Oral Answers to Questions

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

If the right hon. Gentleman had been listening, he would have heard me say that the Ministry of Defence was going to provide an update on the costs within the next week. I know that, when he was in the Treasury, everything was a Treasury matter, but in this Government we let the Ministry of Defence talk about defence operations, just as we let the Department for Education talk about schools and the Department of Health talk about the NHS. The Ministry of Defence will provide an update on the costs within the next week. The costs come from the special reserve, as the right hon. Gentleman well knows, and I can tell him that they are very much lower than those of the ongoing operations in Afghanistan.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

2. What assessment he has made of the likelihood that the growth outturn will meet or exceed the forecast for 2011 made by the Office for Budget Responsibility in June 2010.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

13. What assessment he has made of the likelihood that the growth outturn will meet or exceed the forecast for 2011 made by the Office for Budget Responsibility in June 2010.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Osborne]

Well, the hon. Gentleman will like this bit, then. Recognising that we are all going to have to work a little longer, I am announcing the extension of Brendan Barber’s term by a further year.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

A year ago at the Dispatch Box, the Chancellor said that, in his judgment, we would have sustained economic growth, even in the face of the cuts agenda that he is pursuing. Does he now believe that the 1.7% economic growth that the OBR has forecast will be met, or will we face a fourth period of downgrading its growth forecasts?

[Mr Osborne]

The OBR is a new institution that I think we all agreed should be established and put on a statutory footing. It is independent, and it makes independent forecasts. If the Chancellor of the day started giving a running commentary on those forecasts or making his own forecasts, that would completely undermine the OBR. The institution was introduced in order to give more credible independent information to Parliament. It is interesting that, in the acceptance speech that the former Foreign Secretary would have given if he had become the Labour leader, one of his central points was that Labour should embrace the OBR as an idea that it should have had while in office and that it should support in opposition.