Sir Keir Starmer faced a series of probing questions on Monday on whether Rachel Reeves "lied" to the public and misled the Cabinet over a black hole in the public finances ahead of the Budget. The Prime Minister was seeking to focus on the "substance" of the Budget such as tackling the cost-of-living crisis, protecting public services including the NHS, and reducing the nation's debt.
00:00Well, thank you very much, Beth. Look, there was no misleading, and I simply don't accept, and I was receiving the numbers, that being told that the OBR productivity review means you've got £16 billion less than you would otherwise have had, shows that you've got an easy starting point.
00:19Yes, of course all the other figures have to be taken into account, but we started the process with significantly less than we would otherwise have had. That productivity review or review like that hasn't been done, I think, for 15 years. This is not an annual exercise. It's an exercise that was done this year. I'm not sure why it wasn't done at the end of the last government, if I'm honest about it, because that would have seemed to me a sensible time to have done it, but it was done.
00:43The net result was £16 billion less than you would otherwise have got. That meant, if we measured against our objectives, which is protecting public services, doing what we could on the headroom, which I really wanted to do this time for reasons that are well understood in terms of the stability that it gives, I wanted to more than double the headroom, and to bear down on the cost of living, because I know that for families and communities across the country, that is the single most important issue.
01:11who wants to achieve all those things, starting that exercise with £16 billion less than we might otherwise have had. Of course there are other figures in this, but there's no pretending that that's a good starting point for a government. It isn't.
01:24To suggest that a government that is saying that's not a good starting point is misleading is wrong, in my view, and as I say, there was a point at which we did think we would have to breach the manifesto in order to achieve what we wanted to achieve.
01:39Later on, it became possible to do it without the manifesto breached. Given the choice between the two, I didn't want to breach the manifesto, and that's why we came to the decisions that we did.
01:52On the question about welfare, look, I do think that this is a moral mission. I don't think we can simply leave the best part of a million young people, not earning or learning, and walk past it.
02:06Just as I fundamentally believe we've got to lift children out of poverty, that is a moral and personal mission for me, always has been.
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