---

Finance Bill

My Lords, I am not going to answer for judgments that are fundamentally for the Bank of England. It has a very clear monetary policy mandate, which is around keeping inflation low, and through the combination of monetary policy and confidence in the new Government’s fiscal stance we have seen that UK government borrowing rates have indeed remained low, and that the spread against the benchmark of the German Bund has indeed worked in the UK’s favour since the election. That goes to the heart of the nexus between monetary policy, low interest rates and keeping the flow of credit going to businesses and private individuals. I want to move on—