Public finances must remain under control

Philip Hammond must be ruing the day he decided to move his Budget from the spring to the autumn. It means he has a second bite at a not especially flavoursome cherry within the space of just eight months. Changing the timing might have seemed a good idea a year ago, but the Chancellor will struggle today to say much more than he did then in March.

His first Budget misfired when he was forced to abandon plans for a tax increase on the self-employed that was in breach of a Tory election promise. There has been another election in the meantime, but it has compounded his difficulties by denying the Conservatives an overall majority. His room for manoeuvre is inevitably constrained by the difficulty of getting anything radical through Parliament.

Many Conservatives have no great expectations and are just anxious to see Mr Hammond through the day without mishap. But this would throw away the opportunity that the Budget gives a Government to take the initiative, and it certainly needs to. The Brexit drama has pitched Tories against one another and the loss of two Cabinet ministers in recent weeks has left the impression of a troubled administration.

Yet the Conservatives remain level-pegged with Labour in the polls, which shows how much the country distrusts the economic approach of Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Hammond needs to counter Labour’s lurch to the Left not by trying to meet them half-way but with a robust defence of capitalism, wealth creation and enterprise, accompanied by the policies to encourage all three.

From what we know so far, he intends to try to woo young people away from the Corbyn cult with Help to Buy and concessionary rail fares. The centrepiece of the Budget is expected to be an eye-catching initiative on housing, with Mr Hammond committing the Government to build 300,000 new homes a year, when it already struggles to hit 200,000.

But the best way of helping young people is not to lose control of the public finances. Mr Hammond, following on from his predecessor George Osborne, has presided over a lower deficit, which has fallen by two thirds from its post-crash high. He now needs to work on cutting overall debt. There will doubtless be the pettifogging detail that the Treasury loves to insert into every Budget. Above all, however, the Chancellor needs to set a confident and upbeat tone.