Sir Mel Stride

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. That brings me to another point, which is that the Chancellor has taken a conscious decision to reduce the headroom, in the primary target, from around £24 billion to £15 billion. That is a mistake. If he had taken the radical measures necessary to get on top of public spending, particularly the welfare bill, he could have increased the headroom. He talks about the risks ahead—that is the very reason why we have the buffer of that headroom. If we have low headroom, we end up paying a premium on the debt servicing costs to which my right hon. Friend just referred. The average headroom that Chancellors have come forward with since the instigation of the OBR runs at about 1.4% of GDP. In today’s terms, that would be about £40 billion of headroom. We are now down to £15 billion. Members across the House should therefore not be surprised if the Chancellor comes back at a future date and tells us, just as was the case with his predecessor, that the headroom has entirely evaporated, once again, because of reasons beyond his control. This is a mañana Budget. This is a Budget kicks the can down the road. When the Chancellor resigned as Secretary of State for Defence, he made it very clear that his resignation from Government was nothing to do with the defenestration of the previous Prime Minister, and was instead a matter of principle: he did not believe that our country was going to be adequately protected as a result of not coming up with the money to fund the 3% of GDP on defence by 2030. He now has his hands on the levers, and he has failed to do even that on this occasion.