Speeches by Reeves.

“If you are referring to public sector pay, the remits given to the independent pay review bodies were given by the previous Government, not this Government, and when evidence of affordability was given, no number was given around what was affordable, which, from my understanding, was pretty unprecedented. The independe…”

“On 29 July I set out £5.5 billion of savings against that £22 billion, and in the Budget we announced, for example, £4.3 billion in the biggest ever package of savings on welfare fraud and error. We are making savings—we have made savings—but that financial pressure still exists.”

“We have now published the line-by-line account of the £22 billion. That was published alongside the Budget last week, and it was those numbers that I was taken through on that first weekend.”

“Yes. My first meeting at the Treasury was on 5 July—the Friday afternoon. We then worked all weekend, and it was on that weekend that the £22 billion number was put to me, when I became Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

“Yes, that first weekend when I became Chancellor.”

“We knew there were big pressures coming down the line. What we didn’t know was that they were in the fiscal year that had already started. That was the big surprise—the baseline that we were starting from did not reflect the true spending pressures. We asked the Office for Budget Responsibility to make recommendations …”

“It was not known going into the election; it was something that was given to me when I became Chancellor that weekend—the £6.4 billion overspend this fiscal year, and that was a number that was increasing, not decreasing. The second biggest component of that £22 billion overspend was £1.9 billion of payments to private…”

“We have published now the line-by-line breakdown of it, but one of the two of the biggest components of it was a £6.4 billion unfinanced pressure in asylum. This was not just a pressure; this was something that was being paid for every month with no plan to bring it down—in fact, it was rising.”

“Thank you very much, Chair. When I arrived at the Treasury that first weekend, it was made really clear to me that the starting point for my inheritance was not the forecast in the Budget from March, and that the actual spending that was happening was significantly higher than that. You can see that in the monthly publ…”

“At the moment, we are the only G20 economy with private investment of less than 20% of GDP. The way we are structuring our capital spending, particularly through the national wealth fund, will crowd in private investment, so you should see the two together. That is why what Will Macfarlane was saying is really importan…”

“Yes. There are a number of what we call guardrails around the investment rule—getting public sector net financial liabilities, or public sector net debt for short, down as a share of GDP. The first of those guardrails is strengthening the role of institutions to improve infrastructure delivery—which I know the Chair ha…”

“Public sector net worth would have created even more space, but I think public sector net financial liabilities is a target that is already measured. It has been measured since 2016 by the Office for National Statistics, and it has been forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility as well since 2016. I would not qu…”

“Yes. There is a whole spectrum of acronyms to choose from—”

“There are two types of capital investment that we prioritised in the Budget last week. The first part was those things where we can really crowd in private investment and look to grow our economy and exploit—seize—some of those huge opportunities. Probably the best example of that was what we have done around carbon ca…”

“We’re not in that world, and I’m not going to speculate.”

“Yes—I was just going to make a joke at my own expense, actually: the Mais lecture was the longest speech I ever gave until I delivered my Budget. On the issue around African debt and the debt crisis, as one of the largest providers of official development assistance across the G7, I do think we are playing our part in …”

“One of the really important innovations with the Office for Budget Responsibility is the longer-term forecasts. I think those are so important to try and foster—not just for this Government, but for future Governments—a longer-term approach to policy making. It is no good just doing things that will speed up a bit of g…”

“Thank you very much for your question. Securonomics is about building strong growth on stable foundations. The most important thing is bringing back economic stability, because we know that a lack of certainty about the path of economic policy creates the instability that inhibits investment. Securonomics is also about…”

“I think we absolutely have to be doing that, but these things also have to be led by Departments. They should not be led by the Treasury. If a Department does a zero-based review and has a hierarchy of the importance of things, then surely you would rather get rid of things at the bottom of the list to be able to do mo…”

“And so they should be. If things are not priorities and other things are greater priorities, we should put more resource and more time and effort into things that are priorities. That requires difficult decisions, because there will always be, understandably, vested interests to defend the things that already exist.”