4 November 2025
If you are covering Rachel Reeves' pre-budget speech, please see the following comment from Rachael Griffin, tax and financial planning expert at Quilter:
Rachel Reeves’s pre-Budget speech was all about preparing the ground for some painful measures later this month. She knows this Budget will define her credibility, and her message today was clear that Britain’s finances are in a worse state than many realise, and everyone will be expected to play their part in putting them back on track.
Reeves was at pains to distance herself from the politics of austerity, arguing that deep cuts and short-term fixes are what weakened the country’s economic foundations in the first place. But while her argument against renewed austerity will appeal to many scarred by the last decade, it also lays the groundwork for a different kind of pain, which is higher personal taxes to rebuild public finances. She’s made it clear she is happy to be unpopular if it helps secure public finances.
Her insistence that ‘easy answers’ are off the table is a warning that there will be few giveaways in this Budget. The Chancellor is trying to convince both markets and the public that fiscal discipline can coexist with fairness, but for households already facing high borrowing costs and squeezed budgets, the idea of contributing more will still be a tough sell.
This was a speech designed to project authority and honesty, not to win popularity. The real challenge for Reeves will come when she has to translate that rhetoric into decisions that feel credible to investors but also tolerable for working families.
