Speeches by Reeves.

“I believe in the numbers that I set out in my Budget. A lot of people had views of what I was going to do in my Budget and whether I would be able to live within the means set in my Budgets, but we have consistently done that, and we have increased the headroom. We also set out, just before the summer recess, our spend…”

“We have now made those settlements. When I became Chancellor, there had not been a spending review for a number of years. We had negotiations. We came to the settlement in the spending review, and Departments are now living within those settlements. That should give the confidence that is needed to show that we will be…”

“The OBR is clear about some of the reasons for the productivity downgrade, as I said to Mr Murphy—the Brexit deal, the pandemic and the decisions of the previous Government. The plans I inherited from the previous Government would have seen capital spending as a share of GDP fall from, I think, 2.5% to 1.9%. We have ma…”

“I think it is best if Chancellors do not get into commenting on the bond markets. I will say that we were very focused on those issues when we put together the Budget package, both on increasing the fiscal headroom—which goes from £9.9 billion to £21.7 billion—and on fiscal consolidation. I recognise that that fiscal c…”

“Ah, but one of the differences is that in the early years, we had an immediate uplift in spending to end the fiscal fiction, frankly, that previously existed in the forecasts. Similarly, we have protected the CDEL budget, so if you look at TDEL, it is a slightly different picture. The reason we have done that is—”

“I have always been really clear that in the end, we have to grow our economy to deliver the money that we need to keep increasing living standards and deliver our public services, which is why growth is the No. 1 priority of this Government. As we saw, if you just had 0.3% higher productivity growth, which would transl…”

“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 …”

“Yes.”

“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.”

“We will definitely look at that.”

“Not consequential of this Budget, Mr Glen, and I want to be really clear about that. The OBR says explicitly that the productivity downgrade is not because of any of the decisions this Government have made. In fact, it has scored positively both the CDEL—the capital spending—and the planning reforms.”

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

“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…”

“Dame Harriett, I recognise that businesses are crunching through all the numbers now, and I would urge all businesses, and also parliamentarians when we are interacting, to make sure that businesses understand the transitional relief. I know there have been a number of businesses that have seen the headlines without un…”

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

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

“I think it is the first time I have had a conversation with you when you have not, but I will address your actual question. The distribution analysis that we published alongside the Budget shows that every income decile, except for the top, is better off through the measures that we have taken in the last two Budgets, …”

“If there is one thing we know about you, Mr Coghlan, it is that you care very much about R&D, and rightly so. I was very pleased, in the spending review, to be able to increase R&D spending in real terms during the course of this Parliament. I said earlier that the OBR took into account our CDEL spending, which include…”

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

“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,…”