 Maen nhw. Rydw i'n meddwl i gweithio gweithio ddechrau i gael y dystafel, a ydych chi'n ei gweithio yn y model? Rydw i'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r lleidio yn y ffwrdd yn fwy, yn ymddiol i'r gweithio'n cymdeithio. Rydw i'n meddwl i'r gweithio'n cymdeithio'n disgwylol i'r gweithio'n ymddangos o'r spennu. ydy'r ysgol, y byd, y dyfodol, y dyfodol, y prysgol, y prysgol i'r ystyried ac ymwneud yn ffynlands. Rwy'n meddwl, o'r ddweud y teimlo, o'r sgol, i'r pethau yn ymddi'r ysgol, o'r mae'n teimlo'r ysgol, o'r mae'n rhaid i'r 70s. Dwi'n credu'r hynny. Felly, yw'r hynny'n credu'r hynny'n credu'r hynny. Yn amlwg, oesau'r ysgol yn dromidebon â'r gweithio wnaedd. Mae'r llatynau i'r ddweud yn barod, mae'n meddwl i gael mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud, a'r ddweud yn gyntafol, yn ddweud yn y 1950s. Mae'r barodau yn gweithio'r gweithio'r ddweud, a'r gweithio'r ddweud yn ymddangos o'r ddweud. Dw i'n mynd o'n ysgrifennu, y pwynt ychydig o'r gweithio'r pwynt, o'r gwaith ysgol ymlaen i gael y nifer. A yn rhoi y bydd yn cyffredig o'r cyffredig yw'r gwaith yn ymlaen o'r wahanol. Yn y gydig o'r gwaith yma, oedd yn y 1980, yn cyfwyrd ymlaen, a'r cyffredig a'r cyffredig a'r cyffredig o'r cyffredig. Ond ydych chi'n eu cyffredig o'r gwaith o'r gwaith o'r gwaith o'r gwaith o'r gwaith, a'r cyffredig o'r gwaith o'r gwaith yw'r gwaith o'r gwaith o'r gwaith. Ac ydych chi'n dysgu'r pethau ond y ei gymryd ywch chi'r bwysig, bod yw'r ffordd ddechrau diolch yn newid na oed yn ddim yn gwkeilol, os ydych fan hyn ychwanegu pob o edrydiad a'r gweithio'n gwahanol sy'n cael eu cyffredin ni'n gwahodd a yn ymgyrch chi'n gwahanol ar gyfer y gwaith. Rydych chi'n gweithio, a'r bwysig chi'n gweithio'r llif yn gwahanol, sy'n chкраech lle ar gyfer ddechrau. On this basis, we have 13 years before the peak that we were at back in 2010 gets re-reached. And that's almost twice as long as the pause we had in the 1980s. So really unprecedented times. And if we convert all of those numbers into what spending looks like as a share of GDP, which when you think about it, if you've talked about the size of the state, what you really care about is the size of the state relative to how much resource you have in the economy. This chart shows you the sort of the up and down of the last decade or so. So we had that spike, as we came out of the financial crisis, where obviously economic output fell, and therefore spending as a share of GDP shot up. And then we've had that long downward pull ever since, which was the fiscal consolidation was the period of austerity. But just at the very end of the series, you can see that it does tick up. And that's really down to the spending round of September, in which the Chancellor said he'd turned the page on austerity. So the spending he was talking about was only spending that goes towards departmental spending, and that's about 43% of the total. And it only goes one year into the future. So this is not sort of setting out the plans for forevermore, but nevertheless it did mark a change of direction that the line starts to tick up again. And in actual fact, the plan at the moment is that by 2020-21, spending will be at 40.6% of GDP, which is roughly where it was, in fact, maybe even a little bit higher, going into the financial crisis. And certainly a lot higher than the average we had over the course of the 80s and 90s post that facturism moment, but still lower than it was in the 1970s pre-facture when it was at 42% on average. But nevertheless, I think we have changed direction. So what comes next? Well, much like the Chancellor's stance, I think it's about to get bigger whoever wins the election. So from the Conservative perspective and particularly for the Chancellor, at the spending round, alongside setting out the figures for 2020-21, he talked about actually moving into a new phase, a new decade of renewal he called it, and he paid particular attention to capital spending, talked about rebuilding our national infrastructure. And that was a theme that he'd also talked about in the Conservative leadership contest, where he'd actually pledged a £100 billion national infrastructure fund. So it remains to be seen once we get the manifesto exactly what the Conservative plan is, but I think it's fairly clear that the intention is to increase the size of the state to spend more, especially on capital. And for Labour, I think we only need to look back two years to the 2017 election and look at the manifesto then, which had lots of spending pledges across a whole range of areas. So tuition fees, childcare, schools, healthcare, social security, social care. And again, on the capital side, the idea of a national transformation fund, £250 billion spread over 10 years. And the Labour Party costed all of that up, and their own figures said that they were going to be spending an extra £49 billion a year on current expenditure. And if you take the £250 billion capital over 10 years, well, that's £25 billion a year. So that's big numbers. Now, since 2017, of course, things have changed. Some priorities would have shifted. We've heard other spending pledges from Labour since then. Some of these spending pledges that were already in place may have been userved by other things that have come along, but I think we can expect something of a similar scale in the next manifesto. So ahead of the manifestos, let's do a bit of speculating about what the different parties might be wanting to deliver. And this is obviously our best guess, if you like, so this is not scientific by any means. But what we're doing here is we're saying for the Conservative Party, first of all, let's assume, having just delivered the spending round, that they want to maintain the momentum on current spending. And so having brought up some of that departmental spending, they don't want to drop it down again. So let's maintain the share of GDP going on current expenditure. On social security, I