Speeches by Glen.

“No new taxes—no additional taxes?”

“Can I ask about the tax view you have about competitiveness and tax? If you add up the increases in national insurance, the retention of the corporation tax rate, the changes to CGT and other changes to business property relief, you have obviously put a lot of emphasis on the distributional impact of it. But is there a…”

“Thank you for those answers.”

“As you will be advised in subsequent years, the choreography of when you settle is part of the process of resolution. If you settle one by one, you create a dynamic to those resolutions. It is not unreasonable to have two back, and then to hold them back until you have the others.”

“But you also made additional choices that caused additional pressures during that period in July.”

“And you maintain, Chancellor, that none of that number could have been managed through decisions made by the Chancellor in terms of departmental trade-offs and underspends?”

“Okay. Has that document been fully published?”

“That first weekend—so there was £22 billion on that first weekend.”

“Beyond the theatre of politics, what we saw was politicians of both parties, in good faith, dealing with officials and taking advice as best we could. When we were dealing with those pressures the previous summer, we settled on the workforces, and we asked those workforces—I remember having those conversations, Departm…”

“I have two quick questions, one macro and one micro. If you look at the retention of the corporation tax level, the combination with the employee NICs, the overall effect of the £5 billion of the Employment Rights Bill and the effect on the national living wage, the assertion is made by some that this makes the UK look…”

“Can I just clarify? The additional money for the NHS is essentially in line with what it takes to stand still. In your words, Mr Brewer, it is crisis management, essentially. What I am not clear about is, from the Budget’s numbers, the implied uplift thereafter to do the sorts of things that you say are desirable in th…”

“Thank you. That is very kind.”

“I just wanted to add a point of fact. On infected blood, there was no costing because the analysis of the victims had not been done. In June there was a piece of work done to speak to the victims, which then verified the numbers. There was a speculative range, but it was very difficult to pin down and indeed it still i…”

“Can I get into the dynamics between the Treasury and the OBR? It is really unfortunate that we got into a situation where that dynamic is in question. For many fiscal events, OBR officials and Treasury officials interacted and produced documents in parallel. There was no reason to dispute the degree of transparency on …”

“The previous year it was within departmental spending limits and there were only some modest changes in terms of revenues. There was a mechanism to do it that allowed departments essentially to wash their faces. That was the arrangement that the previous Chancellor had come to. The assumption that it was all net additi…”

“Mr King, we need to come back to you about the black hole and lean on your experience in the OBR. Was it right to characterise it as a £22 billion black hole?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I just wanted to ask about regulatory reform and industrial strategy. Those are areas that will have an effect on the economy. The OBR has increased this concept of dynamic scoring. Do you see a role for that mode of analysis with those areas or are we getting into unrealistic assessments of economic activity? I take t…”

“Mr Brewer, would you like to say something?”

“Is that fair, though, given the emphasis that the new Government have put on fixing planning? You talk about the constraints in terms of the labour force or whatever, but they have put an emphasis on overruling constraints in terms of public opinion on where to build and removing those barriers. Is the OBR not being a …”