Migration, the customs union & a £40bn black hole?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There are reports that the OBR will downgrade Britain’s productivity growth forecasts, increasing the size of the black hole facing the Chancellor at the end of the month. This continues the spate of bad news for the Chancellor on the economy – but can we trust the figures? James Heale and Michael Simmons join Patrick Gibbons to talk about what this means ahead of the budget, whether anger over the money wasted on asylum hotels can be linked to the cost-of-living crisis and what Rachel Reeves is doing in Saudi Arabia this week.
Plus: is a debate over the customs union really what Britain wants right now?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:44.6 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. |
| 0:47.9 | I'm Patrick Gibbons and today I'm joined by Michael Simmons and James Hill. |
| 0:55.5 | So Michael, there are reports this morning that the OBR is going to downgrade the productivity growth forecasts, which could leave us with a 20 billion black hole, or 20 billion at least, I believe. Yeah, so 20 billion was |
| 1:02.1 | actually from the sort of original accepted downgrade that was first reported a few weeks ago |
| 1:07.2 | that Rachel Reeves now appears to have confirmed. This second downgrade that the |
| 1:13.2 | FT reported last night, so instead of a 0.2 percentage point downgrade, a 0.3 percentage point |
| 1:19.8 | downgrade, that sounds like a small number, but it potentially changes a 20 billion pound black |
| 1:26.0 | hole into maybe even a 40 billion one. It is so up in the air, |
| 1:31.1 | but that just illustrates how much these numbers can change. It's questionable whether this is |
| 1:39.1 | actually true. I mean, has the OBR indicated this is the downgrade they're going to make and the |
| 1:44.9 | treasury is sort of letting us know the bad news now? Or is this pitch rolling from the treasury? |
| 1:51.0 | Are they saying that the downgrade's really bad and then it turns out that the downgrades |
| 1:55.9 | only half is bad and they've got a little bit more room to play with? I'm inclined to believe it is quite bad because of the fact that the language from the |
| 2:06.7 | Treasury has changed on breaking the manifesto pledge not to raise the big free taxes on workers. |
| 2:14.7 | They've changed from categorically ruling that out to saying something along the |
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