Budget Secrecy Claims Meet a Steady Stream of Leaks Ahead of Healey's Statement

Reports have repeatedly said that Chancellor John Healey has brought defence-style "compartmentalisation" to the Treasury to stop financial secrets from escaping. The question ahead of Wednesday's budget is whether the approach has made much difference compared with earlier years.

The theme took hold in mid-August, when the Telegraph said Healey was "on a war footing" to halt the drip of information that had troubled Rachel Reeves. The Financial Times described "military-style protocols", the Spectator highlighted "classified computer systems", and the i newspaper reported that officials could sign in only to their own sections of the document and could not see the parts they were not working on.

This weekend the Observer added that Healey was "flabbergasted" by the weak security around financial information on becoming chancellor, and that it was "so different to how we did things in the MoD". The chancellor is known to be concerned that market-sensitive leaks cost Britain billions before the previous government's budgets.

Even so, much of Wednesday's package is already public, apparently from a blend of authorised and unauthorised sources. A higher tax on banks, a deeply market-sensitive policy, emerged well in advance, as did an energy support package for the most vulnerable. Billions of pounds in extra defence spending, directed towards the British Business Bank and National Wealth Fund, has also been reported, along with a £1bn crackdown on online VAT sales that would make retailers such as Amazon, eBay and Temu responsible for collecting what is owed from smaller merchants on their platforms.

Stories have also pointed to headroom of around £15bn, a practice known in political circles as "pitch rolling", meant to avoid alarming markets or the public. Meanwhile, the Treasury and No 10 have followed the usual pattern of embargoed press-release announcements in the days before the fiscal event, including a £1.5bn borrowing facility for local authorities and £1bn for social housing, as they try to build a sense of momentum.

Former Treasury advisers say the elaborate security is partly meant to deter civil servants and gossiping MPs from thinking they can talk before a policy is ready. They also argue that a hermetically sealed budget is unhelpful, because surprise measures can provoke a backlash in the markets, the media, among the government's own MPs and with the wider public.

Policies that were less well trailed have often gone wrong, they note, from George Osborne's pasty tax in 2012 to Philip Hammond's surprise national insurance rise for the self-employed in 2017, which was abandoned within seven days after anger among Conservative MPs over a broken manifesto promise. "If everything is kept tight, then you end up surprising people. And that's called a Liz Truss situation," said one former strategist from the Tory years.

Healey has been closing down speculation about several possible tax changes, from higher capital gains tax on certain assets to lowering the mansion tax threshold on properties worth more than £1.5m. That suggests a growing appreciation of expectation management and of limiting surprises on the day.

A few fiscal "rabbits out of the hat" may still appear, as Healey aims to pair a "steady-as-she-goes" budget with some eye-catching measures meant to show the public the government is on their side. And if the Treasury truly aimed for military levels of secrecy, the Ministry of Defence might have something to worry about.