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Rules are rules – until you change them. One of the ways in which Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is expected to find more money for investment in her Budget on 30 October will be to change the fiscal rules – a concept established by Gordon Brown in 1997, and beefed up by the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility by George Osborne in 2010.

Labour committed itself in its manifesto to two such rules. One is that current spending is met by taxation rather than borrowing. The other is that the national debt must be falling as a share of GDP by the fifth year of the OBR’s economic forecast.

While these rules can be changed – an elected government does not have to stick to its manifesto promises – Reeves has further limited her room to manoeuvre by saying in her high-profile Mais Lecture in March that there had been too many changes in recent years, and unless there were some emergency, she would stick to them.

She said: “The UK has changed its fiscal rules more frequently than any other OECD economy, with the average lifespan of less than four years. That has contributed to instability and uncertainty. So I will end the practice of the Chancellor being able to scrap the rules at any time, with an escape clause that would only suspend the rules if the OBR declared the UK was in an economic crisis.”

That sounds pretty conclusive, though it could be read as giving her a one-off chance now to revise the rules, and then having to stick to them for the life of the Parliament. So what might she do?

This week a proposal by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank seems to be gaining traction. The first rule, that current spending should be met by taxation, is unchanged, but the second one would be eased to allow more borrowing for investment.

The idea here is that the Treasury should take into account the assets of the Government as well as the debts. It explains: “Instead of using the previous government’s rule that says net public debt should be falling in year five of the economic forecast, the Government should commit to public sector net worth increasing in year........

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