Speeches by Reeves.

“I am not surprised you do not want to hear about the previous Government. Nor do voters. There we are: a rare moment of agreement.”

“But not because of Government policy. It is because of the productivity downgrade based on the previous 14 years before we took office.”

“Which is what I am trying to do. We have returned stability to the economy, which has enabled the Bank of England to cut interest rates five times, and, as you will have seen, since the Budget a number of mortgage lenders have cut interest rates on mortgages. I think interest rates on mortgages are now lower than they …”

“Of course, the previous Government took taxes to a record high and saw interest rates go through the roof.”

“Shall I finish answering your question, Dame Harriett? You have asked about economic growth. You will know that in the spring, the OBR upgraded their growth forecast. It was the biggest upgrade to growth from a non-fiscal measure that the OBR, in its 15-year history now, has ever made. That reflected the changes we mad…”

“Yes, we have regular meetings with the growth mission board. I did not say in my answer to your question, as you suggested, that there were no growth measures in this Budget. Far from it. In the week of the Budget, we made further progress on the runway at Heathrow; we signed off the film studio in Marlow. Jamie Dimon,…”

“That is exactly—no, no, no. That is not what I said. Sorry, Dame Harriett—”

“Yes.”

“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 …”

“Not at all. The £22 billion black hole left by the previous Government, which we had to fill, was set out to me by Treasury officials on the weekend that I became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Then there was the £16 billion downgrade to productivity and the impact that that had on fiscal revenue. The Office for Budget R…”

“The Prime Minister and I met two or three times a week during the Budget process. That is not always the case between Chancellors and Prime Ministers—I recognise that—but there is a very close partnership between myself and the Prime Minister. We took him through all the numbers and options, and we decided it together,…”

“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.…”

“First of all—we have been through this a number of times—there was new information after the general election: first, the £22 billion black hole in the public finances left by the previous Government.”

“The productivity downgrade by 0.3 percentage points took £16 billion off headroom in the final year. Obviously, it has bigger impacts than that, because the impacts are not just on fiscal revenue. The impacts are also felt in people’s wage packets, or certainly the forecast for those future wage packets, because produc…”

“Yes, and—”

“Yes, there was, and the reason for that is that the OBR do costings of all the changes that we are making, as well as there being interactions between the tax measures and other economic variables, whether those be GDP, consumption or inflation, so all of this was changing. It was a big Budget—I think we can all agree …”

“Thank you very much for that question. The growth rate of RHDI per capita is expected to be positive in every year of the forecast, but you are right to say—this reflects the answer that I gave to, I think, John Grady earlier—that the impact of the productivity downgrade is not just a fiscal impact. That is the one tha…”

“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 …”

“A couple of things. First of all, in the speech on 4 November, I was very clear that everyone would have to make a contribution, and you saw that in the Budget on 26 November: we froze, for an additional three years, the tax thresholds—national insurance and income tax—that the previous Government had frozen for seven …”

“Of course there are always other options available. There are a number of policies leading up to the Budget that we cost. As the Prime Minister has been clear—”