Is there a £22bn ‘black hole’ in the UK’s public finances?

The trouble with terms such as “black hole” is they suggest the government’s hand was forced. Ms Reeves told the Commons: “The scale of the situation we are dealing with means incredibly tough choices.”

It is important to remember that choices were indeed made. The government decided to do things like giving winter fuel payment only to those receiving pension credit, but it could have taken other decisions.

For example, it is basing the decisions on needing to meet the fiscal rules that it imposed on itself, but it could have changed the rules. Or it could have decided to spend less on something else.

The Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, told BBC News on 1 September: “If we hadn’t taken that action we would have seen a run on the pound, we would have seen the economy crashing.”

It is always hard to predict at what point markets would lose confidence in a government, as happened after former PM Liz Truss’s mini-budget, but there is little sign that it would have happened if the government had not taken its immediate action.

Nina Skero, chief executive of the Centre for Economics and Business Research told BBC Verify: “It is hard to find any evidence to support the claim that there is an imminent risk of a run on the pound.”

She added that the size of any hole in the public finances is “highly speculative, subject to forecasts, and there are no alarm bells going off at the moment among investors looking at the UK”.