Speeches by Glen.

“Yael, could I turn to you and Mr Brewer on the OBR’s assessment of the lags in terms of the effect of this public investment? One of the frustrations from the Government’s point of view is that they are making all this investment, but there is a lag before it can be accounted for. How do you think about the OBR’s asses…”

“We did know from your biog. Thanks for telling us.”

“Can we turn to public investment? I want to ask some questions about the OBR and the modelling of public investment beyond the immediate period. Perhaps I could start with Mr King. What do you think about the OBR’s assessments at 10 and 50 years? The core narrative of the Government is that we are fixing the foundation…”

“I would like to turn to the dynamics with the Treasury. I must declare an interest. Until a year ago I was Chief Secretary and before that I had some other involvement in the Treasury. Clearly, as I said at the start in my first set of questions, you are set up to give a dispassionate assessment of what is true, and yo…”

“In 2023. I cannot account for the interval between that and the fiscal event. However, having worked with those departmental spending teams week in, week out, I cannot see how their demeanour and approach to doing their job would have changed in those four months. That is why it is quite confusing that we have got to t…”

“I was there until 12 November.”

“What concerns me is that, given that the rhythm of activity was routine and you had no reason to believe that there would be a change in the way that Treasury officials would interact with you, at the time of that fiscal event in March/April the OBR never said anything about its concerns over a material change in the d…”

“I mean the 73% could be seen as misleading because it includes small holdings that are not, for meaningful purposes, actual farms.”

“Do you know anything about the baseline? It is asserted that 73% will not be in scope of this. If the baseline is inflated by, essentially, a house with three acres that is not really a farm, can you say anything about that assessment?”

“Have you done any distribution analysis of where that money is from—how many people? Is it 2,000 estates that will yield the £520 million over the forecast period?”

“Am I allowed to ask you, “If you were asked”? If I asked you to apply a higher threshold, what effect would that have on revenues? Obviously, it is something that many stakeholders in the industry are looking at in the context of all the other pressures they face. What material impact does that have? If you are not all…”

“I just want to ask about the tax side of things. There has been a lot of controversy about the agricultural property relief, and that will be ongoing. Some of that is outside your realm. Were you asked to do any different scenarios around the threshold changes? What did they give in terms of projections of different sa…”

“I just want to ask one question about this productivity issue and productivity savings. Most Government Departments assert, I think, 2% per Department and stress the rigidity of that. What is your experience of the delivery of that and any optimism bias in that assertion? It seems intuitively that, with AI and differen…”

“If I may, as the Minister who did that, we concluded it the day before the election was called. It was impossible—”

“It is just that the problem we have, and that we are left with—I will finish on this question—is that the assertion is made by the Government that there was a sort of wilful restriction on what was shared with you. My impression, working through, I think, seven fiscal events, was that there was a formal iterative proce…”

“But don’t you think it is highly regrettable that over the last few months you have been sucked into this political debate about a black hole? Do you think that can be avoided in future?”

“Can I ask you one other thing about the interaction with the Treasury? I recall, in previous fiscal events, there was an iterative process of discussion—for example, around the therapeutic effect, if you like, of the childcare policy. During that conversation, the impact on jobs and so on worked through. My assumption …”

“Yes, we will.”

“The point I am making is that as a Minister one receives figures from Treasury officials and is aware of those tensions. The interaction between you, your officials, and Treasury officials is outwith the relationship between Ministers. This is, essentially, as you have described, a dysfunction in the smoothness of the …”

“I am just trying to establish—I have a lot of respect for the dynamic between the Treasury and the OBR: what I am trying to get at is how we got into a situation where an assertion is made on 29 July about a black hole, which I acknowledge is an ongoing tension that would crystallise at a fiscal event, through the proc…”