Every autumn, Westminster falls into the same ritual: the air thickens with briefings and rumours about what could be in the Budget. It’s a well-practised routine, designed to minimise shocks on the day and maximise the upside of any good news.
That’s not a criticism. Pitch rolling remains a necessary part of Treasury communications – although I may be biased, having led pitch rolling efforts when Philip Hammond was Chancellor.
Budgets are sprawling, high-risk exercises in political and economic management. They involve billions of pounds and multiple audiences: Parliament, the media, business, the public and, increasingly, the markets. You can’t simply unveil hundreds of measures at 12.30 on a Wednesday and hope it lands smoothly.
Done well, pitch rolling helps. It relies on discipline – briefing the right people at the right time – and gives stakeholders advance warning of difficult choices. It helps to ‘defang’ bad news and manage expectations so that policy made in the national interest can survive first contact with reality. It’s the communications equivalent of putting the flaps down before landing. For a ‘harder landing’, cast your mind back to Liz Truss’s mini-Budget of 2022 – but there are plenty of other bumpy landings in recent memory.
This year, though, the noise has become deafening – and the signals deeply confusing. Every day brings another story about what the Chancellor might or might not do. For all but the most experienced Westminster watchers, it’s impossible to separate well-sourced briefings from wishful thinking.
Much of the responsibility lies with the Chancellor. At the last Budget, she left herself so little fiscal headroom that speculation was inevitable once it became clear she’d need more money. With more room to manoeuvre, she could have absorbed shocks like an OBR productivity downgrade or a welfare cuts reversal. Instead, talk of a £30 billion black hole has fuelled months of rumour. Treasury officials can hardly deny one story without denying them all, so what used to be a focused process has become a rolling cacophony. The result isn’t managed expectation, but confusion and uncertainty.
But that uncertainty has been further exacerbated by pitch rolling tactics that are hard to fathom to the outsider – e.g. marching the country up the hill, so to speak, on an income tax rise, only to march us back down again. Hope that there is a strategy guiding these tactics is slowly ebbing away – and that should concern us all, since the consequences of ‘hard landings’ are no longer just political.
One area where the Treasury has managed expectations more effectively is on the bigger picture. Whether by design or not, the message that this Budget will be tough, has landed. Within that, Reeves’ team have prepared Westminster and the media for an OBR downgrade that will blow a hole in the Chancellor’s plans. Better to brace people early than deliver an unpleasant surprise on the day.
Pitch rolling isn’t going away, nor should it. It remains essential to how modern fiscal policy is communicated and absorbed. But it works only when it’s focused, disciplined and strategic. Used properly, it helps a Budget land safely. Used carelessly, it just adds to the turbulence – and nobody wants to be the pilot still circling the runway on Budget Day.
Giles Winn is a Specialist Partner at Pagefield and was previously Special Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Philip Hammond.
