Week Ahead: Rishi Sunak's Spending Review, Covid-19 envoy and Halloween in Yorkshire

Budget time

The Chancellor will announce the conclusions of the 2021 Spending Review in an autumn Budget on Wednesday.

The three-year review will set UK Government departments’ resource and capital budgets for 2022-23 to 2024-25 and the devolved administrations’ block grants for the same period.

In September, Chanecellor Rishi Sunak, who is Conservative MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire, said: “Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve delivered on an unprecedented scale to protect people’s jobs and livelihoods.

“Despite the worst economic recession in 300 years, we have not only got people back into work through the Plan for Jobs but continued to deliver on the priorities of the British people.

“At the Spending Review later this year, I will set out how we will continue to invest in public services and drive growth while keeping the public finances on a sustainable path.”

Mr Sunak will be under pressure to unveil funding measures to deal with climate change. It comes after former Labour leader, current Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Doncaster North MP, Ed Miliband, urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to “get off his sun lounger” and treat the upcoming Cop26 conference in Glasgow with the “seriousness” it deserves.

Covid-19 envoy

World Health Organisation special envoy on Covid-19 Dr David Nabarro will discuss the handling of the pandemic tomorrow.

Dr Nabarro will be speaking at a virtual Institute for Government event about the international community’s handling of the crisis from the initial outbreak, to public health measures to curb transmission and current vaccination programmes, to how to be better prepared in the future.

It comes after MPs on the Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee earlier this month published a damning report criticising serious errors and delays at the hands of the UK Government and scientific advisers.

In a wide-ranging report, cross-party MPs said the UK’s pandemic planning was too “narrowly and inflexibly based on a flu model” that failed to learn the lessons from Sars, Mers and Ebola.

Former chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies told MPs there was “groupthink”, with infectious disease experts not believing that “Sars, or another Sars, would get from Asia to us”.

Minister for the Cabinet Office Stephen Barclay told Sky News’ Kay Burley the Government “did take decisions to move quickly”, including on vaccines, and that both scientists and ministers were acting on information they had at the time.

Mr Barclay, who was repeatedly asked to apologise for Government failings but did not, said: “It was an unprecedented pandemic, we were learning about it as we went through and of course, with hindsight, there’s things we know about it now that we didn’t know at the time.”

Trick or Treat?

Events will take place around Yorkshire and the wider UK as the trick or treating traditions of Halloween come around next weekend.

The day itself, October 31, falls on Sunday, meaning that many youngsters and older revellers will likely take to the streets in grisly fancy dress on Saturday night.

In Yorkshire, there is a pumpkin trail in Strid Wood at Bolton Abbey, ‘Halloween Hauntings’ at Temple Newsam in Leeds and even a ‘Light Spectacular’ on the North York Moors Railway.

And don’t forget: the clocks go back by one hour on Sunday.