Speeches by Baldwin.

“It costs £4,000 more to employ a young person.”

“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…”

“How far does the cycle have to go?”

“The Office for Budget Responsibility at the time forecast that 50,000 jobs would be lost. Has it been higher or lower than 50,000?”

“It has not been zero.”

“But that is your job.”

“He is the interim chair.”

“It is 5% now, so what is your forecast of where it will peak?”

“What about the squeeze on profit margins and the potential improvement in productivity? Have you perceived any of that in your data?”

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

“I am going to move on to some operational questions, so perhaps, Ms Pritchard, these will be for you. Under these proposed reforms, the Financial Ombudsman Service will have to adhere much more closely to FCA rules. That is obviously going to set up some sort of operational challenges. Are you currently resourced to be…”

“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?”

“You mentioned that the subsidiarisation is not happening, but you are losing your ability to appoint the chair of the Financial Ombudsman Service, and that was not even a proposal in the original consultation the Government had. Does that not give you concerns? That is going to be a Government appointment.”

“Would you support the proposals that this Committee put forward for us to have a veto power over the appointment of the chair?”

“We will get on to that.”

“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”?”

“Let me ask the question slightly differently. There are 150,000 fewer people on payrolls than there were at the time of the October 2024 Budget. How much of that impact was a reaction by employers to the measures in the Budget?”

“Are you ready as of now, or will you have to make changes in your organisation to be ready?”

“Dr Pill, you mentioned a cyclical rise in unemployment and alluded to some work you have done on the structural change in unemployment, potentially due to companies trying to use artificial intelligence. Can you tell the Committee where you think we are in the cycle? Given that unemployment has breached 5% for the firs…”

“I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. The Conservatives very much believe in a sovereign steel industry, but what we see today is a multibillion-pound shot in the dark, and it heralds the end of primary steel production in the UK. Just to set the record straight, there would no longer be an…”