Speeches by Baldwin.

“We will see? That sounds like you don’t know; you are putting your finger in the air.”

“Okay. I am sure we will be coming back to this. I have one last question for Sir Dave Ramsden, which is linked to the FPC’s decision to relax bank capital by 13%. As Yuan Yang was asking what the equivalent impact of quantitative tightening is in terms of percentage monetary tightening, could you summarise what assessm…”

“Ms Lombardelli, the way the story reads is that you are putting a lot of money into new computers and databases and that that is being funded by a voluntary redundancy programme. Is that a fair characterisation?”

“I just want to drill down into those moments. Is it fair that some person got that information sooner than the rest of the market? Were there participants in the market who were getting more information than others?”

“This is the real-time gross settlement system, yes?”

“What sort of roles are being made redundant?”

“My question is about the Bernanke review; I understand that you are in charge of its implementation, Ms Lombardelli. The review was initiated and completed by Dr Bernanke after the court was concerned about the way that the Bank dealt with the very severe inflation that we experienced in this country after Russia’s ill…”

“And that was just normal volatility?”

“I can imagine. I am focused on that moment on the night of 13 November, when the Financial Times ran the story that income taxes would not be going up. The minute the gilt market opened on the morning of the 14th, the Bloomberg terminal said that UK gilts “plunged at the open”. “Plunge” is quite a strong word on a Bloo…”

“Sir Dave, you obviously have a Bloomberg terminal in the Bank of England.”

“Last year, the Secretary of State, her Front-Bench colleagues and pretty much everyone behind her voted against lifting the two-child benefit cap—[Hon. Members: “No, we didn’t.”] Those who rebelled had the Whip withdrawn. What would she say to those rebels now? What has changed since that vote last year?”

“It sounds like we are basically driving without any information in the rear view mirror here.”

“But we will not know whether this measure has closed the stable door in time. Is that fair to say?”

“Would you support us finding out a bit more information about whether the people who are leaving the country were people who were significant taxpayers?”

“Have you done any work on what the distribution is of the people who do participate in these schemes?”

“Turning to my third topic, which is around the net migration numbers that the Office for Budget Responsibility has put into its forecasts, there has been a lot of anecdotal commentary in the media about the fact that there are a lot of people leaving the UK. There does not seem to be any data out there about how much t…”

“One of the changes that was made in the Budget was around rowing back on some of the previous changes to the non-domicile tax regime. Do you have any understanding as to why the Chancellor would have done that? Is that to try to prevent an exodus of non-domiciled individuals? Does anyone have any data on that?”

“My question is about the aggregate. Is the country saving enough for later life in aggregate?”

“No one has done any work on aggregating it. In terms of the salary sacrifice changes, which were the second biggest tax increase in the Budget, my understanding is that the people who will be most affected by that are those who pay the highest national insurance, which would be those earning between about £10,000 and £…”

“So this salary sacrifice is pretty tough on middle earners.”