Speeches by Davies.

“I remind the House that inflation has already gone from 2% to 3% under this Labour Government, and in fact, the OBR scored the Hallowe’en Budget as inflationary. The hon. Gentleman is right that when these tax rises hit, they will be passed on through higher prices. I hope that that will not put pressure on inflation, …”

“I will make some progress, if the hon. Gentleman will allow me, and then give way. This tax, purely and simply, is a financial penalty on 940,000 businesses—that is how I look at it. The analysis shows that it is going to cost businesses an average of £26,000 per year per employer. Not content with ruining farmers’ fut…”

“Yes, it is. My right hon. Friend is exactly right; the Government are giving a small amount with one hand and taking a larger amount with the other, but the bottom line is that it is all taxpayers’ money. It is a double tax on those people who now face the brunt of this tax increase.”

“The problem with that intervention is that the chairman of GB Energy himself disagrees about the number of jobs that it will supposedly be creating. I have set out clearly some of the things that we would do differently, and the different choices we would make from the choices this Labour Government are making. When we…”

“To answer simply, I do not think the Government did that assessment before announcing this tax rise, but with plummeting business confidence, declining economic growth and forecasts for economic growth that are consistently downgraded, the profound impact on businesses and growth—as I was saying—is clear for all to see…”

“If the hon. Gentleman looks back at the record of proceedings on earlier stages of the Bill, he will see that we voted against it. If he looks at our record in government, he will see that we cut national insurance for 29 million people across the country. As I have said so many times in this place, why are we not deba…”

“I rise on behalf of the official Opposition in support of Lords amendments 1 to 4, 8, 10, 14 and 21. Before I dive into the detail, I want to get a little nostalgic. One year and six days ago, I opened Second Reading of the National Insurance Contributions (Reduction in Rates) Act 2024, which cut national insurance for…”

“It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq. It is also a great pleasure to see the Minister. It has been so long since we last saw each other—it must be at least two hours. I am grateful to the Minister for laying these statutory instruments, which will revoke the double taxation conventions with Belarus an…”

“The Chancellor has lauded the new National Wealth Fund as a key part of the Government’s regional growth ambitions. The trouble is, it is not actually new; it is just the UK Infrastructure Bank with a new colour scheme and £7 billion it did not need. The Prime Minister announced at a recent Labour party political confe…”

“Of course, this is auditing an industrial process rather than a set of financial statements. The reason we concluded in our report just over a year ago that we did not think that the combination of the Department and Ofgem had done enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the process for assuring the sustainability of t…”

“We do, yes. We have a really detailed, bottom-up operational planning process involving our teams. The information that has driven this is not a top-down set of guesses; it is detailed information about what it is taking to audit the organisations for which we are responsible. I am confident that with this budget we ca…”

“Yes, we have certainly picked up the Committee’s interest in us doing more of that. We have been working on it ourselves. We are going to make more intensive use of the OECD data, always checking the data quality as we do that, of course. Recently, we used some OECD data, and we spotted that the UK data had been submit…”

“We are certainly going to bear data quality in mind—but, absolutely. We have good relationships with our equivalents in other countries, particularly other developed nations with similar challenges around their public services. We are going to use those relationships to maximise the quality of the comparisons we can br…”

“I have shared with Committee members our new five-year strategy, which takes effect from April. If I could characterise the last five years, they were essentially about getting better at what we do. That has been our focus. Clearly, while doing that, we have had to contend with pretty extraordinary events like the covi…”

“Some things are very measurable and important, such as timely, completed audits of Government accounts and good-quality results from our regulator. Our audits, as you know, are inspected by the same regulator as for the big firms, so there are measurable things to show whether we are doing our job well. In some ways, h…”

“Yes, there will. Of course, there will be big debates about attribution: “This may have improved, but was it anything to do with the NAO?” That is a perfectly fair question, but without the data you cannot even start to have that discussion.”

“My core role is to make sure that Parliament and the public get high-quality assurance on the Government’s accounts, but also an insightful assessment of value for money in public spending. At the moment, we are dealing with three big risks to our ability to do that. One risk relates to ensuring that our quality—partic…”

“That is why it has been our top priority for three years. As I was saying at the start, the huge agenda for quality improvement in the audit industry over the last few years, driven by the regulator in response to the scandals in Carillion and other audited entities, has completely transformed the way these audits are …”

“We are quite unusual in doing the full range of financial statements audits that we do. Quite a lot of our equivalents in other organisations contract out all their financial audit work to the private sector and do not do any. We think we are unique in being externally regulated by the same regulator as the private sec…”

“We are getting more information all the time about the creation of new bodies. Often we know that they are coming, but it is a question of which year there will be a first set of accounts that require audit. It is also the ones that already exist that are coming from the private sector inside the public sector boundary…”