article: Part of this was unavoidable. The election came close after the March Budget. The new Conservative government wanted to set out a new economic stall and it did so in the July Budget. Then it had a November Spending Review and Autumn Statement. And now this. The Autumn Statement is not meant to be a Budget, but anyone glancing at what it did - a climb down on tax credits, spending cuts, stamp duty increases, an apprenticeship levy and an extension of the Help to Buy scheme - would be hard pressed to tell the difference. Julian McCrae, Deputy Director of think tank the Institute for Government says: "Osborne said that he would have one proper Budget and then the Autumn Statement would 'foreshadow' it. But it's not worked out like that. These things have a dynamic of their own. They grow. In a sense they are unstoppable." And they have reached a prodigious size. Mr McCrae counted 77 measures in Wednesday's Budget, which he thinks is close to a record, although he thinks some of Gordon Brown's Budgets may have come close. He said: "That is a huge amount of work. 77 things that have to be worked through, 77 things that have to be planned and thought out and put into action." Giles Wilkes agrees. He is a former special advisor to Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in the Coalition government. He told Radio 4's PM show: "From the policy making point of view, policy gets much, much worse when you have a Budget or an Autumn Statement. "It's a time when the Treasury takes control pretty much of the whole government. Everything gets settled in last minute arguments. "There's a huge appetite for gimmicks and showy things so the more Budgets you have probably the worse your government policy is, so the last twelve months haven't been good from that point of view" Paul Johnson, Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies thinks the problem is deeply ingrained in government: "There's a problem with the way we make tax and economic policy because it is all done in secret, sprung on us all at once, twice a year. "We have too many of these and we do them in the wrong way." The government has a legal duty to publish two economic forecasts each year. The temptation is that, having done so, it should announce some kind of response. In fact the months since November have seen dramatic changes in the global economic climate with the Office for Budget Responsibility saying the outlook is "materially weaker". The Chinese economy slowed dramatically, and the markets had a wild ride through the first two months of the year. It had a direct effect on government policy - for instance market volatility forced the chancellor to put off the sale of the government's remaining stake in Lloyds Bank. When the economic weather is so unpredictable surely government should respond as and when it can. Mr McCrae doesn't think that is what the Budget is about: "The chancellor
summary: The main complaint about Wednesday's Budget is not so much its contents, it's that it's effectively the fourth in 12 months.