Speeches by Reeves.

“We’ll not be doing that.”

“It is baked in, as it was for the previous Government, but it did not feel, given the cost of living challenges that families and businesses continue to face and given the uncertainty in the middle east, that it was the right policy approach at the moment.”

“We are not looking at road pricing. I think you make a fair challenge. At the moment, though, the focus is on trying to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. We have fallen behind the target that the previous Government set for the roll-out of electric vehicles, and that has an impact on manufacturers, which will b…”

“I am not going to write five years’ worth of Budgets—I have just written one! I would say that the commitments that we made in our manifesto, around income tax, employee national insurance, VAT and capping corporation tax at its current rate, are for the duration of this Parliament.”

“It was one of the many things that was put to me as an option. It is not something that we wanted to take forward. People have gone through a massive cost of living crisis in the last few years, and increasing council tax above the 5% increase a year that the previous Government capped it at would not be the right appr…”

“I am not suggesting that they should have been settled before the election, but what I am saying is that those pressures were well known by the Government at the time of the general election.”

“If you are referring to public sector pay, the remits given to the independent pay review bodies were given by the previous Government, not this Government, and when evidence of affordability was given, no number was given around what was affordable, which, from my understanding, was pretty unprecedented. The independe…”

“On 29 July I set out £5.5 billion of savings against that £22 billion, and in the Budget we announced, for example, £4.3 billion in the biggest ever package of savings on welfare fraud and error. We are making savings—we have made savings—but that financial pressure still exists.”

“We have now published the line-by-line account of the £22 billion. That was published alongside the Budget last week, and it was those numbers that I was taken through on that first weekend.”

“Yes. My first meeting at the Treasury was on 5 July—the Friday afternoon. We then worked all weekend, and it was on that weekend that the £22 billion number was put to me, when I became Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

“Yes, that first weekend when I became Chancellor.”

“We knew there were big pressures coming down the line. What we didn’t know was that they were in the fiscal year that had already started. That was the big surprise—the baseline that we were starting from did not reflect the true spending pressures. We asked the Office for Budget Responsibility to make recommendations …”

“It was not known going into the election; it was something that was given to me when I became Chancellor that weekend—the £6.4 billion overspend this fiscal year, and that was a number that was increasing, not decreasing. The second biggest component of that £22 billion overspend was £1.9 billion of payments to private…”

“We have published now the line-by-line breakdown of it, but one of the two of the biggest components of it was a £6.4 billion unfinanced pressure in asylum. This was not just a pressure; this was something that was being paid for every month with no plan to bring it down—in fact, it was rising.”

“Thank you very much, Chair. When I arrived at the Treasury that first weekend, it was made really clear to me that the starting point for my inheritance was not the forecast in the Budget from March, and that the actual spending that was happening was significantly higher than that. You can see that in the monthly publ…”

“Yes. There are a number of what we call guardrails around the investment rule—getting public sector net financial liabilities, or public sector net debt for short, down as a share of GDP. The first of those guardrails is strengthening the role of institutions to improve infrastructure delivery—which I know the Chair ha…”

“Public sector net worth would have created even more space, but I think public sector net financial liabilities is a target that is already measured. It has been measured since 2016 by the Office for National Statistics, and it has been forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility as well since 2016. I would not qu…”

“Yes. There is a whole spectrum of acronyms to choose from—”

“There are two types of capital investment that we prioritised in the Budget last week. The first part was those things where we can really crowd in private investment and look to grow our economy and exploit—seize—some of those huge opportunities. Probably the best example of that was what we have done around carbon ca…”

“We’re not in that world, and I’m not going to speculate.”