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Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [Lords]

I hope that we will have an altogether more constructive relationship with the IMF. In fact, it has already commented on the background to the need for this Bill. In November last year, it stated that the recent crisis led the UK to suspend its two national fiscal rules—golden and sustainable investment rules—at the end of 2008, and that the credibility of the national rules as effective constraints of policy action was weakened well before the crisis. It went on to say that the rules failed to prevent a worsening of the fiscal balance in the years leading up to the crisis, leaving insufficient buffers as the economy entered the downturn, and that while in place the golden rule was often criticised because it provided insufficient monitoring, transparency and accountability of fiscal policy. That was the IMF's assessment of the previous fiscal mandate, and I think that it demonstrates clearly why it was so ineffective in tackling the problems that our country experienced. In many respects, it provided the ground on which those problems were able to prosper and grow.