Chancellor George Osborne has surprised critics by doing a U-turn on tax credit cuts and also vowing to protect police budgets in his spending review. Millions of low paid families will not now see their benefits cut in April. Rather than phasing the cuts in, as he had been expected to do, he decided the ‘simplest thing’ was ‘to avoid them altogether’, even though it would mean missing his own target for overall welfare spending in the early years of this Parliament. This announcement was followed by the surprise decision not to cut police budgets, amid security concerns sparked by the terror attack in Paris. This declaration was met with disbelief and ‘euphoria’ among senior police officers, according to the BBC's Danny Shaw.