Speeches by Reeves.

“I think you can tell how keen I am to make sure that we invest in our infrastructure. That is also why we are using means such as the national wealth fund to leverage in private sector investment. Capital spending is 2.4% of GDP in the final year of the forecast, and actually higher in some other years.”

“Thank you. I was underselling what we are doing. It is forecast to be 2.7% earlier in the Parliament and 2.4% in the last year, rather than the 1.6% that we inherited. In addition, the national wealth fund is leveraging in private sector money. Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England and now Prime Minis…”

“Yes. The idea of that fund is that it leverages in three times as much private investment as the public investment that we put in.”

“It has to do a bit of both. You can see from the remit letters that I have given to the financial services regulators, and the work that the Prime Minister has led on better regulation, that we are saying that we should regulate for growth, not just for risk. That is important. If you only cared about risk, you would n…”

“Actually, I met with Quantexa yesterday. It is one of the UK’s massive success stories—a unicorn firm. Its series C or series D funding got £10 million from the British Business Bank. It has just done its series F funding, and I think that raised £200 million, including more money from the British Business Bank. The pe…”

“You started by talking about the IMF. The IMF are very supportive of what we did in the Budget last year to put the public finances back on a firm footing. They were also very supportive of the fiscal rules that we announced, both to bring stability to the public finances but also to unlock private investment. I was ve…”

“I absolutely accept that there are costs to any policy, whether it is on spending or tax, but there are also costs to irresponsibility. Just imagine if, last October, I had not taken the action that we did—to put the public finances on a firm footing and put more money into the NHS, which has seen, for five months in a…”

“Yes, but if we had not made those decisions last October in the Budget, there would have been other demands on those budgets. You say, “Only by doing that”—I am afraid your party had 14 years to put more money into defence, and money on defence spending fell.”

“I have said that of course there are always costs to any policy on tax or spending, but there is also the cost of the counterfactual. The counterfactual would have been leaving the public finances on an unfirm footing, to embed the instability bequeathed to us by the previous Government. It would also have meant furthe…”

“It is from the OBR numbers; I already gave that answer to Yuan Yang. If you take the spring Budget of the previous Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, and compare the OBR’s forecast for real household disposable income at that time with the forecast that the OBR published last week, and if you look at RHDI per year, every year, a…”

“No, at quite a high level compared to the historical averages, which, again, gives confidence that businesses do want to carry on hiring. In fact, it is about redoubling our efforts to ensure that those people who are not in work today are supported to get back to work. Vacancies, at about 700,000 or 800,000, are at a …”

“I spoke to my opposite number, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in his first week in office. I have joined the G7 meetings since then, and I spoke to him again on Monday this week. The Business and Trade Secretary, Jonny Reynolds, is meeting regularly with his opposite number and the US trade representative. Those tal…”

“There were a lot of questions to—”

“I said in the Budget last year that it was a once-in-a-Parliament Budget to wipe the slate clean after the economic mismanagement of the previous Administration. We made a number of difficult decisions around taxation. We increased taxes on the wealthiest in our country, and we also increased, as we have discussed, tax…”

“I am not going to write another four years’ worth of Budgets—that would not be responsible—but I can assure the Committee that I will not need to repeat a Budget on that scale because we have now wiped the slate clean and put our public finances on a firm footing. Indeed, in the spending review in two-and-a-bit months’…”

“First of all, let us see how other countries and other trading blocs respond. I spoke to Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis just before I came to give evidence to this Committee today, and we are discussing with other countries and with the EU the appropriate response to whatever announcements are made later today. The Pr…”

“I am not going to disagree with its analysis, but obviously, we are looking ourselves and with the Department for Business and Trade at a whole range of possible scenarios and preparing for all different eventualities. I think the OBR is really clear that the biggest impact comes from global tariffs, not UK-specific on…”

“That is also a really important point. I think that you had the FCA and maybe the PRA in—”

“I am sure that Sam Woods and Governor Andrew Bailey will also be in to give evidence. We are very much a supporter of high global standards. We also recognise that we operate in an internationally competitive environment, which is why at the end of last year the PRA announced that we will postpone the implementation of…”

“No, I certainly would not put it like that, but the US Administration are focused very clearly on improving the competitiveness of their economy; and as a global trading economy with a big financial services sector, we need to make sure that we remain competitive on that world stage if we are to secure jobs and investm…”