Lord Livermore (Lab)

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his last comment and I obviously say the same to him. I am also grateful to him for raising the £22 billion black hole again. He is possibly the only Member of this House who mentions it more often than I do and he will be absolutely aware of the outcome of the OBR’s review. It conducted a review into a meeting it had with the Treasury on 8 February, when the Government were obliged under the law to disclose all unfunded pressure against the reserve. The OBR’s review has established that, at that point, the Government concealed £9.5 billion. The OBR made 10 recommendations to stop this ever happening again, which this Government have accepted in full. But, of course, the previous Government still had five more months left in office and they continued to amass unfunded commitment after unfunded commitment that they did not disclose. By July, records show that that had reached £22 billion. The noble Lord asked a number of subsequent questions and I simply ask him: is he seriously saying that we should not have repaired the public finances? Is that his serious contention? That is absolutely what the Liz Truss mini-Budget did and we saw exactly how that ended up.