don't think we're looking at any particular changes from where we were back in the spring statement in March. We had yesterday news around the fact that the four-year benefit freeze was going to be ended from April. Well, we already knew that. That is the government default that was in the March figures. So I don't think we're necessarily expecting anything different from that from the Conservative Party. So the big change really is on the capital side, where if we take the Chancellor at his word, then we might expect some big boost to capital spending over the next few years. Now, you might get some different variation on all of that, but nevertheless, I think this is probably the right direction of travel. And what it is, it takes us to 41.3% of GDP spending, which I think is not quite at the 1970s level, but it's certainly heading up in that direction. And it doesn't take much more in terms of, you know, a bit extra money for the NHS or for schools for that figure to very rapidly get towards the 1970s average. So what about Labour? Well, if we just plug in the 2017 manifesto figures that 49 billion on the current side and 25 billion on the capital side, then we're in a world in which spending is a share of GDP is at 43.3% well above the 1970s average and actually the ninth highest of any year in the period here. So whichever party forms the majority part of the next government and we're receiving as one of the two, it looks like spending is on its way up, heading back towards the 70s. But what's the backdrop for that and why does that matter for the election campaign? So I think there's really, there's three, there's a triple public finance challenge, if you like, looking to the past, present and the future. So thinking about the past, there is the austerity legacy, the fact that lots of public services have had their funding cut and so there are some severe pressures there. But also the nature of the state has changed and what the state does has changed over the last decade and that's the starting point for any new spending plans. In terms of the present, there's the fiscal situation that we need to contend with where the current fiscal rules are broken. It's very hard to make a case that they're not. And so the parties in presenting the new spending plans also need to think about what fiscal framework they want to situate them with and what fiscal rules they want to put in place and fundamentally how they're going to pay for it. And then on the future, there is the demographic headwind associated with ageing, which we've known about for some time and that is now becoming more and more manifest as the years go by and brings with it challenges of its own. So today we're not going to do the second one of those. We had a whole event on that last week but it is there in the report so do go away and read that. So instead we're going to focus on the past, the austerity legacy and on the future, the demographic headwind. So we're heading back to the 70s on spending but things ain't what they used to be. And the change really has been brought about. Obviously austerity has dominated everything and means that there's a constrained fiscal envelope out there that the government's to work with. But then there have been deliberate and active policy choices within that envelope, which have meant that the focus of the state has changed quite a bit. And as we say there, particularly a growing focus on the old and the sick. So if you think about the departmental spending first of all overall, departmental spending per person has fallen, this chart shows you how that plays out across the different departments. So it shows the real terms cumulative change since 2009, 2010 across different departments adjusted for population growth. And what you get is that at the top there you've had growth overall in some departments. So particularly health international development which reflects the fact that we've protected NHS spending and we've protected foreign aid spending. But at the bottom you've got local government budget cut by 77%, budget more than 50% down in housing communities and transport and work conventions, more on the third down in many other departments. So some really big cuts to many departments brought about by the fact that they have not had that same protection. And so within a squeezed envelope it is those departments which were born that brunt. And you can see the lighter bars there just showing you where we were in 2019-20 so ahead of the spending round and you can see that that spending round has turned the page on austerity but actually what that means is yes a bit more money for all the departments but really a long way to go for many of them. And that obviously changes the balance of what each pound that gets spent on departments looks like. So back in 2009-10 31p of every pound went to the Department of Health and Social Care. By next year 2020-21 that's going to be 40p. So an increasingly dominant factor in the overall spending on departments. Education and defence have pretty much held their own. They've faced cuts but those cuts are pretty much in line with the average. DFID has grown obviously because of that protection for foreign aid but remains very small. So although it's been a big winner if you like it's not really a big factor in overall spending. And so what happens is it's all the rest. It's the others that get residualised that face the brunt of the squeeze. So a big change in what the state does in terms of departments. But a big change too also on social security where this is showing you the proportion of each pound spent on social security where it goes and you can see 2007-08 37% went on the state pension. By next year that looks like being 44%. So again this has become a more dominant part of the overall picture. Disability and incapacity benefits actually that's the biggest proportional increase from 14% to 19%. Child benefit has gone the other way down