Speeches by Murphy.

“Including housing costs? Why would those be included? Is it not a measure that excludes housing costs?”

“Is RHDI the most accurate measure of living standards? I ask because it includes imputed rents and it is gross of housing costs. Would a measure net of housing costs not be more accurate?”

“My constituents will welcome the action on the cost of living in the Budget, from the rail freezes to the cuts to energy bills, but could you set out the trajectory for real household disposable incomes over the Parliament? How does it change compared with your forecast in March, and what is the main reason for that ch…”

“Do you have the necessary data to make that assessment?”

“May I quickly turn to migration data? The latest data is much lower than you forecast. What are the fiscal implications of that?”

“So that number on the EV forecast could change, in the negative, if Government were to freeze fuel duty?”

“Is that something that you publish?”

“I appreciate that you only assess the policies that the Government put in front of you, but to ask the question slightly differently: do you have a typology of policy measures that shows how you assess different types of policies in-house?”

“I have a question about the significance threshold on policies. Do you only ever assess what the Government put in front of you, or do you have a basket of measures, as it were, or a range of different types of policy, that you publish, and that you could show make the biggest difference in terms of enhancing growth? H…”

“Say that fuel duty was not uprated: does that potentially have an impact on demand for EVs, and do you model that?”

“On fuel duty, the Budget states that from April 2027 the Government will uprate fuel duty by RPI. But as we know, fuel duty rates have been frozen for 15 years. How much headroom would the Government lose if they did not go ahead with uprating fuel duty by RPI?”

“So there are significant risks around the figure?”

“You predict a reduction in EV car sales of nearly 450,000 as a result of the measure, which is offset by other Government policies to increase sales. Could that reduction in sales be bigger than envisaged? How confident are you around the modelling of the impact of the policy change?”

“There were new taxes to electric vehicles applied in the Budget. Could you set out what the scope of this tax is to plug the fiscal gap created by reduction in fuel duty revenue?”

“Would your expectation be that the charge will have to increase in the future to fill that gap, and potentially be extended to vans and lorries?”

“Having spent the past 18 months arguing that this Government have mismanaged the public finances, the Conservatives have now come to the House to argue that the public finances are fine after all. Their position is patently absurd. Due to the OBR’s productivity downgrade, which was a direct result of the Conservative G…”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“Should any reform take any account of someone’s income, as the current system does in some ways? What deferral mechanisms would you put in place given the income challenge for someone paying an annual rate?”

“Can I ask about who should be levying the tax? I understand that in other countries it might be collected nationally but levied locally. Should we accept a lot of variation in council tax if we are allowing it to be set locally? I appreciate that you have a particular proposal, but I am interested in who should be levy…”

“Kate Willis, you talked earlier about the principles of stamp duty; one of them was around the acceptability of taxation. Is one of the issues with council tax the fact that we cannot make up our minds whether it is a consumption tax, a property tax or a services tax? How much do you think that feeds into its acceptabi…”