Speeches by Reeves.

“Yes, and—”

“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 …”

“That was part of the agreement in the spending review, that for this spending review period, that would be absorbed. The costs are actually quite low in the first couple of years, and that was part of the spending review settlement. But obviously, at future spending reviews—”

“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.…”

“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.”

“We have been consulting on this for around a year, and I think that is a good way to make policy. We have spoken to all the different stakeholders, and there were lots of things going on. We decided not to do anything about in-person betting or horseracing, and we have entirely taken tax off bingo because there are lot…”

“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…”

“Obviously, these taxes apply whether the company is offshore or not, because it is a tax on the bet. Again, that was an important design of this policy—that you cannot just relocate overseas to get out of paying that tax. We are also making it relatively more attractive to do betting in real life, rather than online. T…”

“Obviously, everything in the next spending review will be set out in the next spending review.”

“What I did in the Budget was to increase by 2 percentage points the basic rates on dividend, savings and property income, and I made some changes to the additional and higher rates as well. I think that is the right thing to do. An increase of 2 percentage points is quite a big increase in the tax rate on any form of i…”

“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 …”

“Obviously, if you go out to work, you pay national insurance, and you do not pay national insurance on other forms of income, but we have taken action in this Budget to narrow the gap between those different forms of income.”

“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 if you have any ideas, we are always in the market, Mr Dean. We have already done a lot of work in this area, but the job is not done; while there is a gap between the tax that is due and the tax that is paid, there is more work to do, so of course we will carry on looking at all of those.”

“We have set the level of eVED at half the rate we get from fuel duty. I think that is the right balance, because we want to incentivise the roll-out of electric vehicles, for reasons that are well understood. We have no plans to increase it further, and we would not do so until the move to electric vehicles is well sec…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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—”

“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…”

“We have frozen it until September next year. At the same time, from early in the new year, we are introducing something new, called the fuel finder. That work has been led by the Competition and Markets Authority, and it is something other countries already do. It means that real-time information will be available on f…”