Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a weekly podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and each week I'll be taking an in-depth look at this week's

biggest political stories with fellow politics home reporters and special guests from across Westminster.

I'm joined by Politics Homes, political reporter Noah Hoffman, and I'm delighted to be joined by Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies to reflect on Rishi Sunak's Spring Statement and and shield households from the inflationary pressures building in the price of fuel, energy and goods.

And we'll also discuss what comes next for Sunak with the Treasury Select Committee Chair Mel Stride,

who tells me what he plans to ask the Chancellor when he appears in front of the committee on Monday.

So let's begin with what was actually in the Spring Statement. Paul, what measures did Sunak announce that were going to ease the pressure on households as the cost of living rises?

So the specific announcements in the Spring Statement, there weren't actually that many of them. There's five pence off the price of a litre of petrol and diesel, relatively modest, given increases in the prices recently.

There's a change to national insurance contributions which will raise the point at which you start

to pay them, which will offset for low to middle earners, the increase in the rate of national

insurance contributions that was announced last year.

A bit further into the future, there was an announcement of a cut in the basic rate of income tax,

a couple of years down the road.

But in terms of announcements actually in the spring statement, there wasn't a great deal else,

though, to be fair, the Chancellor did come up with a pretty

substantial package just a month ago in September, giving £200 off energy bills, repayable

for everybody, and £150-pound rebate from council tax for 80% of people, those living in band D and below. And it is probably

important to think about everything in the round, not just what was announced on Wednesday.

Yeah, indeed. Obviously, you know, a lot of that stuff that was announced earlier this year,

it feels so events have kind of taken over a bit from that. Noah, what was the kind of the

reaction that you got from some Tory MPs to the measures that were announced yesterday?

So I contacted quite a few Tory MPs from cross-section of the party from different

...