Hello, everybody. Apologies for that slight delay. For some reason, it took us longer to sink than it usually does.

But thank you very much for bearing with us and welcome to this IFG instant guide to everything you need to know about today's spending review announcements.

The day that potentially defines the rest of the course of this government.

I'm Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the IFG, and to analyse what we've just seen and heard and read,

I'm joined by top IFG colleagues.

Nick Davis, the program director for the public services team who produce our regular

performance tracker analysis. Ben Paxton,

who gave a loss of advice to the Labour government on how they should run their first spending

review. So we'll see how far Ben thinks they took that advice and how it's worked out in practice.

And of course, our deep expert Gemma Tetlow, the IFG's very own chief economist,

who knows everything to do with the fiscal rules, etc., etc.

Please, as many people already are, start posting in questions on Slider

and hopefully that all those questions weren't just why we were slightly late started.

We will get stuck in

and if necessary we will run this slightly longer than we intended if there are a million and one

questions and I have to warn my colleagues, there already are a lot of questions coming in.

So let's start. Before the spending and remember to post your questions on a slider if you haven't got there already. Before the spending, and remember to post your questions on a slide over if you haven't got

there already.

Before the spending review, we posted six questions to be answered or that we hope would

be answered or clearer after the spending review.

So let's see what answers.

But I just want to start at the beginning, if you like.

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