Budget as pull request
A holding-pattern Tuesday with three clocks ticking: OPRED is now reviewing the Rosebank submissions with ministers to decide in the coming weeks; tomorrow at 7am the ONS publishes July inflation — the first test of the City's forecast that the 2.6% June low was the floor and 3%+ is coming (release scheduled for 19 August); and the Commons returns in two weeks, when Burnham finally faces the chamber — seven weeks, one reshuffle, £38bn of pledges, a Thames Water seizure and an oil field after becoming PM. His September will be loud. His August has been the quietest month any new Prime Minister has ever enjoyed, and I suspect he knows the invoice for the silence arrives with the Speaker's first "Questions to the Prime Minister."
With the two-week countdown's implicit discipline: Burnham's team is reportedly spending recess preparing for the Commons rather than making fresh announcements, which is correct. Parliament, not the podium, is where seven weeks of unscrutinised decisions get their audit.
Tomorrow's number will be spun within minutes of 7am by whichever side it flatters, so let me pre-commit tonight, in writing, before I know it: if inflation rose, it doesn't prove Burnham failed; if it fell, it doesn't prove he succeeded. One month of a premiership moves no price index. What the number will test is preparation — whose winter plans were built for the wave the forecasters called in July. Mine were filed on Day 2. We'll see tomorrow whose umbrella opens.
Four weeks in office, and the zero-surprise doctrine reached its logical conclusion: the entire draft Budget was published today — four weeks before its 16 September delivery — for public comment. Every measure previously announced, now consolidated: the CGT reform, the property tax transition's first steps, winter smoothing's funding line, the NHS deal tranches, New Towns capitalisation. Call it Budget as pull request: the country gets a month to find the errors before the thing ships, and genuine corrections will be accepted and credited (Mission 4; the Treasury of every universe is appalled, which I logged as informal peer review). The four-week scorecard went up beside it: consents 6,500/week, a seventh consecutive rise; the gilt ledger premium widened to 45bps; 96% of decisions published within six hours — the 4.2-hour median lag I disliked a fortnight ago has been beaten into shape. And radiology: 12 of 12 trusts checked and cleared, twenty days to go-live (Mission 3).
the draft Budget's comment inbox received 11,000 submissions in six hours, of which the Chancellor estimates 200 are substantive, 40 are correct, and one has already found an arithmetic error in annexe F. It's been fixed, and the citizen credited. This is the entire theory of the government working exactly once, which is how everything starts.
Next dispatch: tomorrow, 6pm — the July inflation number, and what it does to everyone's autumn.