Speeches by Reeves.

“It is then up to the Department how to spend it. As I said in a previous answer, as a Government we do not want to micromanage Departments from the Treasury. As brilliant as my officials are, I do not believe that the Treasury always knows best.”

“This might be a radical change: trusting colleagues in other Departments. Mr Glen might have some questions about that.”

“We wanted to make sure that we understood the skills and the qualities that we were looking for in a new chair.”

“Well, you have seen the job description.”

“One of the things that I did in the Budget last year was to get rid of the two-child limit in the universal credit system, which lifts almost half a million children out of poverty. It was the biggest thing we could have done to change the trajectories, the lives, of some of the poorest children in the country. Obvious…”

“One of the things that we have been working on with the other two members of the BRC is what the role is of the OBR and the BRC, and how they do their forecasts. We have done that work and have now advertised this role. We always knew that we would not have a new chair in for the spring forecast, but we will for the ne…”

“I think applications close at the end of this month.”

“The key reason that we want to build 1.5 million homes is that we want young people and first-time buyers to be able to realise the dream of home ownership. Also, we want more social and affordable housing, including council housing, so that people who are privately renting can have greater security. That is also why w…”

“AI is already having a big effect on the economy. Some of the real-time data show that productivity has actually been pretty strong in the last year or so. We are still working through the numbers, as are other economists, but part of that will reflect a greater use of technology and AI in the economy, whether that is …”

“As Dharmesh Nayee said a minute ago, the numbers around people leaving are based on past data from the previous Parliament that is extrapolated going forward, rather than on information about what has happened in the last year. Dharmesh, do you want to elaborate?”

“It is, but we work together rather than having two different impact assessments.”

“We work on these things together.”

“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 …”

“There absolutely is when we lack specific skills in the UK, but that should also be a wake-up call that we should be training people up in those areas. If there is a part of the economy where we do not have the skills we need, we should be training up more people who are already here to do those jobs and benefit from t…”

“Where there are genuine gaps in the workforce, the immigration system and the rules are exactly there to make sure that we plug them. But we have too many young people, particularly, who are not working at the moment, and we need to do more to make sure that they have the skills to match the job opportunities that exis…”

“Britain has already attracted many global tech companies to this country, and we are also growing our existing businesses. One of the points of the pensions reform, for example, is to enable innovative businesses that are starting in this country to scale in this country. Changes to the listings rules and the tax incen…”

“In the spending review last year, we invested in things like sovereign compute and the biggest supercomputer up at Edinburgh university. Things like this are about ensuring that when a scale-up business or a multinational business thinks about where to invest, it chooses the UK, because that is where we get the jobs fr…”

“But there are also thousands and thousands of jobs being created every single day.”

“As in every wave of technological change in the world, you have never been able to hold on to the past. What you have to do is embrace the future. The Government have a key role in making sure that we skill people up. Take my city of Leeds: it was built along the canals with the mills. The mills now host great start-up…”

“No, actually. On the edge of my constituency is Castleton Mill, and in the centre of my constituency is Sunny Bank Mills, which employs as many people today as it did when it was a woollen mill, but now it is creatives and tech businesses.”