Chris Mason

I once went to a soft play in the company of a friend with his daughter before I had kids and was on all fours, on like level four of this quite complicated soft play, when I encountered a former colleague of ours on also on all fours coming the other way.

Yeah, and I was thinking with the... Because with some of this, there was a bit of a riff from some of the critics, some critics prior to her standing up at lunchtime today, saying, you know, to what extent will this add up to something that people can feel and notice?

And then the stuff on the VAT on attractions, you think of things like theme parks, which if you go with...

a few kids in tow, quite expensive, actually.

Because that's the other thing, isn't it?

With all of this, I was sort of pondering with this around this sort of suggestion of, you know, what can or should happen.

governments do in an era where we've perhaps in the last decade become accustomed to these colossal interventions associated with once in a whatever shocks, whether it was the pandemic or the full scale of evasion of Ukraine with furlough and then those big energy interventions and then where that leaves the public finances.

and therefore how governments approach their decisions in the years after.

But then also what we collectively as a society then regard as quote-unquote normal as far as interventions are concerned.

And then to that point about what should we reasonably expect from governments or what can they best do to try and address these longer-term issues around incomes and the cost of living and how affordable things feel to people.

It does.

And just picking up on Helen's point, and this is the challenge, isn't it, alongside some of the, alongside the kind of retail-y stuff and then talking about theme parks and stuff, is that the whole business of things, and the same applies with petrol here or diesel,

things not going up as much as they might otherwise have done is quite a hard sell, isn't it?

If your nuts or your marge or whatever has not gone up by as much as it might have done because there's a certain element around the tariff that means it's a reduction.

Sure, all of that into the mix.

On the energy stuff, so the argument that over and over again folk in the Treasury have been making, well, firstly is that it's summer.

So they are conscious of winter coming and contingency planning around winter.

Secondly, the thing they go over and over again to emphasise is this idea, the merit, as they see it, of targeting support rather than universal support because it's cheaper and because it can be more focused.

What we don't know as far as the winter is concerned, there's a million things we don't know.

We don't know the chances it's going to be in the winter, do we?