Speeches by Glen.

“Could I go back to the question that I asked Sir Robert about the design of the OBR? At the point we are now at with the public finances and the situation in which we find ourselves, as if the OBR had not existed hitherto, is there anything you would suggest, Mr Hughes, that would be helpful?”

“It is not the one we have, though, is it?”

“The average headroom from 2010 to 2024 was, I think, £25 billion. I totally acknowledge what you said about the last Conservative Budget, and that was not replenished. But we are also seeing a situation in which the level of debt, post covid and the energy crisis, and the cost of that debt mean that the public finances…”

“My purpose in asking that question is not to dismiss the OBR. I have deep respect for you, for your successor and for the theory of this. I am just saying that it is quite obvious that the way politics works, the way the OBR’s documents are pored over to look for any discrepancy and the way those numbers have to sync u…”

“I don’t mind the slip.”

“I am not saying that we should get rid of it. I am just asking whether you can refine it so that the interaction is better—because it is not now, is it?”

“You have both given a very reasonable assessment of the theory of the OBR and how it should work. You have pointed to the medium-term and long-term assessments that you make and the fact that you are just trying to do what you would do in most jurisdictions, which is give a dispassionate assessment of whether the Gover…”

“Can I come in on this point? Essentially, what happened is that the FCA relied on the work being done in this Treasury review before they made a judgment on whether they would do anything. If the essence of the outcome of this endeavour over the last few months is, “We’ve got near to it, but we haven’t really identifie…”

“I think we would all recognise that what happened in the run-up to the Budget was, to put it charitably, a very unusual process. There has been a lack of clarity over who was responsible for that, and the consequences of the outputs of the reports that have come out of this review clearly inevitably mean that there is …”

“Economic Secretaries through the ages have repeatedly seen credit unions go under. Often those are very small institutions. It has never really been possible to drive consolidation from the centre. How do you reconcile anxiety over performance and security with the desire for expansion? Secondly, we have brilliant init…”

“You think that what happened with the FT before the Budget has happened previously?”

“It wasn’t mine, though, was it? It was pre-me. I just want to make that clear.”

“As a former Chief Secretary, I seem to remember talking to individual Cabinet Ministers where the senior officials in their respective Departments would condition the numbers with lots of qualifications, in ways that made it very difficult for the Treasury team to penetrate, so it is not just about systems. How would y…”

“I had a constituent who wrote to the local paper saying that, in the years to come, most of the Treasury will be hollowed out by AI. Can you tell us how you see AI working to create efficiencies?”

“After five and a half years as a Treasury Minister, I have deep respect and gratitude for your work and the work of your colleagues, but I am a little anxious when I look at some of the reports around staffing in the Treasury. There has always been a higher turnover of staff—I think about three times the civil service …”

“More immediately, and back to the question I put about the year ’25-26 and the £3.5 billion efficiency savings across all Departments, would you like to comment on the progress towards that goal and what is happening with that money?”

“Can I turn to efficiency savings? The previous Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, talked about the real-time cross-departmental spending tracker. He said it would take two to three years. A recent NAO report found that Departments lacked the granular data to track basic service costs. There is a projected £…”

“Which Departments are finding it most difficult, do you think?”

“How would you say this Committee can best scrutinise progress in that domain and weigh it against best practices elsewhere, in financial services, across Whitehall, and beyond?”

“I think that people watching this will probably think, “Gosh”, because in a business, even in a quite sophisticated global corporation, managing the flow of money between departments and so on should be quite achievable. How would you reassure us that you are doing this at the best speed you can, and that it could not …”