What Labour's welfare reforms say about Rachel Reeves' tricky fiscal position

However, just five months on, Ms Reeves is facing similar economic headwinds to those that took down Liz Truss.

Business confidence has dissipated and the world’s economy is in a state of flux because of Donald Trump’s obsession with tariffs.

As such, most of Ms Reeves’ fiscal headroom, the leeway in the Government’s budget, has vanished due to the price of borrowing rising.

This means the Chancellor is desperately trying to find money without raising taxes, as she previously ruled out, to meet her own fiscal rules for the independent watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility.

That leads us to the previous week’s events. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall announced a major reform of the benefits system, which she said would reduce the staggeringly high welfare budget by £5bn by 2030.

This includes many laudable initiatives such as scrapping the workplace capability assessment and introducing the “right to try”, which means people can try to return to work without fearing losing their benefits.

However, it also includes major changes to personal independence payments (Pip), which provide funds to help disabled people with their higher cost of living, which have not been made clear yet.

This means for Labour MPs, like Shipley’s Anna Dixon, “it makes it very hard to be 100 per cent behind these reforms”.

She told me: “Unfortunately, there’s not enough detail - we need an impact assessment.”

The Government has said it will publish all of this detail on Wednesday to coincide with the Spring Statement.

The other big question is why are the Pip changes the only one of eight major reforms that the Department for Work and Pensions has said it will not consult on?

Could it be that the Treasury needs to ensure the £5bn spending reduction goes through to make sure it doesn’t break its fiscal rules?

In more ways than one, Wednesday is going to be a huge day for the Labour government.