Lord Livermore (Lab)

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his very generous comments; I hold him in equally high regard and have enormous respect for him and his expertise in this matter. I do not think, however, that what he says is in any way inevitable. He talks about the impact of this Budget on growth. As he will know, yesterday the OBR upgraded its growth forecast from 2026 onwards for every single year of the forecast. For the first time, the OBR has recognised one of the major planks of our growth strategy—the planning and infrastructure work we are doing. It says there will be a permanent increase in growth of 0.2% by 2029, and 0.4% over the course of the decade. So the impact on growth of yesterday’s Spring Statement was positive. The noble Lord talks about the risks. Of course there are risks. The OBR set out various scenarios for various risks, but the planning upgrade shows that there are also upside risks, as it were, in terms of growth. It shows that tax and spending is not the only way of meeting our fiscal rules; we can use growth to meet them, as yesterday’s planning announcement shows. It reduced the deficit by £3 billion in 2029 and as a result, there was growth of 0.2%. So I do not take what the noble Lord says as an absolute. Of course there are risks, and we are planning for those. We have rebuilt the headroom and eliminated the black hole in public finances, as he knows. That is an incredibly important way to set us up for the future.