Treasury Committee

11 November 2026

Treasury Committee Actual start House of Commons

Follow its sittings
15:46 - 17:16
Speaker 1
Order.  Welcome to the Treasury Select Committee on Wednesday the 11th of November 2026.  We're delighted today to welcome the Right Honourable John Healey MP, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to explain his budget of 2 weeks ago. 

And first of all, may I say Chancellor, congratulations on being appointed Chancellor.  It's an honour to hold that role and we all wish you well in it, and we'll obviously be questioning you in detail as we're expected to do as a committee, but congratulations.  He's joined by James Bowler, who's the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, and by Dharmesh Nayee, who is the Director of Strategy, Planning and Budget at the Treasury, so the man who puts the budget together in detail with under the guidance of the Chancellor.  So before we go into our main session, there is a really important issue that arose on budget day itself that was outside, of course, your directly your budget statement, Chancellor. 

And the Treasury is signed up to not giving out specific individual tax rates, but Bloomberg knew very specific information on that it was that the change to the bank tax was going to be temporary and less than 8%.  So that was a very specific tax-specific leak.  Mr Bowler, as permanent secretary, you've been there for a while, was the leak of information about bank taxes the worst type of breach you can think of given it related both to the duration and the level of a single tax related to the listed banks? 
17:16 - 17:43
Speaker 2
Well, thank you, Chair.  So yeah, the Bloomberg had the shape of the bank surcharge, as you say, they didn't have the exact detail, that it was less than something and a and temporary, not the exact measure, and that is deeply regrettable and frustrating, and I think the right thing to do is to have a proper investigation into how that came about. 

The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers

Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.

The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.

Start a free trial

Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.