Downing Street Says

Asked what the Prime Minister thought about Richard Lambert’s speech, the PMS said that he did not know if the Prime Minister had read the speech.

The PMS said Richard Lambert seemed to be making many of the arguments you would expect a business lobby group to be making.

Asked whether the Prime Minister would agree that the Government was firing on one cylinder on economic policy’ by cutting spending and not encouraging growth, the PMS replied that the Government did not think those two things were separate.

The first thing we needed to do was to tackle the deficit; that would allow interest rates to remain lower for longer, which would support growth. There was a whole range of things that the Government was looking at, and as people would know, there was a Growth Review underway.

Asked what had happened to the Growth White Paper, the PMS replied that there had been a number of publications from the Department for Business on growth and there would be more announcements to come on how we could support growth.

When asked if tackling inflation or keeping interest rates lower for longer was the Government’s priority, the PMS said that interest rates needed to be set by the Monetary Policy Committee; their job was to set interest rates to meet an inflation target. The PMS said that we did not comment on that decision.

The PMS added that if you had tighter fiscal policy, it allowed interest rates to stay lower than they would otherwise be. This was one of the benefits of a credible deficit reduction plan.

Put that Richard Lambert had said that the Government had ‘failed to set out their vision for economic policy’, the PMS replied that he did not accept that.

The PMS said that the Government had been in power since May of last year. The first priority was to tackle the Structural Deficit, which was approaching 10%. We had seen the problems other countries had faced when they failed to deal with their structural deficits and a failure to do so was not a recipe for generating growth in the economy.

The PMS said that we would make no apology about the fact that the deficit had to be addressed. The Government was also looking across the board at what more we could do to promote growth in the economy. There was a Growth Review underway and it would report in the coming months.

Put that Richard Lambert had criticised the introduction of the Bribery Act, the PMS said that we were looking at regulation across the board. We would look very hard at where there were regulatory burdens and see if there was anything we could do to remove them.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Monday, January 24, 2011

Economy

No Comments »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries