Speeches by Reeves.

“I don’t think anyone thinks that the current system of welfare, particularly around sickness and disability benefits, is actually working today. It is not working for the people in receipt of those benefits, not working in terms of ensuring that we have a decent participation rate in the economy and not working in term…”

“That £2 billion is a down payment on the spending review. We wanted to announce it early, not because that is the total sum of the money that we will make available in the spending review but, as I said to Rachel Blake, because we wanted to give the sector certainty that the money would be there into the new financial …”

“On the issue of the green belt, we are very keen, on those areas that we call grey belt, to have more development. We are also, in the next few months, going to announce the outcome of the review that the Deputy Prime Minister commissioned on new towns. A number of proposals have come forward for brand-new new towns, a…”

“Yes!”

“Obviously, it would be helpful for people’s living standards if a lower proportion of their wages was spent on rents. It would also have quite a big fiscal impact on councils. You gave me the number recently that your local authority spends £95 million on temporary accommodation. If we were actually building the social…”

“They now forecast that house building will be at its highest level for 40 years. That is very welcome, but going back to the further and faster mantra, we will want to do more to get those houses built—in your constituency of Cities of London and Westminster, I dread to imagine what the average house price is. So we do…”

“One of the reasons why we brought forward, from the spending review, the £2 billion extra for the affordable homes programme is that we know that the construction sector and the house building sector want some stability and certainty that they can do deals and make commitments around building—so not living hand to mout…”

“I absolutely accept those constraints, which is why, with Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, we announced the increase in the number of places on construction courses—a combination of apprenticeships, bootcamps, the technical excellence colleges and incentives so that people want to move into the FE sector to…”

“All the officials in the Treasury who meet me know that I want to go further and faster on pretty much everything we are doing, including on the regulation agenda. We have taken out two regulators already. The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is abolishing the biggest quango in the world—NHS England—and we have set the…”

“That is not something that we are looking at at the moment.”

“Some councils wanted to significantly increase their council tax this month. We have resisted calls from a number of councils—including Windsor and Maidenhead, and Slough—that wanted to increase their council tax significantly, because we recognise the ongoing pressures on living standards and the cost of living crisis…”

“Yes. It was consistent both with the Green Paper and with the Secretary of State’s statement to the House of Commons.”

“In the Budget last year, we increased two broad types of tax. We increased national insurance on business, which we have already discussed, and we also increased taxes on the most wealthy. The reforms to the non-dom tax status will bring in £12 billion during the course of this Parliament. VAT on private schools will b…”

“Yes, and your constituents in Glasgow and mine in Leeds West and Pudsey do not need the OBR or their MP to tell them that, because it is what happened a few years ago. The cost of borrowing for businesses and families went through the roof, uncertainty was all around us, and it constrained the ability of our economy to…”

“There would be numerous impacts if we increased borrowing and were not able to deliver economic and fiscal stability. The first is that the national debt, which is already almost the size of our economy, would grow larger still, and that would increase the servicing costs of that debt, which are already £105.3 billion …”

“To go back to the £30 billion of headroom, that would require £20 billion of tax increases. Actually, it would probably require more than £20 billion of tax increases, because if you do that, the OBR may well assume that the economy would therefore weaken, so you would need to do even more than that. Or you would need …”

“It would be nice to block him out.”

“Indeed, and the Employment Rights Bill will put more money in people’s pockets, so there are upsides and downsides there. There are things—the Government are not passive; we are doing a number of things, such as the capital markets reform. I think everybody in this room recognises, because some of it draws on what the …”

“No, but what I am saying, Chair, is that the Office for Budget Responsibility have already scored the national planning policy framework, which is a small part of the growth reforms that the Government are bringing forward. They rightly have not scored anything to do with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill because, a…”

“No, but we are not passive as a Government, waiting for things to happen; we also have an agenda to grow the economy. Since the Budget, we have introduced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which has successfully got through its Second Reading—”