Speeches by Reeves.

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

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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—”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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, …”

“And of course it is right that it looks at all those people. That is not suggesting that we think any of those people are responsible, but everybody who had access to this information should rightly be part of that leak inquiry.”

“The OBR look at the interaction of policies when they look at the indirect effects of the Budget package as a whole, so they are taken into account in the forecast. The distributional analysis obviously takes into account all the policies and how they interact with each other.”

“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.”

“Yes—the answer to John Glen’s question.”

“Yes, I agree with the permanent secretary.”

“Of course, we look at these things ourselves, but the numbers that are published, including the indirect effects—”

“Well, yes. We look at things like the sectoral impact of policies, so the impact of policies on families with children, on pensioner households—”

“On 4 November, I gave a speech where I set out my priorities for the Budget: to cut the cost of living, to cut NHS waiting lists and to cut the debt and the deficit. I was clear in that speech that I wanted to build more resilient public finances, with the headroom to withstand global turbulence. As you saw when I deli…”

“I do not want to give you a number without being able to check.”

“Yes, and I and my team of officials are very clear about the Macpherson principles. Of course, as I said yesterday in Parliament, I did not disclose confidential information. As I have also been clear, there have been leaks, and that is why we have set up a leak inquiry, and why we are doing this work. That investigati…”

“As I have just said, Dame Meg, there were leaks that were clearly not authorised. That is very serious, which is why this review is going on. If you would like me to address specifically the issues on 13 November, I am very happy to do so.”