Speeches by Bell.

“The nature of our model is that you have an Office for Budget Responsibility that will draw on expertise across Departments. That is unavoidable. The only way not to be in that situation is not to have it producing the fiscal forecast that underpins the Budget, given the sheer range of inputs to an official forecast.”

“Absolutely, it is required to assess as reasonable all government costings.”

“I was enjoying that. I was waiting for the link to the Office for Budget Responsibility.”

“The Chancellor partially agreed with you when she came and spoke to this Committee in January or February, in the sense that the process in the autumn was not what you would want. That is true in terms of the leaking of the EFO on the morning of the Budget, which is why we are recruiting a new chair in the first place,…”

“It would not achieve the objective that you have just set out in its own terms. If you are arguing that publishing more details earlier than a Budget would lead to less speculation, that is an odd argument to run for anyone who has met the British debate.”

“It depends on what that means. I would just go back to where you started. What is the actual thing that is constraining Governments? It is the substance of fiscal policymaking in a more different world where we have inherited higher debt levels from the previous Government, and then on top of that we have seen those de…”

“I am not sure I agree with that characterisation, but I take your general point, which is that there was more speculation than you would like to see. Some of that, as I say, leads to changes inside the Treasury on our control of information. Some of that is driven by wider things outside of the control of Government. W…”

“That is a clearer case. I just do not agree with that at all. We should be clear. Let me answer your question, John. There is a difference between a forecast, which is the basis for detailed fiscal policymaking, and the ability of politicians—we all believe in a political debate as the way in which we get to outcomes—t…”

“That would have been very good news for me in my previous life. You would be providing journalists, think-tanks and the rest lots of content and they would spend the entire autumn talking about nothing else. It would achieve the opposite of what you are suggesting.”

“We are changing how we do things. That is exactly what the information security review was looking at. All its recommendations are being put into place with tighter security. I agree with what you have said, and the answer is that we are acting.”

“I would point to lots of foreign investors investing heavily in the UK.”

“They absolutely should have the autonomy, and they do.”

“I am not sure I am quite following the actual line of argument.”

“No. My honest view is that the Conservative Party let us pass the reserve power, exactly as we said it needed to be, to deliver exactly the objective that we said, and then attempted to redefine what had happened to save face about having let a Bill pass that included something that it said was the end of the world but…”

“I do not expect Government to need to use those powers because pension schemes themselves have recognised that investing in a wider range of assets, as we see in every pension system, including in the UK and abroad, is the right thing to be doing for the interests of their members. There is a huge amount of literature …”

“Let me say a number of things to your slightly fair question.”

“I said “slightly fair”, which is a fair characterisation.”

“You did not cross into the unfair category. The Labour manifesto sets out very clearly what we will do when it comes to the triple lock throughout this Parliament. That is what we are going to do and that is the right thing to do because it was in our manifesto. That is particularly important when you have around 1 mil…”

“I did not get to work with her because she replaced me. I have worked with her in previous lives, but let me come on to answer your question directly. In how you think about that, you should distinguish between the mechanism of the triple lock and the policy outcome. The mechanism—I would probably choose the adjective …”

“That is a highly political question. We should all be taking that seriously. Our responsibility is in making sure that we argue the case for the institutions that we believe underpin good policymaking and the long-term prosperity of the United Kingdom. It is relatively minor in the grand scale of things, but that inclu…”