Treasury told the newsletter this would be a very “low-key” budget
First Edition readers and people struggling with the cost of living set out what they wanted from the Burnham government’s first budget as Chancellor John Healey prepared to present it in the Commons at 12:30 p.m. on October 28. Energy bills, food costs, housing expenses and fuel prices dominated the requests. Readers asked for immediate help with winter bills, more council housing and lower fuel prices, while Common Wealth director Mathew Lawrence separately proposed a structural plan for reducing energy bills over the medium term.
Michael, who works for a small property company, rents a three-bedroom bungalow in Winchester with his three children. The bungalow is draughty, and he spends about £165 a month on electricity and gas, a figure set to increase this winter. “I think about the cost of everything now,” Michael said. He asked: “Will I get enough money to be able to afford this? Will I have enough when the rent is due?” After tax, his monthly income was between £2,500 and £3,000 and his rent was £1,800 a month, leaving him at most £300 each week in a good month to cover the living costs of four people.
Healey was considering making the warm homes discount, a £150 annual reduction on electricity bills for people in receipt of benefits, more generous. Michael does not qualify because he receives no benefits. The newsletter noted that the discount is targeted at the most needy and does nothing for people further up the income spectrum who are still struggling.
The scale of those pressures was remarkable, the newsletter wrote. StepChange, the UK’s largest debt advice charity, pulled together figures for the morning newsletter showing that average household arrears debt for its clients increased from £2,833 to £4,345 between 2022 and 2025. A charity spokesperson said: “In the late 2000s, people would primarily come to us with consumer credit debt.” The spokesperson added: “But one in two people who come to us now have energy debt. These pressures are completely new.”
Mathew Lawrence, director of Common Wealth, a thinktank cited as an influence on Burnham’s government, set out the longer-term demand: “Alongside funded measures to provide immediate relief, the government needs a structural plan to reduce energy bills over the medium term.” One idea he raised was an “energy guarantee”, a protected bloc of energy priced at pre-crisis levels. Energy officials, as Kiran Stacey reported earlier this month, are working up more radical changes that could be introduced after the budget. Healey has ruled out some of the tax changes that could help fund that kind of policy. Lawrence added: “So decisions on tax have limited the government’s scope for action on bills.”
Food costs produced another set of requests. The rising cost of food was a persistent source of stress for Michael. “Once something goes up in price, it never comes down again,” he said. A report from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit published in May observed that when food prices in the UK have risen during crises such as the pandemic, they have either fallen slowly or incompletely, or have stayed the same indefinitely. One of the proposals the government announced on Monday was the removal of import tariffs on products including baked beans, chocolate and gherkins. The newsletter said the impact on household budgets would be minimal, and the Treasury estimates the change will save £21 on the average yearly food shop. For Michael, who tries to limit his weekly food shop in Aldi to £80, that will barely make a dent.
Housing costs produced a further set of requests. Sue, from west Kent, wants the chancellor to announce more council housing. Burnham has committed Labour to the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar decade, and Healey is expected to announce a further £1bn in funding for it. He is also likely to provide more details of the Your First Home scheme, designed to help first-time buyers get on the property ladder, a new version of the Help to Buy scheme that the newsletter said pushed up house prices and made property developers “inordinately rich”. The impact of both measures, the newsletter stressed, would only be felt in the longer term. A more immediate solution, the newsletter wrote, would be linking local housing allowance, frozen since 2024, to rents. The Resolution Foundation finds that more than 900,000 private rented households on universal credit face a shortfall between their rent and their housing allowance, averaging £158 a month for a family renting a two-bedroom home.
Fuel prices produced the final request. Pat, from Aberdeen, told the newsletter she would like to see the government reduce fuel prices; the newsletter said the rising cost of petrol was penalising people who relied on their cars to get around. The government has announced that it will continue the freeze on fuel duty, the tax levied on every litre of petrol or diesel that Rishi Sunak announced in 2022. Maintaining the freeze will largely help higher-income households, who drive more, while depriving the government of a revenue source, Resolution Foundation economist Jonny Marshall said. Marshall said: “Obviously some people on low incomes have to drive a lot. But they’re also struggling with the cost of living at large.” He added: “So instead of using this rather blunt instrument, it would be better to find other ways to help poorer households, particularly with more action on energy bills.”
The measures awaiting Healey’s speech combined immediate household assistance with longer-term reform. The government has announced a series of “everyday fixes” to ease the cost-of-living pressures facing UK households, expected to include support for poorer families with energy bills this winter and a pledge of energy market reforms aimed at bringing down bills for all households in the longer term. Patrick Butler and Pippa Crerar reported the previous day on the government’s plan to abolish the rule the newsletter said had plunged unpaid carers into debt, which The Guardian exposed last year. The government was also criticised yesterday for pausing the process of equalising the lower national minimum wage, paid to people under 21, with the more generous “national living wage” for older workers.
Those proposals arrived under constraints the government itself described. The Treasury had been at pains to tell the newsletter that this would be a very “low-key” budget, and the newsletter opened by warning readers not to expect anything radical. That approach followed weeks of speculation from journalists, a flurry of press releases from thinktanks and a Treasury photo shoot that the newsletter described as coming with “an obligatory red box”. Healey was selling the package as a series of measures designed to relieve pressure on low- and middle-income households under the tagline “breathing space for today, fresh hope for the future”. Many of the proposals had already been briefed, and the newsletter’s author attributed their modesty to the constraints — both real and self-imposed — facing the government.
