Speeches by Reeves.

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

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“It is about two things: good jobs paying decent wages—jobs in this sector are highly competitive in terms of their wages and are increasingly distributed across the UK—and the efficient allocation of capital to fast-growing sectors. I want British start-ups and scale-ups, like some of the ones we have mentioned in this…”

“If you are a saver into a pension scheme, you should see the benefit with better returns on your pension savings. If you are saving into a local government pension scheme, that money should work better for your local community. These changes will have an impact on people’s lives. Financial services is such an important…”

“Some of this is coming in this year.”

“Let me give you a couple of examples. We asked all the regulators, including the financial services ones, to come back with specific ideas that they could pursue to make the sector more competitive. The FCA, for example, suggested increasing the limit on contactless payments; also changing some of the rules around mort…”

“What she said in her statement was not contradicted by anything that was given to the Office for Budget Responsibility.”

“Yes. I set out a range of things to make financial services in the UK more competitive: the updated remit letters to the regulators, where we asked them to focus on regulating for growth, not just for investment—”

“In my Mansion House speech last November—”

“No, I certainly would not put it like that, but the US Administration are focused very clearly on improving the competitiveness of their economy; and as a global trading economy with a big financial services sector, we need to make sure that we remain competitive on that world stage if we are to secure jobs and investm…”

“I am sure that Sam Woods and Governor Andrew Bailey will also be in to give evidence. We are very much a supporter of high global standards. We also recognise that we operate in an internationally competitive environment, which is why at the end of last year the PRA announced that we will postpone the implementation of…”

“That is also a really important point. I think that you had the FCA and maybe the PRA in—”

“I am not going to disagree with its analysis, but obviously, we are looking ourselves and with the Department for Business and Trade at a whole range of possible scenarios and preparing for all different eventualities. I think the OBR is really clear that the biggest impact comes from global tariffs, not UK-specific on…”

“First of all, let us see how other countries and other trading blocs respond. I spoke to Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis just before I came to give evidence to this Committee today, and we are discussing with other countries and with the EU the appropriate response to whatever announcements are made later today. The Pr…”