Economic Affairs Committee
19 May 2026
No chapters available yet
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
Economic Affairs Committee House of Lords
00:05 - 01:15
Speaker 1
Welcome to this the first evidence session of the Lord's Economic Affairs Committee's inquiry into fiscal devolution in England. And we're delighted that for our first witness, have an old friend, Paul Johnson, provost of Queen's College, Oxford, with a distinguished history in public life, including, the IFS before. And I should say that this is being broadcast live. As you know, Paul, on Parliament Live TV, a full transcript is going to be taken, and we'll make it available to you shortly after the meeting so you can correct any errors. Again, thank you for joining us.
Let me start with a general question, but in a way the most important question, which is what exactly should we mean by the term fiscal devolution? Is it about revenue? Is it about powers? All of those things and other things. And what are the objectives of fiscal devolution from a policy point of view?
What should be the criteria by which we should judge the wisdom of fiscal devolution, however construed? Over to you, Paul.
01:15 - 01:52
Speaker 4
Okay. Well, fiscal devolution obviously, covers in principle spending, devolution of spending choices and devolution of tax choices. So the spending issue is fairly straightforward. We can decide to, allocate money and from Whitehall and how it's allocated, for example, as we do for the health service, or we could decide to allocate that money to local authorities or mayoral combined authorities and leave them, to decide how they want to spend the money. There are different there are different kinds of, spending devolution.
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.
Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.