Chancellor Rachel Reeves speaks at the Great Northern Conference.
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00:00So what you're saying is effectively, unless there's some, you know, once-in-a-generation event like Covid,
00:06the businesses here today can go home confident that national insurance contributions for them will not go up over time?
00:13Well, no Chancellor's going to write five years' worth of budgets in the first five months of being Chancellor
00:18because you don't know what's going to happen in the future.
00:21But I can tell you with certainty and with confidence that we have now done what it takes to get public finances back
00:29on a firm footing. As I said before, in the spring when we settle, spending will be doing so for day-to-day spending
00:37for the next three years and for capital spending for the next four years.
00:41So public services will have to live within the envelope that we have set.
00:45We're not going to be coming back to top up that envelope in the spring through more tax increases or further borrowing.
00:53So we've done what we need to do to put those public finances back on a path that is sustainable,
01:01which means not only can you be confident that I'll never have to do a budget like this again,
01:06but I hope you can also be confident that the volatility that we had over the last few years,
01:12whether that is on financial markets or indeed in your borrowing costs or the costs of doing business because of inflation,
01:19we shouldn't ever be in a position like that again because of the measures that this government took in the budget.