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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots and spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Forsyfe and Kate Andrews and it is Budget Week.

Over the weekend, we've had various announcements trailed, various stories steered against.

Kate, when it comes to what we're expecting, the headline from Rishi-C-N-X budget and the spending review to be, it seems as though we're now being

tipped that there will be measures when it comes to cost of living that could relate to the minimum wage.

Yeah, so the Treasury has publicly put out there so many of its proposals that the question

now is, well, what have they held back? What's going to be the rabbit out of the hat, so to speak?

And it's thought that it would be related to the looming cost of living crisis that a lot of people

are already experiencing. I mean, inflation is up. But especially with energy bills in the coming

months because of the international

gas shortage and, you know, just the fact that for millions of people, energy bills are all but

guaranteed to be going up. So the fact that labor are now calling for this cut to VAT on electricity

bills might indicate that they have a sense that that is exactly what the chancellor is going to do,

so they're trying to get ahead of it. We don't really know, but it wouldn't be surprising.

I think what's going to be interesting is in some ways it's going to be a tale of two budgets,

one in which Rishi Sunak has already briefed that there's going to be quite a lot of spending

announced, especially around the NHS. We're going to get roughly six billion pounds worth of capital spending to increase capacity, new beds, to improve

tech in the NHS. All of this is supposed to be helping with the COVID backlog. But on the other

side, we're going to hear a lot of talk of fiscal responsibility. You're going to hear the chancellor

talking probably about new fiscal rules that he plans to set for

...