Speeches by Glen.

“Mr King, we need to come back to you about the black hole and lean on your experience in the OBR. Was it right to characterise it as a £22 billion black hole?”

“The previous year it was within departmental spending limits and there were only some modest changes in terms of revenues. There was a mechanism to do it that allowed departments essentially to wash their faces. That was the arrangement that the previous Chancellor had come to. The assumption that it was all net additi…”

“Can I get into the dynamics between the Treasury and the OBR? It is really unfortunate that we got into a situation where that dynamic is in question. For many fiscal events, OBR officials and Treasury officials interacted and produced documents in parallel. There was no reason to dispute the degree of transparency on …”

“I just wanted to add a point of fact. On infected blood, there was no costing because the analysis of the victims had not been done. In June there was a piece of work done to speak to the victims, which then verified the numbers. There was a speculative range, but it was very difficult to pin down and indeed it still i…”

“Thank you. That is very kind.”

“Can I just clarify? The additional money for the NHS is essentially in line with what it takes to stand still. In your words, Mr Brewer, it is crisis management, essentially. What I am not clear about is, from the Budget’s numbers, the implied uplift thereafter to do the sorts of things that you say are desirable in th…”

“On the micro side, one controversial change has been the agricultural property relief. It has been said that 73% of estates will be exempt from it. Has there been any assessment made of the behavioural impact and the effect that would have in terms of the obligation to sell, notwithstanding the fact that clearly you ca…”

“In the light of the fact that they have, rightly or wrongly, post Brexit had significant changes to their economic model, have been encouraged to diversify as well and there is still uncertainty over the applicability of capital grants, et cetera, it is not quite the same, is it? They are on margins of 0.5% to 1%, whic…”

“Or they can say no to.”

“Is it not possible that one Administration’s familiarity, through difficult times, with the ongoing pressures that would need to be resolved at the next fiscal event is the same as an incoming Government’s black hole, where they have not had that familiarity with the ongoing fact that things emerge between fiscal event…”

“I understand.”

“They might have made different choices on productivity or whatever. Can I finally finish the question, then? What could be done to improve this and avoid this happening again? It is not in the interest of the integrity of the process for it to carry on like this.”

“This is linked to food supply and food security, which is national security, a stated objective of the Government’s policy. That is where the concern is.”

“What a great privilege it is to be sitting on the Back Benches and able to make a contribution freely after 12 years on the Front Bench, as a Parliamentary Private Secretary or Minister. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Wrexham (Andrew Ranger) for his maiden speech and acknowledge what a wonderful experience it was…”

“I spent most of the past six years looking at Treasury figures and I have a great deal of sympathy for the hon. Gentleman. I fear he is a victim of a hit-and-run exercise by the Treasury on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs budget. He would do well to think about the lessons learned from the pasty …”

“I turn to another area of national resilience. National security experts have been warning about the Chinese Communist party’s use of genomics companies to harvest DNA data globally and dominate the genomics industry supply chain. Given the increasing importance of genomics for public healthcare, and the potential dual…”

“I warmly welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s announcement on the £100,000 interim payments to the estates of the deceased infected, thereby maintaining the momentum that was established earlier this year, and I thank him for his thorough statement to the House yesterday introducing the statutory instrument. Will he conf…”

“The Opposition support the new Government’s aspirations for the highest ministerial standards, and we acknowledge the significant experience that the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff can bring to her role as envoy to the nations and regions. Why then, in breach of Cabinet Office guidance, have Ministers not publi…”

“Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that when he assessed the June engagement exercise that Sir Robert Francis supervised, he did not resist any of the recommendations from the expert group that interrogated the scheme—apart from four or five where he thought the Government could do better—and there was no attempt ei…”

“I thank the Paymaster General for advance notice of the statutory instrument being laid, as he has always given. He rightly reminded the House of the injustice that victims of the infected blood scandal have been subject to—one that has spanned several decades. I hope that we are now in rapid delivery mode. My role is …”