SerpApi.Org
Two before-breakfast announcements on consecutive days set the tone for the new UK prime minister, who entered 10 Downing Street on Monday after winning the Labour leadership unopposed following Keir Starmer's resignation.
The cost of living dominated Andy Burnham's first speech, and on Tuesday he told his newly assembled ministers they would form a "cost of living government" whose job was to convince households "that help is coming".
The same day, the British government said it would remove the 5% VAT from household electricity bills from October until the end of the financial year next April, expected to knock an average of £45 (€53) off yearly household bills.
The cut is to be paid for by scrapping the digital ID programme, prompting questions over whether that money had ever been set aside.
Downing Street insisted the measure was "fully funded" as departments were to absorb the digital ID scheme from existing budgets and will now redirect those savings.
Wednesday brought the second initiative.
Single bus fares in England outside London, currently capped at £3 until the end of March 2027, will instead be capped at £2 from 1 January through to the end of next year, cutting the maximum fare by a third and heading off a spring price jump.
The previous £2 cap generated an estimated 30 million extra bus journeys in ten months, and without one, single fares on the most expensive routes could climb above £10.
The £454 million (€533mn) cost was found in the energy department's budget by switching cash earmarked for international climate finance projects into loans.
"I've done it before and I will do it again now: a £2 cap on bus fares for millions across the country," Burnham said, arguing no one should be priced out of essential transport and invoking his first-day pledge to build "a country for everyone, everywhere".
The cap echoes Greater Manchester's Bee Network, where fares have been held at £2 for four years under his mayoralty.
Giveaways now, hard sums later
The constraint on all of these policies is fiscal.
Burnham surprised observers by handing the Treasury to John Healey, a former defence secretary with Treasury experience under Gordon Brown, whose appointment is read as reassurance that Labour's promise to bring down debt will hold.
Healey inherits public debt above 95% of GDP, its highest since the 1960s, with interest costs of £111.2 billion (€130bn) last year, or 8.3% of government spending, according to the UK budget watchdog.
Growth has averaged under 1.5% a year since 2009, half its pre-crisis pace, a stagnation that helps explain why Burnham is the seventh prime minister in a decade. Post-crisis occupants of 10 Downing Street have lasted barely two years, on average.
Meanwhile, Britain's pledge to raise defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 will cost about £36 billion (€42.3bn) a year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Burnham's ambitious growth agenda, which envisions reindustrialisation beyond London, tackling the UK's housing shortage and support for small firms providing six in ten private-sector jobs, will face hurdles if he plans to also increase pensions according to the triple lock which follows either higher inflation, earnings growth or a set 2.5% increase while avoiding an increase in taxes for average citizens.
