The IFS delivers an ambivalent judgement on the Budget

Away, away from Drill Hall in central London, where the Institute for Fiscal Studies has just delivered its briefing on yesterday’s Budget. And, as useful as this event always is, there’s no denying that another independent body — the Office for Budget Responsibility — has taken some of the sting and surprise out of it. Not only did the OBR poach the IFS’s former director, Robert Chote, for themselves, but their supplementary Budget document has already done an IFS-style job on the government: highlighting the trends and tremors that might otherwise go unspoken.

And so we heard, again, about how overall spending has risen slightly after yesterday’s Budget; about the higher borrowing forecasts; about inflation outstripping wages for a couple of years; and so on.

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Yet there were some new grace notes in the IFS analysis.