The government had rejected calls to raise capital gains tax or lower the mansion tax and had promised to stick to Labour’s fiscal rules, while the Iran war had increased the cost of borrowing and eroded the government’s spending power. There had been some detectable grumbling earlier in the week over the lack of information about this budget compared with those of Rachel Reeves, and Healey had made much of the “military-style protocols” that have allegedly stopped the Treasury’s secrets from leaking out. The newsletter’s author judged it more likely that there had not been much to leak. “It’s going to be a far smaller budget than last year,” Kiran Stacey, The Guardian’s policy editor, told the newsletter on Monday. Stacey added: “It’s not going to be ending 40 years of neoliberalism.” The newsletter’s author wrote that voters might be hoping for something transformative from a government that risks presiding over the “worst parliament for living standards on record”, an impression drawn from First Edition readers and people struggling with the cost of living.
Beyond the budget section, the newsletter’s morning briefing covered other stories. On the Israeli elections, exit polls and partial official results showed that neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the opposition bloc led by former general Gadi Eisenkot had won enough seats to form a government, and the newsletter said Israel could be in for weeks of political haggling. In the Middle East, a multipronged peace deal — reopening the Strait of Hormuz within four days of sanctions being lifted and the Houthis withdrawing substantial forces inside Yemen — sits at the heart of Gulf states’ plans to avert what they regard as a disastrous renewal of war between Iran and the US. In Brazil, the newsletter described senator Flávio Bolsonaro as far-right and incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as leftwing. It reported that Flávio Bolsonaro had reportedly fled Brazil and was on his way to the United States after losing Sunday’s presidential election to Lula. And in Serbia, students celebrated after Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat in Belgrade, Serbia, on 26 October 2026.
On energy, the government’s plan to fund a multibillion-pound nuclear plant at the Sizewell site in Suffolk represents a “terrible deal” for the UK taxpayer over the rest of the century, according to the government’s spending watchdog. In UK news, a 78-year-old volunteer has claimed that a Reform UK councillor accused her of “facilitating the invasion” and of being akin to a Nazi collaborator during the second world war because she has helped asylum seekers learn English. The newsletter also pointed to pieces by its Caribbean correspondent Natricia Duncan, following calls for a full apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade from King Charles as he begins his tour of the region, and by Faiza Shaheen, who asked politicians why they are not taxing the rich. Duncan’s piece set out what was at stake, while the newsletter said Shaheen’s article showed that the politicians’ answers provided useful insight on how to push the dial. Writer and activist Darren McGarvey, whose Orwell prize-winning book Poverty Safari was referenced by Andy Burnham in his first speech in Scotland as Labour leader, was interviewed by the National. After covering the Serbian elections the previous week, the newsletter also recommended Aleksandar Matković’s analysis of their outcome and what weary European democracies can learn from the triumphant “bunch of students”, and Zoe Williams’ column on how the people who see you least may just know you best. Libby recommended Duncan’s piece, Matković’s analysis and McGarvey’s interview, while Poppy Noor, of the newsletters team, recommended Williams’ column and Shaheen’s article.
On the field, the newsletter reported that Conor Haughey scored the winning penalty in Fleetwood’s 5-3 shootout win over 10-man Arsenal after the Carabao Cup fourth round tie finished 1-1. Michael Carrick has been given the chance to save his Manchester United job by turning the club’s results around, with the head coach remaining in place for Saturday’s visit to Chelsea. In cricket, Australia fought back in a rollercoaster start to the deciding Test against South Africa, with the hosts all out for 329. Harry Kane is the men’s Ballon d’Or winner for 2026, the first Englishman to win the trophy in 25 years. At a ceremony at the Palladium Theatre in London, Kane unexpectedly won ahead of co-favourites Lamine Yamal of Barcelona and Kylian Mbappé of Real Madrid. In a contest that has been critiqued for promoting individualism and celebrity in sport, Lucy Hough speaks to The Guardian’s chief sports writer, Barney Ronay, about the symbolism of Kane’s win.
The day’s front pages led on the budget. The Guardian’s splash for the front page dated 29 October read “Healey targets cost of living crisis in budget for a ‘difficult moment’”, the Times led on “Healey to cut energy bills by scrapping green levies”, the i Paper had “Burnham to target rising energy bills in high-stakes first Budget” and the FT’s take was “Healey puts energy reform at centre of Budget aimed at steadying nerves”. Still on the budget, the Mail had “£6 billion budget benefits bonanza”, the Mirror wrote “A budget for workers” and the Express said “Kemi: Labour is coming for your pay packets”. Elsewhere, the Telegraph led on “King: Slavery was a ‘great suffering’”, the Sun said “Arise Sir Harry” and Metro had “Wife ‘victim of a sick fantasy’”.
In the Guardian’s Upside section, billed as “a bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad”, the newsletter reported that younger users have become increasingly aware of the downsides of social media, with enterprising Generation Z users working on fixes for their peers and a growing number of companies offering ways to digitally detox. Nineteen-year-old Shreya Nallamothu, a computer science student at Duke University, has invented her own DIY Brick device to block selected apps. “Everyone deserves to have a good relationship with technology, and it shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive,” Nallamothu said. “Often the tech companies’ best interests aren’t in the users’ best interests. Social media has gotten away from what good technology can do, and people have noticed.”