This time there really was no money! At least according to the IFS.
Nonetheless, some of the specifics are indeed shocking, and raise some difficult questions for the last government. If the scale of these overspends and spending pressures was apparent in the spring – and in lots of cases, there’s no reason to suppose otherwise – then it is hard to understand why they weren’t made clear or dealt with in the Spring Budget. Jeremy Hunt’s £10 billion cut to national insurance looks ever less defensible. On asylum costs, the decision to effectively stop processing claimants, and to budget virtually nothing for the resultant costs of housing them, looks like very poor policy making. The new Chancellor is right to be cross.