Economic Affairs Committee
22 July 2025
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Economic Affairs Committee House of Lords
00:02 - 00:04
Speaker 1
Well.
00:07 - 01:30
Speaker 2
To this annual evidence session with the Chancellor here at the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords, we are delighted to be joined today by the Right Honourable Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and with her Beth Russell, Second Permanent Secretary at Her Majesty's Treasury, and Stephen Farrington, Director of Fiscal Policy at Her Majesty's Treasury. I should say that we are broadcasting this session live on Parliament Live TV, and a full transcript will be taken, which is going to be made available shortly after the meeting so that you can make any corrections. Let me start, Chancellor, by asking you a general question about the economic moment we're in. It's a time of huge economic challenges: aging population, stagnating growth, fragile public services, the need to adapt to climate change, tariffs from the US, and our fiscal position is also very challenging with record borrowing and the highest tax take for many years. Given these multiple constraints, maybe you could outline exactly what your strategy is for achieving growth, the thing that you've consistently made your main priority.
And I guess, slightly more pointedly, how can you restore healthy levels of growth without either borrowing more than your fiscal rules allow or boosting current spending more than your tax commitments allow? Well, thank you very much, Lord Woods, and it's...
01:30 - 02:35
Speaker 3
A real honor to come and address you for the first time as chancellor of the AEX checker. So, thank you for giving me the opportunity today. As you say, we are living in an age of insecurity today, and economic policy has to respond to the moment in which we live. At the same time, we also have a challenging economic inheritance with high levels of tax as a share of GDP, historic high levels of government debt, and then also economic growth that really for the last 15 years has been very poor by historical standards because of the weak productivity growth that we've experienced in that period of time. But just to sort of go to the first point that you raise about the economic moment and that age of uncertainty and instability in which we're living, the growth strategy has to be the right one for this era.
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