Speeches by Lowe.

“Thank you for answering my questions. Unlike a lot of people, I genuinely think that if you make things easier for businesses, you will collect more tax. The more aggressive and opaque you are in everything you do, the more you will effectively close down Britain. I am a great believer in the Laffer curve, which you ma…”

“Quarterly, not annually. That is what you are asking for.”

“They are expensive for people to gather. In my experience of HMRC—again, I asked some parliamentary questions on this—it takes you 26 and a half minutes to answer your telephones, or it did in 2024-25, whereas it took the DWP eight minutes to answer theirs. That says a lot about the people paying the tax compared to th…”

“But you don’t slim it down, do you, Jonathan? I do not think it gets slimmed down.”

“I am talking about large businesses. If you look at this chart, either they are making errors because it is so complicated or their legal interpretation does not agree with what HMRC’s rulebook is saying. There is your issue. That is a burden on our businesses. It is a massive burden, Clive—massive. They have to engage…”

“And responsibilities.”

“I have used my allotted time. I can hear the Chair getting nervous that I am burning too much of it, but I would like to see you seriously reappraise whether you are going to fail here—now is the time to do it. If you are, you have to be honest with the taxpayer, because otherwise they are going to end up footing this …”

“The DFE, too.”

“But who is in overall charge? Who is going to get fired?”

“You did not, because you were not there.”

“But Jerome, you have been there a month—you just said so. You are in charge now, but this has been going on a long time, has it not?”

“But moving to cloud-based systems is not going to solve this problem, Jerome.”

“Thank you for that. You were quite right when you said earlier that this is a time for major reflection; I think it is. You should look, as I did, at the case of the Office for National Statistics—I don’t know whether you know what happened with the Office for National Statistics—because I think they are a microcosm of…”

“I don’t think the NAO would agree with you, from the Report.”

“Thank you, Chair. It is rare for me to start, so thank you for picking me first. Good morning, everyone. I will start by reading a few lines from the Report—just a few little lines I picked out from the summary alone: “significant gaps remain”; “buy-in uncertain”; “no clear owner”; “Engagement…has been inconsistent”; “…”

“So you are happy with progress. I think being efficient means doing things well, regardless of importance. And being effective means doing important things well. I read this Report, and all of the witnesses that were going to be here today—they have been changed for various reasons; Cat Little is not here, although I d…”

“Chair, I think that note needs to look at both cost and operational benefits, because the two are entirely separate.”

“Nathan, I am hearing you. Thank you for that but, to Jerome’s point, the clusters don’t always agree with what you are telling us here. If you read the Report, the clusters contradicted what was said. The NAO uncovered that, as they usually do in their excellent Reports, so that is not entirely consistent. If you can’t…”

“T3. Women all over Britain, including in my constituency of Great Yarmouth, primarily on King Street, feel intimidated, harassed and abused in their town centres. Disproportionately, this unacceptable behaviour is committed by young foreign men imported from cultures and religions that treat women like dirt on the bott…”

“I think we would agree about that. Having run a Premier League football club, I know about the east-west rivalries—particularly the Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds rivalries, which are always very powerful. I do not think that we disagree on what you are saying, but we might disagree in that I think the job of the Gove…”