Budgetary reform

With an impeccable sense of timing, you have given me the opportunity to talk, as you say, about something outside the immediate day-to-day concerns of the Government over the last few days, and for that, much thanks. I would like, if I may, to begin by welcoming the continuing interest of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in this issue of budgetary reform and the institutional arrangements by which we seek to decide these issues in government, and in Parliament. The Institute has a long-standing interest in this subject, and it is useful for a Minister, and also for one or two other faces I recognise in the audience from Parliament and outside, to have a forum in which these important issues can be discussed and where the practitioners, the civil servants, the politicians can also meet and discuss them with people from the wider interested communities. So I am grateful to the Institute for providing such an opportunity.