Sir Keir Starmer has insisted that there was “no misleading” by Chancellor Rachel Reeves over the state of the public finances before the Budget.Ms Reeves has faced claims she misled voters by overstating the scale of the fiscal challenge in the run-up to last week’s Budget, in which she announced £26 billion worth of tax rises.She has also reportedly been accused of misleading the Cabinet.
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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