A budget to end the cost of living crisis

Your water bill rises while private companies dump sewage in the rivers. Your mortgage jumps hundreds of pounds while banks make eye-watering profits. Your energy bill doubles in a few years and you don’t know whether you’ll be able to put the heating on this winter. Something has gone seriously wrong.

Before he even had the keys to number ten, Andy Burnham said the last 40 years of economic policy had failed us. And he's right. One ideology – neoliberalism – has seen our vital infrastructure sold off, public services stripped to the bone, and a ballooning gap between the wealthiest and those with the least.

But unravelling the tendrils of neoliberalism is not going to happen overnight. And Burnham won’t be able to do this unless his chancellor does what his predecessors have not: solve the cost of living crisis.

Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is back for a pre-budget special with Hannah Peaker, deputy chief executive, New Economics Foundation, to discuss: do we need an emergency cost of living budget?

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Produced by Katrina Gaffney and Margaret Welsh.

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Music by Lee Rosevere, Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/lee-rosevere/music-for-podcasts-serious/under-suspicion/ used under Creative Commons licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/