from 7% to 5%. And again it's all the others at the end there which have faced the biggest part of the squeeze. Now you might say that's down to the ageing population of course is spending more on the state pension as we get older. But actually what's been going on over the last 10 years is less about demography and more about policy. And in particular the policy to increase the state pension aid first for women and then for all has actually pushed back against the rising pensioner bill. But instead what we've seen is the triple lock meaning that the average per pensioner has been going up. And at the same time we've had big cuts for working age welfare which meant the average per non pensioner has been coming down. And you see that in this chart here which just sets out that spending on a per person basis. And you can see spending of pensioners and non pensioners rising broadly in line in terms of the overall generosity across most of the period but then clearly diverging over the last 10 years. And that has driven, that deliberate policy choice has driven the changing balance we've seen on the social security side. And if you bring all of that together what does that look like? It means that for every pound of government spending back in 1997, 1998 about 28% when either to old age social security or to health. By 2007, 2008 that was up to 33% so we were already moving in that direction. But as of 2018, 2019 it was 37%. So increasing dominance for those two factors which means other things of course end up getting squeezed. You can see defence there declining, public order spending has declined over this period as a share of the total. So that's where we are and that's the legacy that the next government needs to think about when it's setting out new spending plans. What does it want to prioritise? Does it want to continue in the same direction? Does it want to plug some of the gaps that maybe have opened up over the last 10 years as funding has been cut? But they're crashing into another factor which is going forward there's going to be a growing focus on the old and the sick even without a policy attention because of the demographics. So that demographic headwind that we've talked about for some time which hasn't yet blown particularly hard now is. So these are OBR figures rather than mine and these roll us forward into the middle of the century. And what they're doing is they're taking a policy neutral position so they're saying what if government didn't really change anything from today's policy setup? What happens if we just allow the population to evolve in the way that we expect it to evolve and also a bit of health costs rising above the speed of inflation which is what they tend to do. And what you get is the massive increase in the proportion of GDP that has to be allocated towards health and towards old age social security. And if we pretty much maintain everything else at more or less the same level of GDP then that means overall we end up spending a lot more on as a percentage of GDP from the state. So these figures aren't directly comparable to what I was showing before but if we applied our figures to this growth then we'd be looking at a state which comprises about 48% of GDP which is well above anything we've seen over the course of the series that I set out before well above that average in the 1970s and well above the figures that we've set out under both the Labour and Conservative scenarios earlier. So a huge change and of course it's a huge change in which we are driving ever more towards old age and towards health. So rising from about a third today is more like a half once we're halfway through this century. And that means of course things like education start to form a much smaller part of the total. So big demographic challenge and one that the parties I think need to start rising to now really. So this is going to be an issue that lots of future governments are going to have to contend with but if you're a party right now about to write a manifesto promising lots of spending rises then you also need to be thinking about well how do those spending rises fit within the challenge that's to come? And start talking not necessarily in the election campaign because this is not popular stuff but start talking about how we approach the coming demographic headwind. And it's really tough questions. It's questions like do you change the health and the pension's offer? So the figures I've just set out are based on the idea that the health and the pension's offer that people get in the future is pretty much the same as it is today. Are we saying that actually we can't possibly afford to go down that route and we might have to start rationing in some way or changing the nature of what people get from the health service or what they get from their state pension? Do we instead cut back on other services effectively doubling down on austerity? The difficulty there, of course, being that we already have huge cuts in place for lots of departments. How much more can they withstand overcoming decades? Is it a case of shifting more into the private sector? Perhaps user charging or perhaps just wholesale moving things elsewhere or asking people to top up? Again, hugely controversial stuff and not stuff that's necessarily going to play out well in the election campaign. But I think even if you had some combination of all of those first three, it's very hard to see how you get away without doing some of the laughter one here which is raising taxes. And it'll be interesting to see how much of that comes out in the debate over the coming weeks where when Labour set out there 2017 manifesto they included lots of tax rises designed to fund at least the current side of it. Whereas at the moment from the conservative side all we've heard about really is tax cuts. Tax cuts are more popular than tax rises but I think the latter is as I say inevitable going forward and it's important