Speeches by Baldwin.

“It has just been published on our website. It is about national insurance contributions and trying to disaggregate them, but acknowledging that, of course, businesses will react in the four ways that you described earlier. I thought that it was a very interesting letter, because, clearly, we can observe that businesses…”

“You must have a view at the Bank of England. You have all these smart economists and all these forecasts. You must have a forecast for what you think is going to happen to employment.”

“You take it as given.”

“We have seen jobs being cut at the fastest rate since 2008, haven’t we, Dr Pill?”

“My questions are for Dr Pill. Of the 12 recommendations from the Bernanke review, could you just update the Committee on how many you have already brought into your decision making? How many are ongoing? Are any of them proving to be impossible to implement?”

“You have the opportunity now to tell us what is going on at the bottom of this iceberg.”

“Have any of the recommendations become part of your way of working? You referred to the scenarios earlier, and I thought they might be linked to the Bernanke review.”

“When can we expect the recommendations to have been adopted by the Bank?”

“Does the work plan have an end date?”

“That is probably enough on the Bernanke report today. We can come back to this in future meetings.”

“How many is that in terms of actual jobs?”

“The art of taxation is extracting the largest amount of money with the lowest amount of squeaking from the goose. Yet the Chancellor will have heard the honking of the tractors on Whitehall today in response to her raising an amount of money that will pay for less than one day of NHS spending. Will she commit to revers…”

“I thank the Prime Minister for his statement and for the hard yards he is putting in at the moment for our national security. May I suggest another angle on which the House would appreciate an update? Last year, during an inquiry into Russian sanctions, the Treasury Committee received evidence that Russian hydrocarbons…”

“Do you all agree with that? Does any of you have any additional evidence that you want to share with the Committee?”

“Mr Johnson, more people last year paid this penalty than actually used their LISA to buy their first home. Do you regard that as a design failure?”

“The withdrawal penalty is the biggest deterrent, is it?”

“Is the withdrawal penalty itself, if you can try to just focus on that aspect, acting as a deterrent to people opening these accounts in the first place?”

“You have made that point very clearly to the Committee. Ms Olufunwa, would you make any other modifications to the withdrawal penalty?”

“There is agreement from all three of our panellists that you would like to see that modification. There was experience during the pandemic of a 20% withdrawal penalty. Are you in favour of reverting to that? Is that effectively what you are saying.”

“I should declare that I was a Treasury Minister at the time that this was announced in the Budget. It is very interesting for me to look now, 10 years on, and see what has and has not worked, and what could be improved. I wanted to draw out a little bit more on the withdrawal penalties. We heard very clearly from Mr Le…”