£30bn and counting: how Labour strategy is zeroing in on property and wealth taxes

A risk-averse government could focus on property and wealth reforms next month as it struggles to establish control of the economy

- By Will Hutton

It is brutal. The government has five weeks to find about £30bn additional revenue a year, by the end of this parliament, if it is to meet its target that the stock of public debt must by then fall as a proportion of national output. British government bonds already languish as the least desired, with the highest interest rates in the G7 group of industrialised countries. It is this menaced fiscal rule that stands between the government and the possibility of a bond-market crisis. So high are the stakes for the budget - the choices will frame the fate of this government - that the prime minister and chancellor quickly decided that anyone with serious economic policy responsibility should be included in a broad “budget group”. Everyone’s hand is to be dipped in blood.

Torsten Bell, pensions and treasury minister, has emerged as the group's pivotal figure, invited by the chancellor to act in practical terms as its executive lead. Rachel Reeves has let it be known that she considers him one of Labour's “sharpest minds” and someone who has “seen the budget from both ends: in the room helping to write [it] and on the Today programme dissecting [it]”.

Before becoming an MP, he authored a trenchant and influential report, Stagnation Nation, as chief executive of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, which he followed up with a no less trenchant book, Great Britain?. We know what the de facto author of the budget thinks of the challenges and options in granular detail. It is all written down.

The budget group has not yet made its decisions, but it has set out its priorities. The chancellor wants to try to convince business that she’s serious about growth - one of the mantras of the budget group is “unleash the private sector”. Officials know that the most efficient way of raising big sums of money is to raise income tax or VAT, but that means ripping up Labour's manifesto commitments not to increase income tax, VAT or national insurance.