00:00We found out from the Office of Budget Responsibility that the Chancellor with your backing misled the public on November the 4th when she warned about a black hole in the public finances without telling us the second bit, that higher than expected tax receipts meant the economy was in a much healthier position than the Chancellor publicly suggested to all of us and to the country.
00:24Well, 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.
00:44Yes, 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.
00:52That 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.
01:00I'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.
01:08The 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.
01:26I 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, wants to achieve all those things, starting that exercise with £16 billion less than we might otherwise have had.
01:42Of 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.
01:49To 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.
02:05Later on, it became possible to do it without the manifesto breach. 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.
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