After a lot of speculation and a double U-turn on income tax, we now have some hard and fast announcements ahead of this week’s Westminster Budget.
So far, they are about spending more. For England, there are pledges on rail fares, more planners and school books. There will be more funds to root out benefits fraud and a real-terms rise in the state pension next spring.
As most local decisions for Scotland are made at Holyrood, there is a shorter list of giveaways for Scotland, but £14.5m for Grangemouth is something.
What does £14.5m buy you? They are not saying yet. We will have to wait until Wednesday.
Until then, some context. The UK government has already committed £200m to Grangemouth. And in a strange choice of words, it “continues working to unlock” that money it committed last year.
Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander put that bigger sum in the context of looking for a buyer for the refinery site. The private land ownership there is complicated, but it sounds like neither Ineos nor its refining partnership with PetroChina are seen as the future.
There is another £100m for the fund to boost Forth Valley growth, with matching funds from the Scottish government. So Grangemouth is not short of funds. Nor is the area short of jobs. There are opportunities for those with industrial skills to work on Babcock defence contracts in Rosyth.
However, Grangemouth has become symbolic of the timing gap in that transition from fossil fuel to clean energy.
It is not alone. And if there is that much money available to be allocated to one site, it raises expectations that there will be similar sums available at Mossmorran gas processing plant in Fife, where we learned last week a similar number of jobs are likely to go.
Yet the big story of this week’s budget is not expected to be about £14m here or there – welcome though it may be – but about tens of billions of pounds of spending cuts and tax increases, and where the axe and the bills are going to land.