As Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and his Treasury team work through the detail of fiscal policy ahead of the Budget on March 6, officials in Manchester are occupied by a very different set of problems.
By last week, council offices in the northwestern city were experiencing queues of 70 to 80 refugees every day in search of housing, according to Bev Craig, leader of the Labour-controlled authority. This comes on top of acute problems with homelessness and a 16,000-strong waiting list for social housing.
“You see swaths of desperate people turning up at our front door for help that in a normal, functioning system would be delivered elsewhere,” she says.