Speeches by Baldwin.

“I just want to drill down into those moments. Is it fair that some person got that information sooner than the rest of the market? Were there participants in the market who were getting more information than others?”

“And that was just normal volatility?”

“Sir Dave, you obviously have a Bloomberg terminal in the Bank of England.”

“I can imagine. I am focused on that moment on the night of 13 November, when the Financial Times ran the story that income taxes would not be going up. The minute the gilt market opened on the morning of the 14th, the Bloomberg terminal said that UK gilts “plunged at the open”. “Plunge” is quite a strong word on a Bloo…”

“Last year, the Secretary of State, her Front-Bench colleagues and pretty much everyone behind her voted against lifting the two-child benefit cap—[Hon. Members: “No, we didn’t.”] Those who rebelled had the Whip withdrawn. What would she say to those rebels now? What has changed since that vote last year?”

“I welcome the fact that the Minister has just confirmed a leak inquiry is under way at the Treasury, and I will be paying close attention to that inquiry. Richard Hughes was an outstanding public servant, and he was truly independent. Will the Minister confirm that the person the Chancellor nominates to this position h…”

“Have you done any work on what the distribution is of the people who do participate in these schemes?”

“Turning to my third topic, which is around the net migration numbers that the Office for Budget Responsibility has put into its forecasts, there has been a lot of anecdotal commentary in the media about the fact that there are a lot of people leaving the UK. There does not seem to be any data out there about how much t…”

“My question is about the aggregate. Is the country saving enough for later life in aggregate?”

“Presumably, there will be people earning less than £50,000 who are caught by this.”

“I am going to cover three completely unrelated topics, if that is all right. I will start by asking Ms Miller from the IFS about business rates. For so many months, businesses—and particularly high street businesses—have been told that there was going to be a new, permanently lower rate of business rates brought in at …”

“No one has done any work on aggregating it. In terms of the salary sacrifice changes, which were the second biggest tax increase in the Budget, my understanding is that the people who will be most affected by that are those who pay the highest national insurance, which would be those earning between about £10,000 and £…”

“Moving on to my second topic, if I may, are we saving enough in this country for pensions?”

“But we will not know whether this measure has closed the stable door in time. Is that fair to say?”

“One of the changes that was made in the Budget was around rowing back on some of the previous changes to the non-domicile tax regime. Do you have any understanding as to why the Chancellor would have done that? Is that to try to prevent an exodus of non-domiciled individuals? Does anyone have any data on that?”

“Would you support us finding out a bit more information about whether the people who are leaving the country were people who were significant taxpayers?”

“It sounds like we are basically driving without any information in the rear view mirror here.”

“So this salary sacrifice is pretty tough on middle earners.”

“As a nation, we will save less.”

“Still within the parameters that you estimated?”