Britain has had more than 50 “fiscal events” since the start of the century, most delivered with a pageantry and performance that is scarcely seen in most advanced economies.

The rhythm of spring statements and autumn budgets — fixtures of the country’s economic calendar over the past decade — is peculiarly British, especially when compared with the rest of the G7.

Even more unique is the fevered political and media heat generated in the weeks and now months running up to a fiscal event.

Since the Liz Truss mini-budget in 2022, such events have been dominated by whether the chancellor can meet his or her fiscal rules and the size of “headroom” against the self-imposed targets.

In years gone by, budget theatrics surrounded which “rabbits” a chancellor would pull out of a hat in the Commons, and the barbs delivered to and from the opposition benches.

Posterity has come to judge budgets less on their effect on Britain’s economic future and more for gaffes such as George Osborne’s pasty tax of 2012 — a budget that will forever be remembered as the “omnishambles”.

Compare this with most economies in the European Union, where annual budget submissions are technocratic processes that go largely unnoticed by the general public. This is partly by design.

The finance ministries of eurozone member states spend weeks every autumn submitting and resubmitting their draft budgetary plans for assessment in Brussels before getting them through their national parliaments.

It is not uncommon for European countries to find themselves without governments for prolonged periods, making annual budgets a rollover of existing policies with little fuss or market fury. This is the case in the Netherlands, whose caretaker government has presented a 2026 budget with almost no new tax or spending plans.

France, the eurozone’s second largest economy, is in the midst of a budgetary crisis, with no parliamentary majority backing spending cuts or tax reforms.

And yet, France’s fiscal quagmire has not provoked angst among bondholders or the media, compared with Rachel Reeves’s set piece on November 26.

There are a number of contemporary and historical factors behind Britain’s fiscal fixation. The most important is the structure and power of the Treasury, arguably the most powerful and centralised finance ministry of any large economy in the world.

Unlike most European executives, where tax and spending policies are handled by finance ministries and the broader economic policy is the responsibility of an economy ministry, the Treasury combines both functions.

This means the chancellor of the day and Treasury civil servants are responsible for the public finances and approving the spending plans of other ministries. They are also in charge of setting out the medium and long-term goals for economic growth, innovation, investment, the financial sector and the labour market.

This concentration of responsibilities has led to a drumbeat of recent attacks on Treasury “orthodoxy” — a phrase that was frequently used by Truss before her mini-budget. It is a criticism that accuses the ministry of prioritising fiscal probity over all other goals of a government that could come into conflict with the management of the purse strings. It is also why chancellors spend large parts of their budget speeches reeling off a list of pot-hole repairs and local projects in countless constituencies.

Jeremy Hunt, Reeves’s predecessor at No 11 between 2022 and last year, has said the “beating heart of the Treasury is what you might call its accountancy function ... I always felt there wasn’t enough discussion about growth, about how you actually grow the size of the pie,” Hunt told the Institute for Government, a think tank.

“If you’re in a situation where there’s a crisis in public finances and the Treasury needs to show an interest in every penny that’s spent, then in that situation it’s understandable, but the Treasury has that power all the time in the UK. My worry about it is that, in the end, we don’t make decisions strategically,”

Hunt said.

There have been a number of calls for Britain to follow the example of its neighbouring economies and split the Treasury to create a standalone economics ministry and a budget ministry.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, called for the Treasury to be broken up during her failed 2022 Tory leadership campaign. She wanted an economics ministry to be set up under the direct responsibility of the prime minister.

The Institute for Government supports the creation of a Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet that would help “refocus ... strategic decision making from Treasury-driven processes into the hands of the prime minister ... create a more conducive environment for negotiating trade-offs and delivering priorities for all of government.”

It added: “These kinds of reforms to the centre of government would require the Treasury’s support if they are to succeed in the long term.”

Sir Keir Starmer has taken some steps to beefing up oversight on economic policy in No 10, appointing Minouche Shafik, a former deputy of the Bank of England, as his chief economic advisor and moving Darren Jones from the Treasury into a new position of chief secretary to the prime minister.

These incremental steps may change some of the political dynamics between No 10 and No 11 but will not drastically undermine the Treasury’s omnipotence in Whitehall.

One factor that has proven to be a thorn in the side of the Treasury in recent years is the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog set up by Osborne in 2010 to provide an independent assessment of tax and spending policy and bring Britain’s economic governance in line with peers in the G7.

However, many inside the Treasury now bemoan the transmogrification of the OBR from a technocratic assessor to an authority that can make or break a government.

The watchdog’s assumptions about the future path of the economy forced the government into welfare cuts it could not get past its backbenchers this year. The OBR’s forthcoming changes to its productivity outlook on Wednesday are a big reason why Reeves will have to carry out one of the biggest fiscal consolidations in decades after her £40 billion of tax hikes last year.

The New Economics Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, wants Labour to revamp the OBR and create an Office for Fiscal Transparency to break the doom loop of forecasts driving fiscal policy rather than the other way round.

The International Monetary Fund, which advises its founding members on best practice, has suggested one headroom calculation a year rather than two; the Treasury is considering it.