Speeches by Reeves.

“With respect, Mr Glen, we saw the number of people not in education, employment or training under the last Conservative Government increase by more than 100,000. That was not because of greater protections at work and increases in people’s wages; in fact, living standards went backwards in the last Parliament. I just d…”

“Apart from it gives people greater security. If you know that you will get sick pay from day one, that means you have a bit more confidence to spend the money—”

“I think you have to look at these things in the round, because if you are a worker on a zero-hours contract and you do not know next week how many hours you are going to get, it is very difficult to be able to plan anything for the future, and it is very difficult to spend money because you have to build up precautiona…”

“There are more people in employment now than there were when Labour came into office. Partly, that reflects a reduction in the inactivity rate. I think there have only been three years in the last 50 years where the employment rate has been higher than it is today. It is, of course, welcome that people are putting them…”

“I wouldn’t say that they are medium-term measures, because they are things that are coming in this year. Let me address employment, and then energy. The youth guarantee scheme that I announced in the Budget last year comes in in the next couple of months, and that includes the job guarantee for young people who have be…”

“I will say it then. [Laughter.] We have to design the scheme and make sure it functions properly.”

“If you look at the OBR forecast and the things the OBR have taken into account, they have taken into account, for example, our increase in capital spending. As I say, that will have a positive impact on the size of the economy. The OBR have also taken into account some of our planning reforms and are saying that they h…”

“I don’t believe in a trickle-down economic theory of growth, where you make better-off people a bit better off and eventually that affects the ordinary person in your Basingstoke constituency or my Leeds West and Pudsey constituency. I believe that growth comes from the bottom up, and the middle out, and that if workin…”

“From the beginning of April, the new state pension is going to go up by £575 a year, and over the course of this Parliament, it is forecast that the new state pension will be £2,000 a year higher by the end of the forecast, because of this Government’s commitment to the triple lock. The previous Government froze the in…”

“And I would say to businesses providing heating oil that it is not right to say that you will only sell in large quantities at the moment. That is not fair on customers, and I would encourage consumers to push back and to shop around in circumstances where they are being told they can only buy a large quantity at a ver…”

“What I would say is that we are much too early, less than two weeks into the conflict, to have any certainty about what things would look like when the next energy price cap is determined at the end of May, for July, and we will work flat out to try and de-escalate this conflict and crucially, from an economic perspect…”

“Thank you very much for that story. I think all of us will have in our mind somebody we have met. I remember meeting a woman a long way from my constituency, down on the south coast in Worthing. Between her and her husband they had five or six jobs; they had a young child and lived in private rented accommodation. The …”

“A Chancellor’s job is to get the balance right between public spending, taxation and borrowing. I have been really clear that, to return stability to the economy, we cannot continue to borrow at the levels that I inherited. The result of the actions I have taken—whether that is spending restraint or indeed the tax incr…”

“It is much too soon to start speculating.”

“It is already the case that most pensioners with any form of private income are taxed. We want, of course, to make that as simple as possible but, over the course of this Parliament—when we are in office—we will not be taxing people whose only income is from the new state pension.”

“Yes—they set this out to your Committee yesterday. We have to be mindful of not only the public finances but family finances because, everything else being equal, if the Government spend more, there will be more demand pressure in the economy that pushes up inflation higher. I am really proud to be the Chancellor that …”

“As I have already confirmed, we are looking at all eventualities, but the root cause of this is the challenge in getting oil and gas out of the middle east, so the best way to deal with this is to address that at the root.”

“Last year we were the fastest growing European country in the G7, and that is also forecast to be the case this year; but the truth is that growth, both here and around the world, especially in the advanced economies, is not as strong as we would like it to be, which is why I have always said that growth is the No. 1 m…”

“Just in general, I do not want the Treasury to be a Department that second-guesses other Departments. It relates to the earlier question about SEND. The Treasury is there not to mark the homework of Government Departments, but to work with them to properly understand the assessments. I do not want a Home Office impact …”

“It is too early to say exactly, but we have no evidence from HMRC to suggest that it is either higher or lower than that amount. We are monitoring closely. The OBR has done two more forecasts since then and has not changed its assessment either.”