Speeches by Yang.

“So people will put more work into getting the right doctor’s assessments and so on. There is no claim from the OBR that that evidence is mistaken and that people will be driven to—”

“I want to continue with one of the themes that Ms McEvoy brought up. In the 2024 welfare report, and elsewhere in the OBR publications, you refer to the “financial incentive” to applying. There is a lot of stigma in the media right now about fraud—incorrect claimants gaming the system, as it were—and the term can be in…”

“In the play of events from 17 March to 19 March, was there any surprise on either side? Were you surprised by being given more measures to score? Was the Treasury surprised by what you have given it? Was there a level of miscommunication? Could you explain what was happening in those few days?”

“Do you plan to publish any analysis of welfare-related changes before the autumn? I note that in previous summers you have published papers describing the overall trends.”

“Just to summarise, you are planning to bring in the forecasts related to the employment support package, which was not scored this time, in the autumn, and also relate it to the behavioural changes and other parts of the welfare packages, which did not come in sufficient detail this time? Is that broadly right?”

“Does that mean that we should expect an update to those forecasts in the autumn outlook?”

“You mentioned that some of those costings were incomplete or some of the analysis was incomplete. Could you go into a bit more detail about what was lacking? What would you have needed to make a better or fuller forecast?”

“When you talk to the Department responsible, does that mean a conversation between you and DWP, or is it the Treasury in this case?”

“On the question of welfare reforms, I note that in the preface, you have written that “details of the policy package were sent to us very late in the process, and late notice of changes and incomplete analysis hampered our ability to reflect these measures in our forecasts.” To begin with, I want to ask about the timel…”

“But not about the underlying ill health trend itself? You mentioned there is a rise in claimants and self-reporting of it.”

“I have a specific question about one part of the inactivity data. Mr Hughes, how confident are you that there has been a rise in inactivity linked to ill health?”

“Mr Hughes, do you have any other responses to those questions?”

“My Committee colleagues are quite keen to know whether you think other countries have done a better job of recovering after the pandemic in capturing labour force data. Are there any other countries that we should be learning from in the UK?”

“How long in months or years do you think it might take before you are confident, or at least fairly confident, in that data?”

“Does the fact that the ONS is very confident make you more confident, or are you still not very confident in its data, as you were last November?”

“Professor Miles, you just said that people should have much less confidence in the employment stats than they used to, and when you last spoke to the Committee last November you mentioned that you were not very confident about the labour force survey data. By contrast, when we saw the ONS as a Committee the national st…”

“In response to that, does it make sense to have a kind of fiscal-first solution, in which you decide what percentage of GDP should be spent on these benefits and work from there? How should the fiscal calculation feed into the broader policy calculation?”

“I want to go back to the discussion with Ms McEvoy about the problem of rising claimant counts, expenditure, and disability and incapacity benefits, and to drill a bit more into what kind of a problem that is. Mr Johnson and Ms Curtice, you said that it is a problem. From one perspective, it is a fiscal problem. On the…”

“It is less work for your colleagues.”

“I have a question about the institutional framework that the OBR and the Treasury operate within. There have been numerous proposals in the media over the last few weeks about doing things such as changing the number of fiscal outlooks, or OBR outlooks a year, or adding other organisations that would make forecasts—for…”