Sam Fleming

speaker

105 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Sam Fleming’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

FT News Briefing · UK chancellor John Healey inherits tricky finances · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

So John Healey inherits a pretty tough fiscal position.

The last chancellor, Rachel Reeves, doubled the headroom against her key fiscal rule to around £23 billion in her most recent budget.

But since then, there's been a lot of pressure on the economy from the war in Iran, higher inflation and so on.

So a lot of economists think that fiscal buffer against the self-imposed fiscal rules that the UK government abides by.

will have been compressed a fair bit, potentially halved.

This is a country which is trying to get borrowing down, trying to get debt down towards the end of the current parliament.

So there's just not a lot of space for tax cuts or increases in spending.

We're also in an inflationary environment in the UK right now.

Another reason why expansionary fiscal policy, looser fiscal policy is not seen as a good idea by economists.

So this is not an easy inheritance by any means for John Healey.

Well, he was the defense secretary under Keir Starmer.

He resigned because he felt the government wasn't doing enough to ratchet up spending on defense priorities.

So we could expect him to really want to prioritize defense in this new role if he's consistent with his position under Keir.

in his previous role.

Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, has said he wants to introduce a cost of living package this week, a package aimed at reducing some of the pressures on households because of rising energy costs.

That's another cost that we would expect him to have to find money to fund.

And then on top of that, Burnham has been talking about wanting to alleviate the pressure on lower earners by increasing the personal allowance at which income tax kicks in.

Again, that's a big effective tax cut.

So there's a lot of talk about big commitments when it comes to spending or lower taxes, especially targeted towards lower earning households.

But no sense yet as to how any of this will be funded.

Showing 1–20 of 105 · page 1 of 6