Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey will deliver his first budget on Wednesday in a key test for Andy Burnham’s new Labour administration as it seeks to maintain a bounce in the polls and keep investors on side.

While the full contents of that budget aren’t known, and Healey could yet announce some surprise measures, all signs from the Treasury so far are that he’s planning a steady-as-she-goes budget. Moreover, officials have sought to avoid stoking the sort of pre-budget speculation that preceded the two budgets delivered by his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, who hiked taxes by more than £60 billion ($80 billion) in her two setpieces.

Healey, 66, has pledged to give “breathing space” to voters and companies in his fiscal set-piece, with a response to higher energy prices driven by the US-Iran war. He’s also vowed to keep fiscal discipline, dampening expectations for major long-term giveaways in the form of significant tax cuts or higher spending.

“The government have realized the narrative about business and wealth creation has been extremely negative,” PIMCO’s Senior Adviser for the UK Rupert Harrison said on Bloomberg Radio on Monday. “They do realize that’s having an impact on investment and location decisions and they want to try and change the narrative.”Here are the main policies to expect: Healey is set to announce temporary and targeted giveaways to help Britons with their living costs, including an expected expansion of the warm home discount — currently a £150 rebate on energy bills — and a freeze to fuel duty, which is currently set to rise in January and again in March. He’s also due to announce interventions including removing import tariffs on products such as baked beans and chocolate.

The chancellor will deliberately time-limit the cost-of-living spending to minimize the hit to the public finances and his self-imposed fiscal rules, which require day-to-day spending to be covered by tax receipts by 2029-30.

The main tax measure Healey is expected to deploy to help fund the cost-of-living support is an increase in the bank surcharge, from 3% currently. Levied on top of corporation tax at 25%, the bank surcharge was at 8% until 2023, when former Conservative Chancellor Jeremy Hunt cut it.

Healey inherited a budgetary buffer from Reeves that was estimated at £23.6 billion in the spring. But the Iran war has stoked inflation and pushed borrowing costs higher, helping erode away about half of that. Healey is likely to seek to restore some of the lost ground, with the median estimate of primary government bond dealers suggesting it will come in around £15.2 billion.

More details on the government’s plans to spread economic power to Britain’s regions are also in the cards. They include handing more tax-and-spend power to mayors, and allowing them to retain more of the revenues generated by local business taxation.

Healey will set out how the government is plugging a £4.7 billion gap in its defense investment plan, which Burnham’s administration inherited from Keir Starmer. Healey is expected to make up the bulk of the sum by taking funds from other departments’ budgets.

Healey is not expected, however, to set out a detailed plan for ramping up defense spending to 3% of GDP by 2030, despite calling for such action when he resigned as defense secretary earlier this year. He is expected to defer the question to a spending review next year.

The chancellor is expected to reveal plans to force online marketplaces such as Amazon and Temu to collect value added tax at the point of sale. The move is an attempt to close a loophole which has been used by shell companies to sell goods on those platforms, only to then shut down without paying their VAT bills.

Healey will announce plans to give more than £20 billion of extra funding to the country’s business lender and infrastructure bank in the budget next week, funded by extra debt issuance. The Treasury expects the funding to create and support 100,000 jobs in sectors including artificial intelligence, defense and green energy by 2035.

The government has said it will use the budget to flesh out its plan to revive an equity loan program for first-time homebuyers, one of the flagship policies Burnham announced at Labour’s party conference in September.

Although the government is waiting for final recommendations in a report by former cabinet minister Alan Milburn into the matter, Healey is expected to announce measures to tackle Britain’s high rates of youth unemployment. This includes a potential scaling back of planned increases to the youth minimum wage to incentivize employers to hire young people.