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Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves statement to the House of Commons on 29/07/2024.

Mr Speaker, on my first day as Chancellor of the Exchequer, I asked Treasury officials to assess the state of public spending.

That work is now complete, and today I am presenting it to this House.

In this statement, I will do three things.

First, I will expose the scale – and the seriousness – of what has been uncovered.

Second, I will lay out the immediate action we are taking to deal with the inheritance.

And third, I will set out our longer-term plans to fix the foundations of our economy.

Let me take each of these in turn.

First, the inheritance.

Before the election, I said that we would face the worst inheritance since the Second World War.

Taxes at a seventy year high.

Debt through the roof.

An economy only just coming out of recession.

Mr Speaker, I knew all those things.

I was honest about them during the campaign.

And the difficult choices it meant.

The British people knew them too.

That is why they voted for change.

But upon my arrival at the Treasury three weeks ago, it became clear that there were things I did not know.

[Redacted political content]

That is why we are today publishing a detailed audit of the real spending situation, a copy of which will be laid in the House of Commons Library.   

I want to take the opportunity to thank Treasury officials for all their work in producing this document.

Let me explain what it has uncovered.

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