Speeches by Reeves.

“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.”

“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…”

“I increased taxes by £40 billion in the Budget last year, and I do not remember any party clamouring for more tax increases. In fact, I think the Liberal Democrats opposed most of the ones that we are trying to take forward. I think we got the balance about right last year, but I was really clear that one of the object…”

“Nothing if not predictable.”

“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…”

“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.”

“We want to make sure that we get things right. For the high value council tax, for example, we are revaluing properties in bands G and H. That cannot be done for next spring or the spring after. Similarly, with things like electric vehicle excise duty, eVED, those changes cannot come in overnight. I think that everyone…”

“When people come back and say, “Well, that was the case in the spring”—”

“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…”

“Headroom went as low as £6.5 billion in the last Parliament. I built it up to £9.9 billion in my Budget last year and in the spring statement. I felt that that was the right approach, but obviously since then we have had a number of global shocks, whether shocks to trade, ongoing conflicts or disruptions to supply chai…”

“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…”

“That is not the case.”

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

“Yes.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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—”

“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—”