Speeches by Reeves.

“We want to make sure that we get things right. For the high value council tax, for example, we are revaluing properties in bands G and H. That cannot be done for next spring or the spring after. Similarly, with things like electric vehicle excise duty, eVED, those changes cannot come in overnight. I think that everyone…”

“Not consequential of this Budget, Mr Glen, and I want to be really clear about that. The OBR says explicitly that the productivity downgrade is not because of any of the decisions this Government have made. In fact, it has scored positively both the CDEL—the capital spending—and the planning reforms.”

“We have now made those settlements. When I became Chancellor, there had not been a spending review for a number of years. We had negotiations. We came to the settlement in the spending review, and Departments are now living within those settlements. That should give the confidence that is needed to show that we will be…”

“I believe in the numbers that I set out in my Budget. A lot of people had views of what I was going to do in my Budget and whether I would be able to live within the means set in my Budgets, but we have consistently done that, and we have increased the headroom. We also set out, just before the summer recess, our spend…”

“I have always been really clear that in the end, we have to grow our economy to deliver the money that we need to keep increasing living standards and deliver our public services, which is why growth is the No. 1 priority of this Government. As we saw, if you just had 0.3% higher productivity growth, which would transl…”

“Yes.”

“If there is one thing we know about you, Mr Coghlan, it is that you care very much about R&D, and rightly so. I was very pleased, in the spending review, to be able to increase R&D spending in real terms during the course of this Parliament. I said earlier that the OBR took into account our CDEL spending, which include…”

“The OBR is clear about some of the reasons for the productivity downgrade, as I said to Mr Murphy—the Brexit deal, the pandemic and the decisions of the previous Government. The plans I inherited from the previous Government would have seen capital spending as a share of GDP fall from, I think, 2.5% to 1.9%. We have ma…”

“There are not many young people who can put aside £20,000 a year in savings—I think we all know that. The biggest challenge for young people today is getting a job that pays a decent wage, not whether they can access the full £20,000 of ISA savings. The reason we put in that age limit is that as you get older, the time…”

“I think it is best if Chancellors do not get into commenting on the bond markets. I will say that we were very focused on those issues when we put together the Budget package, both on increasing the fiscal headroom—which goes from £9.9 billion to £21.7 billion—and on fiscal consolidation. I recognise that that fiscal c…”

“Of course, the previous Government took taxes to a record high and saw interest rates go through the roof.”

“I am not surprised you do not want to hear about the previous Government. Nor do voters. There we are: a rare moment of agreement.”

“Yes, we have regular meetings with the growth mission board. I did not say in my answer to your question, as you suggested, that there were no growth measures in this Budget. Far from it. In the week of the Budget, we made further progress on the runway at Heathrow; we signed off the film studio in Marlow. Jamie Dimon,…”

“Yes, and—”

“Yes, there was, and the reason for that is that the OBR do costings of all the changes that we are making, as well as there being interactions between the tax measures and other economic variables, whether those be GDP, consumption or inflation, so all of this was changing. It was a big Budget—I think we can all agree …”

“Which is what I am trying to do. We have returned stability to the economy, which has enabled the Bank of England to cut interest rates five times, and, as you will have seen, since the Budget a number of mortgage lenders have cut interest rates on mortgages. I think interest rates on mortgages are now lower than they …”

“Of course, we wanted to reduce that inflation, which is exactly what we did, as the deputy governor of the Bank said to you yesterday, with 0.4 to 0.5 percentage points off inflation next year.”

“I think the deputy governor was a bit clearer than that. I think she gave evidence to the Committee yesterday saying that next year there will be 0.4 to 0.5 percentage points off inflation because of the measures in the Budget.”

“As you will know from your time at the Treasury, pre-measures is not the final word from the Office for Budget Responsibility; you have post-measures forecasts as well. The post-measures forecasts take into account the policy decisions that we take as a Government on tax and spend, and the OBR rightly do their own anal…”

“Those were the two options that were available. As the Prime Minister has subsequently said, we did look at whether we needed to increase the rates of income tax, given our concerns around the forecast and particularly the productivity downgrade, which took £16 billion off in terms of revenues in the final year of the …”