Speeches by Reeves.

“Yes, and—”

“No, the average is 4%, and there is a cap of 15%.”

“There are not many young people who can put aside £20,000 a year in savings—I think we all know that. The biggest challenge for young people today is getting a job that pays a decent wage, not whether they can access the full £20,000 of ISA savings. The reason we put in that age limit is that as you get older, the time…”

“Let me set out what is happening with business rates, because there are a couple of things happening at the same time. The last time that the valuation office looked at the rateable values of property was in 2021, and of course that was in the middle of the pandemic. Many rateable values fell sharply during the pandemi…”

“I think the deputy governor was a bit clearer than that. I think she gave evidence to the Committee yesterday saying that next year there will be 0.4 to 0.5 percentage points off inflation because of the measures in the Budget.”

“Fifteen per cent is the cap. That is the highest it can be.”

“As you will know from your time at the Treasury, pre-measures is not the final word from the Office for Budget Responsibility; you have post-measures forecasts as well. The post-measures forecasts take into account the policy decisions that we take as a Government on tax and spend, and the OBR rightly do their own anal…”

“I was very up-front in my speech in Parliament, when I delivered the Budget, that that would mean everyone was having to contribute, in exactly the way that I set out in my speech on 4 November. So I very much stand by the speech I made. I said in that speech that we were going to cut the cost of living, and we did: 0.…”

“No—”

“I hope that you see, in this Budget and last year’s Budget, that, due primarily to the work of the former Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury—who is now the Chief Secretary to the Treasury—and the new Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, we have done some really good work on cracking down on tax avoidance and closing l…”

“In the last few years, pension savings have increased, primarily because of automatic enrolment into pensions—I think about 11 million people who were not previously saving for pensions are now doing so. I think that, over the last few years, the cost of living has put pressure on how much people can put in to save for…”

“Those were the two options that were available. As the Prime Minister has subsequently said, we did look at whether we needed to increase the rates of income tax, given our concerns around the forecast and particularly the productivity downgrade, which took £16 billion off in terms of revenues in the final year of the …”

“We have set up the Pensions Commission—the Minister for Pensions has done that—which will look at these issues. But I want to be very clear that people can still use salary sacrifice to save for a pension, and they will still get pensions tax relief—which is the usual way of saving for a pension—so pensions tax relief …”

“That is not entirely correct. The £16 billion is the result of a productivity downgrade. Because of higher wage inflation and price inflation, there were also higher tax revenues, but higher inflation is not a good thing, because, of course, that erodes the spending power of Government. I would not characterise it as, …”

“No, the focus on this was around the tax treatment for pension savings, because—”

“Yes, and as part of the financial inclusion strategy that my colleague Lucy Rigby, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, introduced, we are introducing—including at primary schools—better education on budgeting and saving. That is an important part of it, but the advice and guidance reforms are things that people hav…”

“Of course, we wanted to reduce that inflation, which is exactly what we did, as the deputy governor of the Bank said to you yesterday, with 0.4 to 0.5 percentage points off inflation next year.”

“I said in my speech on 4 November that everyone would have to contribute. We were able to keep that contribution as low as we did by using a range of more progressive taxes such as the high value council tax, the gambling tax and tax on dividends on property.”

“The Prime Minister has been clear that that was one of the things that we looked at, but we were also looking at the tax thresholds. In the end, because of the decisions we made on higher value council tax, property, dividends and a number of other measures, we were able to keep the contribution from working people as …”

“Yes, I agree with the permanent secretary.”