Speeches by Reeves.

“We did want to have about the same amount of headroom; it was accident rather than design that it was exactly the same amount of headroom. I don’t want to take more credit—even Will Macfarlane could not have engineered that.”

“No, honestly, because we couldn’t, even if we wanted to—”

“I know, but I don’t have those superpowers. The OBR look at all the indirect effects and at how policies interact. We couldn’t, even if we had wanted to, engineer an exact amount of headroom. We were hoping for about the same; two decimal points was beyond what I had anticipated.”

“On the final package, when the Secretary of State, Liz Kendall, set out the welfare reforms to Parliament the week before the spring statement, she said that it would be a package of measures worth around £5 billion, but that the final costings would be done by the OBR, as is right and proper. We were going through a s…”

“Because that is the figure that we chose in the Budget last year. We do recognise that headroom is necessary in an uncertain world. We didn’t want to see that erode. Some people were saying, “Don’t worry about the headroom. You can address it in the autumn.” I felt that that would be the wrong decision, because we have…”

“There is a balancing act, when you are doing a spring statement or a Budget, around what you want to do on taxes, on spending and on headroom. Everything else being equal, would we like more headroom? Of course we would. How do you achieve more headroom? Lower spending or more taxes. I felt that we got the balance righ…”

“We will approach the autumn Budget and think all that through. I was pleased we were able to achieve about the same amount of headroom this time. As I said, everything being equal, of course it would be nice to have more headroom, but that would require decisions that, as a Government, we weren’t willing to take—about …”

“The risks around the forecast—there are upside and downside risks—”

“No, but we are not passive as a Government, waiting for things to happen; we also have an agenda to grow the economy. Since the Budget, we have introduced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which has successfully got through its Second Reading—”

“No, but what I am saying, Chair, is that the Office for Budget Responsibility have already scored the national planning policy framework, which is a small part of the growth reforms that the Government are bringing forward. They rightly have not scored anything to do with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill because, a…”

“Indeed, and the Employment Rights Bill will put more money in people’s pockets, so there are upsides and downsides there. There are things—the Government are not passive; we are doing a number of things, such as the capital markets reform. I think everybody in this room recognises, because some of it draws on what the …”

“It would be nice to block him out.”

“To go back to the £30 billion of headroom, that would require £20 billion of tax increases. Actually, it would probably require more than £20 billion of tax increases, because if you do that, the OBR may well assume that the economy would therefore weaken, so you would need to do even more than that. Or you would need …”

“There would be numerous impacts if we increased borrowing and were not able to deliver economic and fiscal stability. The first is that the national debt, which is already almost the size of our economy, would grow larger still, and that would increase the servicing costs of that debt, which are already £105.3 billion …”

“Yes, and your constituents in Glasgow and mine in Leeds West and Pudsey do not need the OBR or their MP to tell them that, because it is what happened a few years ago. The cost of borrowing for businesses and families went through the roof, uncertainty was all around us, and it constrained the ability of our economy to…”

“In the Budget last year, we increased two broad types of tax. We increased national insurance on business, which we have already discussed, and we also increased taxes on the most wealthy. The reforms to the non-dom tax status will bring in £12 billion during the course of this Parliament. VAT on private schools will b…”

“Yes. It was consistent both with the Green Paper and with the Secretary of State’s statement to the House of Commons.”

“Some councils wanted to significantly increase their council tax this month. We have resisted calls from a number of councils—including Windsor and Maidenhead, and Slough—that wanted to increase their council tax significantly, because we recognise the ongoing pressures on living standards and the cost of living crisis…”

“That is not something that we are looking at at the moment.”

“All the officials in the Treasury who meet me know that I want to go further and faster on pretty much everything we are doing, including on the regulation agenda. We have taken out two regulators already. The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is abolishing the biggest quango in the world—NHS England—and we have set the…”