Budget 2018 Preview: Chancellor Philip Hammond will try to patch together competing demands to present a positive vision - which must be closely scrutinised

So, Prime Minister Theresa May announced austerity will come to an end. The Chancellor Philip Hammond told Conservative members they must not surrender the 'party of change' label. Their right-wing colleagues want a bold, positive statement with Brexit just around the corner.

Where does that leave the government ahead of the Budget?

When the Chancellor stands at the dispatch box on Monday, he will have meet a number of commitments and all of them will require him to open the public purse and spend money - something anathema to Hammond's own favoured fiscally conservative approach.

So beware of the narrative. Whatever the Tories in the Treasury have cooked up, take careful notice of how it is being framed. Hammond needs to carefully wrap up his policy announcements in a positive vision, promising a bright future that brings money to spend.

To spend 'sensibly', of course - the note of fiscal responsibility won't be going away. It's how the Conservatives like to paint themselves (despite the way the national debt has ballooned) and they have spent a decade marking it as separating them from Labour.

But something will have to change if the Conservatives are to find £20 billion for the NHS. To find the more than £8 billion a year needed to keep the various taxes and duties from rising. To at least bring a halt to cuts for long enough for it to seem like austerity has stopped - if not been reversed. Is there any room for movement to find this money?

Well there is pressure to bring the tech giants to heel with a tax - though it's not a move without complications. And the Chancellor has already set out his stall, with a brand new narrative, to increase National Insurance contributions from the self-employed - a policy that went down in flames less than a week after last year's Budget.

The other targets for more taxes are only the rich - the main constituents of the Conservatives. From Pensions to private school fees, there are reliefs and loopholes aplenty. But will the Chancellor be willing to close them?

Far more troubling for almost everyone else is that local councils fear even further cuts to their funding are on the way. That would be devastating for essential frontline services, that are already under pressure - as the government forces local communities to raise money in their own neighbourhoods, even those with few resources.

If the Chancellor decides to hold off on these further cuts, it will likely depend more upon halting or deferring various tax cuts, rather than raising taxes in a more direct or conventional sense. But even then, it trimming one advantage for ordinary workers to protect those same people for a new disadvantage. Hardly a progressive pitch.

Hammond will try to dress up these trade offs as the hard-won rewards of decades of hard times and the promise of better to come. Progressives can't let him present that narrative unchallenged, because these measures will be little more than a government that imposed austerity trying to ride the wave of discontent their policies have stirred up.

Spending Review Preview: Osborne has led government to bet the house on policies like Right to Buy cutting cost of living

The government's Right to Buy scheme is no more than a stop gap measure in the battle to deal with the housing crisis and does little to shelter the poorest and most vulnerable from affordable housing shortages.

On Wednesday, following PMQs, Chancellor George Osborne will make his Autumn Statement (Parker & Giugliano, 2015). The statement serves as a spending review, assessing how the treasury is faring with its budget plan, a plan that is dependent upon many factors.

The review will give the country a chance to peek inside Number 11 and discover, through the obscuring lens of politics-speak, how the Chancellor intends to achieve his planned cuts (Wheeler, 2015) - particularly after the damage done by Lib Dem, Labour and Crossbencher Lords to his attempts to cut spending on tax credits (BBC, 2015).

The view amongst independent assessors is that Osborne's cuts are set to have a drastic impact on those carrying the heaviest working burdens for the least reward (Ross, 2015; Milligan, 2015). With more money now having to found to lessen the burden on those losing tax credits, there are clear fears that those funds will be found simply by taking even more away from others (Wintour, 2015).

There is only one thing that can temper the impact of Chancellor Osborne's cuts, and that is the much vaunted efficiency of markets that those on the Right put so much faith in. Without increased efficiency, most tellingly demonstrated by a fall in the cost of living, the impact of welfare cuts will be drastic and long-lasting.

By far and away the most impactful part of the cost of living is the cost of housing. The Conservative's darling policy for this end is their 'Right to Buy' scheme, yet the scheme is controversial. The project offers huge discounts for housing association tenants to buy their rented houses, with certain terms and conditions (Sarling, 2015). Yet the project will be costly and the losses could very well fall most hard upon the housing associations themselves and councils, especially in the most deprived areas.

The intention, plainly, is to increase the number of houses on the buyers' market, so as to increase supply, and so competition, in order to decrease costs. However, the plan can only represent a stop gap, buying time for building of more houses. It cannot be a replacement for it.

Back in 2014, Alicia Glen, New York's Deputy mayor for housing and economic development, assessed the issue of housing affordability by drawing attention to problems with the UK's private rental sector (Murray, 2014). Glen remarked that the private rental in the UK is comparatively small and that management of private rental properties on a small scale is expensive and inefficient, stressing that only at a large scale can its costs be effectively reduced.

"The problem is if you don’t do affordable housing as rental housing by definition you’re going to lose that unit unless you have incredibly aggressive enforcement on resale. You could say - and a lot of conservatives would say - there’s nothing wrong with subsidising the production of a unit if a poor person lives there and 10 years later they sell it for a gazillion dollars - they’ve made money and that’s wealth creation. But you’ve lost the unit and so you’re not making any sort of long-term dent in the affordable housing crisis."

And yet, reports are pointing out that the scheme is already failing to tackle the essential problems of the housing crisis (Gallagher, 2015). Instead of increasing the availability of affordable housing, as many as two-fifths of Right to Buy properties have simply been let out privately by their new owners.

This so-called 'pillaging' of social housing is only a temporary means of diverting the housing crisis (Hutton, 2015). It takes affordable housing away from the poorest and most vulnerable to temporarily increase housing supply for those on middle incomes. Yet it doesn't break the cycles of debt and lending, along with asset investments which all drive up prices, and simply adds more properties to yet another housing bubble.

With Osborne's budget, everything depends upon the cost of living consistently falling. Yet without breaking the housing bubble, without a large increase in supply and competition, and without a scaling up of the operation of private rental - a project in which co-operatives should not be ruled out - the essential problems are not going to be fixed. The cost of housing will not fall, and so the cost of living will not fall.

If the cost of living does not fall, then Osborne's huge contraction of state spending, and the services and safety nets that funding supports, mean that the poorest and most vulnerable will be trapped. With cuts to support, along with wages and hours being reduced and made ever less secure, the poorest will be even further excluded - with housing, left in the hands of schemes like Right to Buy, becoming just another social mobility ladder that has been kicked away.