative