Speeches by Baldwin.

“Would you buy any?”

“How it might affect the acceptance of cash, for example.”

“The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that the measure will raise £500 million in revenue by 2029, which, in the context of tax revenues of over £1,150 billion, is a very small number. What value does the Minister put on food security for the United Kingdom?”

“Replies to my parliamentary questions are often late. They are often evasive and often refer to websites that are infrequently updated, and sometimes they are even overtly political. I know that the Leader of the House cares passionately about improving performance in this area, so will she make a statement to update t…”

“Mr Speaker, have you noticed a pattern—that on a Thursday, a Treasury Minister will be asked to come to the Commons to answer an urgent question, and there will be barely a soul on the Labour Benches behind them when they do?”

“Former Chair, Mr Speaker, but thank you very much for calling me. It is clear that we all want to see economic growth in rural areas and across the UK, but I am concerned that some of the measures in the Chancellor’s Budget are having the opposite effect. Which statistic worries her most: the fact that we are at a 20-y…”

“I congratulate the hon. Lady not only on her excellent chairing of our Committee and this report, but on securing a slot in the Chamber to tell people about some of the report’s recommendations. Her background as the former Chair of the Public Accounts Committee gives huge credibility to the points she is making about …”

“How many more people are going to become, quote-unquote, “customers” of HMRC in this Parliament?”

“If you need to speak to someone, 85% means that 15% do not get to speak to someone.”

“It is not just pensioners.”

“Minister, do you accept that pensioners who may need to interact with HMRC as customers are less likely to be willing adopters of the app and that the helpline is always going to be a very important part of what you do? You are not planning to turn the helpline off again in this Parliament, are you?”

“Last time we asked Jim Harra, something like 250,000 people had downloaded the app and he was promising us a publicity campaign. I wondered whether you had made some big progress on it since we met with him.”

“How many people have downloaded the app by now?”

“You will follow up with the numbers, because I think that it is over a million certainly.”

“I mean the number of additional people who will have to have some sort of interaction with HMRC that is not just PAYE automatic. Then how many of them are pensioners? That would also be interesting, because the state pension is likely to get caught above the tax‑free threshold in the next few years.”

“Okay, brilliant. You mentioned that the helpline response rate is improving. I wondered whether you could share with us how much it has improved by, because I think your metric is that you want it to get to 85% where customers who want to speak to an adviser get to speak to an adviser. It does not sound like an incredi…”

“I think I heard the Minister say that you may look at that metric and think that that is not ambitious enough at 85%, and that you might look to increase that. How many people have downloaded the app now?”

“It is a very great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Ms McVey. I just note that the Minister highlighted the fact that, in fact, this initiative had been started under the previous Government, and so you would not expect me to be objecting to its passage today. But I do have, in the interest of sc…”

“Last March, when the helpline was turned off and then turned on again, we were told in his evidence at the time by Jim Harra that the turning off had been because there was a plan to reduce the number of helpline staff by 5,000. Then some additional money was given to prevent that happening, but I am getting confused w…”

“Is that to not get rid of the 5,000?”