Speeches by Baldwin.

“Congratulations on your appointment. The thing that shocked me the most last week was that there are school dinners that the children of parents who fled domestic abuse are unable to purchase with cash. I am just laying that out there, because that really shocked me to learn. I am going to change the subject to interna…”

“Okay, so it is exactly the same issues you might be recused on in this role as in your previous role.”

“Thank you. That is very clear. Turning to another international issue that I know is very relevant to the inquiry on acceptance of cash is the FCA statistic that 7 million UK consumers have bought a cryptocurrency or Bitcoin, and the acceptance of those. Clearly, we have a change in the US, which has become much more p…”

“Would you buy any?”

“That is the same position as you had in your previous ministerial role.”

“How it might affect the acceptance of cash, for example.”

“But were you recused from more things in your previous role as Pensions Minister, or is it identical to your new role?”

“Replies to my parliamentary questions are often late. They are often evasive and often refer to websites that are infrequently updated, and sometimes they are even overtly political. I know that the Leader of the House cares passionately about improving performance in this area, so will she make a statement to update t…”

“Mr Speaker, have you noticed a pattern—that on a Thursday, a Treasury Minister will be asked to come to the Commons to answer an urgent question, and there will be barely a soul on the Labour Benches behind them when they do?”

“The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that the measure will raise £500 million in revenue by 2029, which, in the context of tax revenues of over £1,150 billion, is a very small number. What value does the Minister put on food security for the United Kingdom?”

“Former Chair, Mr Speaker, but thank you very much for calling me. It is clear that we all want to see economic growth in rural areas and across the UK, but I am concerned that some of the measures in the Chancellor’s Budget are having the opposite effect. Which statistic worries her most: the fact that we are at a 20-y…”

“I congratulate the hon. Lady not only on her excellent chairing of our Committee and this report, but on securing a slot in the Chamber to tell people about some of the report’s recommendations. Her background as the former Chair of the Public Accounts Committee gives huge credibility to the points she is making about …”

“You will follow up with the numbers, because I think that it is over a million certainly.”

“How many people have downloaded the app by now?”

“Last time we asked Jim Harra, something like 250,000 people had downloaded the app and he was promising us a publicity campaign. I wondered whether you had made some big progress on it since we met with him.”

“Minister, do you accept that pensioners who may need to interact with HMRC as customers are less likely to be willing adopters of the app and that the helpline is always going to be a very important part of what you do? You are not planning to turn the helpline off again in this Parliament, are you?”

“It is not just pensioners.”

“If you need to speak to someone, 85% means that 15% do not get to speak to someone.”

“How many more people are going to become, quote-unquote, “customers” of HMRC in this Parliament?”

“It is a very great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Ms McVey. I just note that the Minister highlighted the fact that, in fact, this initiative had been started under the previous Government, and so you would not expect me to be objecting to its passage today. But I do have, in the interest of sc…”