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Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [Lords]

I understand where the hon. Gentleman is coming from. As I understand it, however, the Government, in creating the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England, propose to give it a particular responsibility for macro-prudential regulation. That is quite different from the role of the OBR, which, as an analytical and assessing independent body, will have a duty to provide comment and analysis on, and a degree of scrutiny of, the proposals of the Treasury and, more narrowly, the Treasury's policy in relation to the accounting aspects of fiscal policy alone. If we are to have an Office for Budget Responsibility—or, as some hon. Members have suggested, the equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office, with some kind of parliamentary Budget office, which we will discuss later—it must be an independent body, so it must have the indisputable right to comment on the Treasury's policies writ large on macro-economic and fiscal policy. I do not feel that there is necessarily a conflict with the Government proposals on changing financial services regulation, although we have not yet seen their proposals, and we do not really know what powers they intend to vest with the Bank of England on macro-prudential regulation. We will come to that another day. I will explain why I think it is important that we focus on the concept of a growth mandate. It is not something that was just dreamed up by the Opposition. The Engineering Employers Federation has also called for a growth mandate to supplement the fiscal mandate in the charter for budget responsibility and in the Budget. It states that a growth mandate would"““send a powerful signal to business in the forthcoming Budget that government has a clear strategy to address the barriers to growth””" and calls for"““a Parliament long programme to deliver on it.””" Terry Scuoler, the chief executive of the EEF, has said that a growth mandate should be introduced to"““report on the progress at each Budget in the same way it does with the Fiscal Mandate.””" The EEF also states that"““like the Fiscal Mandate, the Growth Mandate should span the lifetime of a parliament with each subsequent Budget and policy announcement showing further incremental progress.””" The EEF makes a good point about the impact on the industries that it represents, which are in the real economy. Ultimately, that is what matters to our constituents.