Speeches by Glen.

“Could I turn to the Budget and the effects of the Budget? I think the monetary policy report published on 6 November refers to the uncertainty over the Budget, softening GDP growth and delaying investment. There has been a lot of commentary around the unusual nature of the run-up to the Budget. Would any of you wish to…”

“Can we turn to your assessment of the effects of the measures in the Budget? On near-time growth and inflation, what do you think about what you have heard from the Chancellor?”

“Which is to wait for somebody else.”

“So you do not think that the moves on the 14th, notwithstanding what you said about the overall pattern over three months, had anything to do with—”

“I accept that, but what about—”

“Of course. Nobody is disputing that.”

“You have glided straight into the aftermath. What I am trying to get at is that, let’s be honest, this was rather more unusual than previous Budgets. You said so in the report, and so does the commentary of CEOs and Andy Haldane, who is obviously an experienced individual who is known to you. Are you not saying that th…”

“I thank the Security Minister for early sight of his statement, and I thank him most warmly for the way in which he has presented the Government’s response this afternoon. As someone who spent a previous life in Salisbury and south Wiltshire, he has served the people of my constituency very well. I am also very pleased…”

“Richard Hughes was a first-rate public servant, but he did the right thing on the narrow matter of the premature upload of the file last week. OBR representatives told us a number of things yesterday in the Treasury Committee. They told us that there was a £16 billion downgrade and £4.2 billion of headroom on 31 Octobe…”

“You have all painted quite a challenging picture on productivity, despite some excellent questions from my colleagues. We have explored the quantum problem—how much—and then the measurement problem. I wanted to pick up on what you said about the issue of America and where it is different. Could you set out what the tra…”

“Is there anything else any of you would like to say about what we could usefully import, apart from tech?”

“We got away with it this time, but we will not next time.”

“That is what I was accused about on bounce back loans. I set up all the bounce back loans to protect all the businesses and then I was told that a good number of those businesses may have gone bust anyway. I was thinking, “What could I have done?””

“Ruth Curtice, a lot of the Resolution Foundation’s previous ideas have been aerated over the last three or four months for obvious reasons, given one of your predecessors. Do you have any observations about how important we should take that to be as a Committee?”

“Can I just go a little more into this point about speculation? For several weeks, probably several months, we had speculation about wealth taxes, changes to the way that property is taxed, changes to pensions, what would happen to the tax-free allowance and ISAs, to name but a few. As a Committee, we have to work out w…”

“William Hague has pointed to a number of measures in the Budget around changes to VCTs and EIS limits, and to matters around knowledge-intensive companies. He suggested that those will have a positive effect. Have any of you done any work on quantifying the likely value of those changes to the economy?”

“EIS, SEIS and VCT have hardly changed at all. They have been stable for several years. EOTs, or employee ownership trusts, have had their tax advantage halved, but they have been stable for a long time. Is it really fair to say that they have been changing a lot?”

“I would just say this. I would be mindful of having a completely desk-based economist’s view of this. Look at the behaviour of The Entertainer. It sold its business at a lower multiple of what it could have got if it had sold it to somebody else. It did that so that it could preserve ownership for the people who had wo…”

“The Employment Rights Bill was in ping-pong immediately before the Budget, but I suppose the U-turn on Wednesday, on first day rights, would vindicate your position on that. Is that right?”

“If you are talking about a 16% reduction in back office costs in the civil service in four years’ time, that is quite an ambitious number to aim for.”