Pre-Budget Report 2009

My Lords, I apologise that I was unable to get to the Chamber for the first couple of minutes of the Minister’s remarks. Is he unaware that, in real life, there is a considerable time lag between the firm announcement of decisions to cut public expenditure and these public expenditure cuts taking effect? When you are talking about the timing, that needs to be taken into account. Is the Minister also not aware that there are great problems with confidence in the financial markets? Perhaps he was going to go on to discuss these. If they go wrong, it will mean a considerable burden of debt interest, even if we can finance the deficit.