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Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [Lords]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. Fiscal responsibility is the overriding priority of this Government. In May, within 24 hours of taking office, we published a coalition agreement setting out our agenda for government. Fiscal responsibility was the very first item on the very first page of that agreement. It read:"““deficit reduction and continuing to ensure economic recovery is the most urgent issue facing Britain.””" Let me remind the House why we chose that as our priority. We inherited the largest budget deficit in our peacetime history; we inherited a budget deficit forecast to be the largest in the G20; and we inherited the largest structural deficit in the whole of Europe. We simply could not ignore the mountain of debt that was casting a shadow over our economy and our people, so we set ourselves an ambitious task—to bring order back to the nation's finances. The Bill aims to do exactly that.