Employment rights bill will cost firms £5bn per year but benefits will justify costs, government says – as it happened

Analysis from business and trade department says bill will significantly strengthen workers' right. This live blog is closed

In the past the weirdest budget tradition was the convention that the chancellor is allowed to drink alcohol while delivering the budget speech. But since no chancellor has taken advantage of the rule since the 1990s (and no one expects Rachel Reeves to be quaffing on Wednesday week), this tradition is probably best viewed as lapsed.

But Sam Coates from Sky News has discovered another weird budget ritual. On his Politics at Jack and Sam's podcast, he says:

Someone messaged me to say: Did you know that over in the Treasury as they've been going over all these spending settlements, in one of the offices, its full of balloons. And every time an individual department finalises its settlements, one of the balloons is popped.'

There couldn't be a more important time for us to have this conversation.

The NHS is going through what is objectively the worst crisis in its history, whether it's people struggling to get access to their GP, dialling 999 and an ambulance not arriving in time, turning up to A&E departments and waiting far too long, sometimes on trolleys in corridors, or going through the ordeal of knowing that you're waiting for a diagnosis that could be the difference between life and death.

We feel really strongly that the best ideas aren't going to come from politicians in Whitehall.

They're going to come from staff working right across the country and, crucially, patients, because our experiences as patients are also really important to understanding what the future of the NHS needs to be and what it could be with the right ideas.