Speeches by Baldwin.

“Would you recommend any movement to Government?”

“Do you see the UK gilt market as being particularly risky at the moment? If you are paying that level of interest rate, debt in this country is obviously going to compound much faster unless we can get better nominal and real growth in the economy.”

“Would it affect regulated firms mainly through the impact on their mortgage books, or do they hold substantial portions of gilts unhedged themselves?”

“At this stage you cannot tell us if the redundancies have affected the skill mix or the quality or experience of that important human capital?”

“Okay. You will not be agitating for change in that area. That is what I am hearing.”

“I thank the Minister for confirming that this Parliament has not ratified the treaty. As Parliament and the British public heard more about the deal, one of the things they found most inexplicable was that it involved us paying a substantial amount of money—how much has not yet been confirmed to Parliament—to the Mauri…”

“When the Prime Minister was in the middle east, did the subject of the UK’s dependence on helium come up? It is an element that we do not produce in the UK, and it is vital for things such as MRI scans in the NHS.”

“So for digital exclusion it is about auto-savings. Do the other panellists want to pick out one thing that is driving exclusion, or that would solve exclusion?”

“I am about to be interrupted by the Division bell, but I will ask about the trends that are driving exclusion at the moment. We are in 2026. We have had evidence to the Committee that financial exclusion is driven less by lack of access or capability, and more by the fact that there is just no money left after paying e…”

“That is the big driver increasing digital exclusion—”

“We were hearing that digital exclusion is a big driver of financial exclusion in 2026, and I was going to ask Kate Pender, what the most transformational change would be to achieve the large economic activity numbers you cited earlier, presumably from your research.”

“If you had to pick one of those, in terms of the scale of the impact it might have on that total, which one would it be?”

“Q9. The Prime Minister says that he is concerned about the cost of living, so can he explain why he allowed his Local Government Minister to give permission to Reform-led Worcestershire county council to inflict that 9% council tax hike on my constituents?”

“Does your research prove that that would be the single most impactful intervention?”

“Can you put a number on that in part?”

“Given the current crisis, does the Chancellor regret in her first Budget increasing unfunded borrowing by £150 billion over this Parliament, which the Office for Budget Responsibility said at the time was “one of the largest fiscal loosenings of any fiscal event in recent decades”?”

“I would like to ask Mr Alder about the reforms to the Financial Ombudsman Service, because a lot of our constituents rely on the Financial Ombudsman Service as a way of getting redress without having to go through the court system. The Government have announced some fairly major reforms. I wondered, Mr Alder, whether y…”

“If I hear you correctly—I am trying to express this in a way my constituents might find less economist speak—there was an impact on inflation, and you are saying that inflation went up, but you think about half of the increase was from the impact of the Budget. You think that wage increases have been less high than the…”

“I have one last question, if I may. Would the motor finance redress scheme and the issue around that have got through under these new rules that you are implementing?”

“Will there be transparency around that discussion for the wider public and people like us who follow your work closely?”