Speeches by Reeves.

“Let me start by answering your question directly about paying the bill, when there is a bill, and then I will take you through how the numbers stack up. I want to be clear that, for estates where there is going to be an inheritance tax bill, that bill can be paid over a 10-year period, interest free. That doesn’t exist…”

“It would be naive to try and get—you started this session, Mr Glen, with uncertainties about what is happening in the global economy. I am not going to write five years’ worth of Budgets now, but we have drawn a line under the unrealistic path for public spending and the trajectory for public finances and put those on …”

“This Budget was a reset Budget. We are not going to be repeating a Budget like this again—”

“These are things that absolutely, in the second stage of the spending review, we want to do more of. I will go back to the points I made earlier to the Chair’s question about this. In the second phase of the spending review, we are going to be looking from the bottom up with a zero-based approach to make sure that we a…”

“We have now set the envelope for spending for this Parliament, and we are not going to be coming back with more tax increases or, indeed, with more borrowing. We now need to live within the means that we have set ourselves in the Budget and those allocations of spending totals. In terms of what that package means, day-…”

“We have done a 3.2% real-terms increase for local government, including £600 million in additional money for social care. That is phase 1 of the spending review. As the Health Secretary has said, in the spring we will be setting out the 10-year plan for health, which includes looking at social care.”

“Let me say this: you have spoken particularly about health services. As you know, we made a £22.6 billion commitment for day-to-day spending over the one-and-a-half to two-year period in the Budget last week. The Health Secretary is making allocations in the usual way for GPs, for example. For local government, there w…”

“Thank you for that question. First of all, that is the approach that Governments take when making compensation, otherwise you would be making arbitrary decisions around what is public and what is private. This is the definition of what the public sector is and that is what is being compensated for.”

“What I am saying is that there are other ways to raise this money. We could have frozen thresholds for longer and on a wider range of taxes. I do not think that was the right approach. Again, a lot of people were speculating—and arguing—that we should have frozen income tax and national insurance thresholds for a furth…”

“I want to answer the earlier question about whether there were other choices. As I said, we could have reversed the cut to employee national insurance contributions, but I think that would have been the wrong thing to do. Another thing that we could have done, which is what the previous Government did to raise money, w…”

“Let me say something about that, and then I want to answer the earlier question about choices. As you rightly said, we did have choices about the way in which to plug the gap. The way that the Treasury has always done its analysis looks at direct taxes on people, and the impact of spending decisions on people, because …”

“That is 2.A.”

“It is really important to note that there is a floor beneath which wages cannot fall, and that has just gone up by 6.7% in the national living wage increase, and it has gone up by more for workers aged between 18 and 21. The lowest-paid workers will not see any of the national insurance increase passed on to them, beca…”

“Thank you very much. We have not had a chance to work together before, and I look forward to taking questions from you today and in future on this Select Committee. Congratulations on your election. I am not going to dispute the independent analysis of the Office for Budget Responsibility. I have a huge amount of respe…”

“We’ll not be doing that.”

“It is baked in, as it was for the previous Government, but it did not feel, given the cost of living challenges that families and businesses continue to face and given the uncertainty in the middle east, that it was the right policy approach at the moment.”

“We are not looking at road pricing. I think you make a fair challenge. At the moment, though, the focus is on trying to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. We have fallen behind the target that the previous Government set for the roll-out of electric vehicles, and that has an impact on manufacturers, which will b…”

“I am not going to write five years’ worth of Budgets—I have just written one! I would say that the commitments that we made in our manifesto, around income tax, employee national insurance, VAT and capping corporation tax at its current rate, are for the duration of this Parliament.”

“It was one of the many things that was put to me as an option. It is not something that we wanted to take forward. People have gone through a massive cost of living crisis in the last few years, and increasing council tax above the 5% increase a year that the previous Government capped it at would not be the right appr…”

“I am not suggesting that they should have been settled before the election, but what I am saying is that those pressures were well known by the Government at the time of the general election.”