Has Labour really found a bigger financial mess than it expected?

The Treasury intends to publish a full report and breakdown on Monday, explaining where it thinks it has found a “black hole”.

At that point we will be able to scrutinise the calculations and see what is really new.

But it was known before the election that whoever was in power afterwards would face big challenges.

Rachel Reeves started talking about a tricky inheritance well before polling day.

Ms Reeves told the Financial Times, external in June: “We’ve got the OBR now.

“We know things are in a pretty bad state… You don’t need to win an election to find that out.”

This is not just about the economy.

Ministers have been pointing to other areas where they say things are worse than they expected – the health service, prisons, the environment and more.

On prisons, the justice secretary announced some offenders in England would be released earlier to ease overcrowding. She blamed that on the “scale of the emergency” the new government had left.

It is true to say there are big challenges with overcrowding. Senior ministers in the last government wanted action taken – but it was not signed off before the election.

But was it a surprise to the incoming government?

Sources in the justice department point to the system being a lot closer to “disaster” than they thought and how little time they had to try to solve the issue.

They will, however, have had a good idea because the government publishes weekly figures showing prison numbers, external. They knew ministers in the last government were pushing for a quick decision.

The picture is not a complete surprise, even if some specific details might have become clearer.