Speeches by Reeves.

“Yes. That is why my colleague Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has announced reforms to the apprenticeship programmes, for example. She has relaxed the requirements around maths and English at GCSE for foundational apprenticeships, to expand the number of apprenticeships that we are able to offer. It is why…”

“We have committed to technical excellence colleges, one in each region of England, because we want to be building homes in all parts of the country. We have ambitious targets: 1.5 million new homes built in England during the course of this Parliament. We were really pleased to see that, in their forecast, the OBR scor…”

“May I say something first? It is the mayor of Merseyside, Steve Rotheram, who has mentioned this to me more than anyone else, both when we were in opposition and since we were elected to Government last year. I recognise from conversations that I have had with many of our mayors that the tyranny of the BCR does have a …”

“Thank you very much for that question. We want to see economic growth. It is important for the competitiveness of our country and for improving living standards. Economic growth is also crucial to provide the money we need for our public services, as well as for reforming them. There is no better proof of that than the…”

“There are some measurement issues on RHDI per head, but we are determined to ensure that that growth benefits all parts of the country. Will, do you want to say anything more about that? William Macfarlane expressed dissent.”

“Yes. Let me first give you the numbers in pounds, and then I will say a bit about percentage of GDP. The fiscal rules that we are using as a Government are: first, a stability rule, so we have to pay for day-to-day spending through tax receipts; and secondly, the need to bring down debt and public sector net financial …”

“I think you can tell how keen I am to make sure that we invest in our infrastructure. That is also why we are using means such as the national wealth fund to leverage in private sector investment. Capital spending is 2.4% of GDP in the final year of the forecast, and actually higher in some other years.”

“Thank you. I was underselling what we are doing. It is forecast to be 2.7% earlier in the Parliament and 2.4% in the last year, rather than the 1.6% that we inherited. In addition, the national wealth fund is leveraging in private sector money. Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England and now Prime Minis…”

“Yes. The idea of that fund is that it leverages in three times as much private investment as the public investment that we put in.”

“It has to do a bit of both. You can see from the remit letters that I have given to the financial services regulators, and the work that the Prime Minister has led on better regulation, that we are saying that we should regulate for growth, not just for risk. That is important. If you only cared about risk, you would n…”

“Actually, I met with Quantexa yesterday. It is one of the UK’s massive success stories—a unicorn firm. Its series C or series D funding got £10 million from the British Business Bank. It has just done its series F funding, and I think that raised £200 million, including more money from the British Business Bank. The pe…”

“You started by talking about the IMF. The IMF are very supportive of what we did in the Budget last year to put the public finances back on a firm footing. They were also very supportive of the fiscal rules that we announced, both to bring stability to the public finances but also to unlock private investment. I was ve…”

“I absolutely accept that there are costs to any policy, whether it is on spending or tax, but there are also costs to irresponsibility. Just imagine if, last October, I had not taken the action that we did—to put the public finances on a firm footing and put more money into the NHS, which has seen, for five months in a…”

“Yes, but if we had not made those decisions last October in the Budget, there would have been other demands on those budgets. You say, “Only by doing that”—I am afraid your party had 14 years to put more money into defence, and money on defence spending fell.”

“I have said that of course there are always costs to any policy on tax or spending, but there is also the cost of the counterfactual. The counterfactual would have been leaving the public finances on an unfirm footing, to embed the instability bequeathed to us by the previous Government. It would also have meant furthe…”

“It is from the OBR numbers; I already gave that answer to Yuan Yang. If you take the spring Budget of the previous Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, and compare the OBR’s forecast for real household disposable income at that time with the forecast that the OBR published last week, and if you look at RHDI per year, every year, a…”

“Well, if you look at us compared to Germany and France, I think we have moved in line with our peers. That is what the Office for Budget Responsibility confirm. Look, when I became Chancellor national debt was twice as high as when Labour left office in 2010. As a result of that, we are spending £105.3 billion on debt …”

“And a mini-Budget that crashed the economy—both of those things.”

“As I said in my answer to Dame Harriett’s question, of course there are always consequences of any tax changes that a Government makes—”

“As I say, I speak to businesses on a regular basis, including at a breakfast I hosted this morning with some of the UK’s biggest exporters. If we had not taken the decisions that we made, we would not have been able to ensure the stability of the public finances. When you lose control of the public finances, interest r…”