What are the different views on how tax policies should be shaped in John Healey's first budget?

John Healey’s speech: continuity is no crime will.driscoll Mon, 07/09/2026 - 16:58 The summer’s Reeves to Healey switch was more continuity than change. 5 Comment Giles Wilkes Institute for Government Yes John Healey delivers his speech in Coventry on 7 September. Public finances Budget Labour Conservative No The past two decades have seen enough chancellor transitions to support a categorisation into two sorts: radical change and gentle evolution. In the first sits the shift from Alastair Darling to George Osborne in 2010, and to and from Kwasi Kwarteng in 2022. The rest were more continuity than change. And this includes this summer’s changing of the guard. Yes, more of the same John Healey’s speech on Monday has accordingly been damned as “more of the same” by opposition parties, no doubt confident that associating the new chancellor with Rachel Reeves will do him no favours. But it was already apparent that Andy Burnham’s takeover from Keir Starmer represented a change of style and personnel more than a . There will also be something he called “economic potential analysis”, which sounds very like a willingness to be generous when assessing the possibility of positive, dynamic change. These changes are not guaranteed to work. Consultation and judicial review may be impediments but are also helpful guardrails against arbitrary, badly-thought-through ideas. One person’s economic potential is another’s optimism bias. But the government promised a tilt towards action, and these measures should help with that. Healey has also indicated progress on the PM’s signature ambition: greater devolution. One of Rachel Reeves’s last big announcements was a plan to produce a Fiscal Devolution Roadmap. Healey has now promised one at the budget this autumn. The suspicion is that this will be a more ambitious effort than whatever might have been extracted from the Treasury before. His argument is that putting power and resources with local leaders will be a boon for private investm