Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

With Rachel Reeves still dotting the eyes and crossing the T's on a comprehensive spending review next Wednesday,

this week we're looking at what exactly it is, how the process works and going inside the battles between the Treasury and Whitehall departments,

on spending plans for the coming years, looking back at previous reviews and seeing what we can learn ahead of the Chancellor's

big speech and what it will say about the government's priorities over the course of the next

Parliament. We'll be to discuss all that and reflect on how useful spending reviews are for

creating economic policy and delighted to be joined by John Glenn, Conservative MP and long-standing

former Treasury Minister, Sonia Khan, who was a special advisor to Philip Hammond during his time as Chancellor,

as well as B. Bola, research economist at the Institute of Fiscal Studies,

and Tom Pope, Deputy Chief Economist at the Institute of Government.

And later in the episode, we'll also hear from Brandon Lewis,

who was a minister in multiple departments under four different Prime Ministers

about his experience of the spending review process.

So Tom, I'm going to start with you just very basically.

What is a spending review and how did this kind of process come about?

So a spending review happens every few years and it's a process by which Whitehall sets the

budgets for different departments for the next few years. So this spending a process by which Whitehall sets the budgets for different departments

for the next few years. So this spending review is going to set budgets from April

2026 through to March 2029. And it's a process that has been going on in some form. I mean,

we've been planning spending as a government back into the 50s, 60s, even before. But kind of the modern

incarnation of spending reviews was really with the new Labor government. So in 1998,

the first comprehensive spending review that tried to set budgets for sort of multiple years

...