Speeches by Baldwin.

“The Office for Budget Responsibility at the time forecast that 50,000 jobs would be lost. Has it been higher or lower than 50,000?”

“But that is your job.”

“We will get on to that.”

“Obviously one of the standout concerns has been unemployment for young people. Again, is that consistent with what you would expect the labour market to be doing in this unhoarding phase, as you described it, or this part of the cycle? How much worse is employment going to become for young people?”

“If I hear you correctly—I am trying to express this in a way my constituents might find less economist speak—there was an impact on inflation, and you are saying that inflation went up, but you think about half of the increase was from the impact of the Budget. You think that wage increases have been less high than the…”

“It has not been zero.”

“Let me ask the question slightly differently. There are 150,000 fewer people on payrolls than there were at the time of the October 2024 Budget. How much of that impact was a reaction by employers to the measures in the Budget?”

“It costs £4,000 more to employ a young person.”

“I would like to ask Mr Alder about the reforms to the Financial Ombudsman Service, because a lot of our constituents rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service as a way of getting redress without having to go through the court system. The Government have announced some fairly major reforms. I wondered, Mr Alder, whether y…”

“He is the interim chair.”

“Can you put a number on that in part?”

“You mentioned that the subsidiarisation is not happening, but you are losing your ability to appoint the chair of the Financial Ombudsman Service, and that was not even a proposal in the original consultation the Government had. Does that not give you concerns? That is going to be a Government appointment.”

“What about the squeeze on profit margins and the potential improvement in productivity? Have you perceived any of that in your data?”

“Would you support the proposals that this Committee put forward for us to have a veto power over the appointment of the chair?”

“It is good to hear that inflation will be back at 2%, which I seem to recall it was back in mid-2024. Dr Pill, you have mentioned the Budget at the end of last year a couple of times, but there was also the Budget in 2024. In the sessions after that Budget, we asked the Governor what impact it might have on inflation. …”

“Dr Pill, you mentioned a cyclical rise in unemployment and alluded to some work you have done on the structural change in unemployment, potentially due to companies trying to use artificial intelligence. Can you tell the Committee where you think we are in the cycle? Given that unemployment has breached 5% for the firs…”

“Are you ready as of now, or will you have to make changes in your organisation to be ready?”

“I am going to move on to some operational questions, so perhaps, Ms Pritchard, these will be for you. Under these proposed reforms, the Financial Ombudsman Service will have to adhere much more closely to FCA rules. That is obviously going to set up some sort of operational challenges. Are you currently resourced to be…”

“Does any other member of the panel want to try to disentangle the way in which the economy reacted to the measures in the October 2024 Budget?”

“Cyclically, you think we are in an unhoarding—as you would put it—of labour. How far into that cycle are we?”