What’s George Osborne planning for Wednesday’s budget? © Ben Birchall/PA Wire

The Chancellor said yesterday that there would be “no gimmicks, no giveaways” in this week’s Budget. Few people believe him. Before every fiscal event, I go through the documents from the previous one and check what has already been promised for the next one. It’s a former civil servant’s instinct. Surprisingly, the documents from the Autumn Statement (in this blog I only deal with what has been conclusively promised, rather than briefed off the record to journalists) don’t suggest that much action in this Budget either.

There are some nuggets about housebuilding. In the Autumn Statement the Government announced that, rather than selling off a big parcel of public land in Northstowe, Cambridgeshire, it would take charge of developing a new town at what has formerly been the site of an airfield, then a barracks and an immigration reception centre. The ambition is to build 10,000 homes “up to twice as fast as conventional development routes.” The phrasing is handy here, “up to” twice as fast could mean half as fast. Nevertheless the Government is due at the Budget to report back on how it’s getting on and the hint is that, if the model works, then it may be used on other parcels of public land. The Autumn Statement also revealed that the Budget would include proposals for speeding up the development of brownfield land by making the Compulsory Purchase Regime “clearer, faster and fairer.”

A second area where an update was definitively promised is the sale of public assets. The Government has a target to make £20bn of sales between 2014 and 2020. The big…

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