that we have an honest debate on that. So a few conclusions then from all of that. We'd expect in the end Brexit to dominate this election. It hasn't yet but there's a long way to go. But whether or not it does I think there is a big debate about the size and shape of the state to be had. I think it's likely that we're heading back towards the 70s in terms of spending as a share of GDP but in setting out spending increases I think the parties need to be honest and need to think about the three pieces of context here. Osterity and those active policy choices which meant that pensions and health have increasingly dominated state spending and some public services are now very stretched. The fiscal framework which is broken we do need new rules and we do need to think about how we're going to fund any of these spending promises going forward. And then those coming demographic pressures which just add urgency to those fiscal questions but also just that general question of what's the state for. We've got tough choices to come so we need to make some decisions now about what we want the state to be doing. If we can't do everything what do we want it to do? So a big debate to be had and there's anyone who lived through the 1970s will remember debates in the 1970s that have a habit of getting pretty tasty pretty quickly. Thank you. What is it with the pitch blackers? I'd like some lights, I'm hiding it hard to see. The lights are behind your head and maybe the lights behind you guys leaning against the wall. Stay away from the wall, the walls are dangerous place. Thanks, I can see you all now, that's very reassuring. Matt I was going to say thank you and then you ruined it with that ridiculous 70s pastiche at the end there but it's fine, I'll get over it. Before he did that the basic point is that the size of the state has yo-yo'd over time. Those are big, big changes but the shape does as well. Obviously it was the coalition government that did a lot of that resizing and reshaping over the first five years of this decade so Polly. What's going on? Well I certainly can't talk to the 1970s because I was born in 1980 so... Oh my God! It's okay Ben, it's okay. Don't get defensive, we're going to blame you for everything pre-1980 later. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean obviously we're in an election period and election periods I think are a really bad time to end up with sensible tax and spending policies. So the triple lock is something Matt mentioned and so for a long time the Liberal Democrats, I started working for the Lib Dems in 2004, had been campaigning for the restoration of the earnings link which that should have got rid of. And then you know we had a sort of financial crisis and earnings started not growing very much as you guys have analysed in a lot of depth and so this pledge became a bit rubbish and so it was literally in order to fill this empty box on Liberal Democrat leaflets that we in the Liberal Democrat policy unit along with Steve Webb kind of came up, well what else can we say because we don't want to, we've got to have something to tell the pensioners about why we're great and so we came up with this other policy and of course then it was in our manifesto and then because it was in the manifesto it was in the coalition agreement and you know that's, I don't know, at 90 billion pounds spent by a couple of you know 29-year-olds making up policy because you know that's what elections do and you know it's not just the Liberal Democrats who make up ways to spend tens or hundreds of billions of pounds on the back of envelopes, in fact that's quite hefty policy development. But mainly the Liberal Democrats. Totally unfair. We had Diane Abbott talking about police officers that cost 10 pounds, we've got Boris Johnson and 350 you know like it's actually just this kind of in the nature of election campaigns and increasingly in the nature of election campaigns that's not a statement I can kind of back up with evidence but it feels like there is this increasing disconnect between the details of policy and what people say in that the art of writing a manifesto ought to be for and I guess was less because the Liberal Democrats just didn't have that discipline of expecting to be in government ought to be trying to manage what looks good on leaflets combined with what is possible. And because weirdly enough people have somehow stopped being punished for making stuff up or not delivering stuff, the need to consider actually hang on we might need a fiscal rule that the markets might take seriously or that we can actually use to govern decision making when it's so much easier to make it up as you go along which is of course something that our Prime Minister has done his entire life and I didn't make it up as I went along I wrote some notes for four by stealing Matt's notebook because I forgot to bring a notebook so I feel like I'm very zeitgeisty but not quite as good as the Prime Minister just randomly making it up but elections mean that there is huge pressure to spend more especially in this election where we know that if the election moves away from Brexit as it sort of seems to be doing to public services we have this legacy of austerity and demands for increasing public services are very high and so people will ask for more money the government will both parties are pledging vast quantities of money we also know that Boris Johnson in order to keep part of his party on board will also want to pledge tax cuts the first pledge he made in his leadership campaign was to cut taxes for the higher earners and so even though he hasn't repeated that you know that it's going to be part of his worldview something that kind of comes along you know there's still plans for cuts to corporation tax whole range of tax cuts it's interesting that they talk a lot about infrastructure rightly you know I think one of the biggest fiscal mistakes made by the coalition was to cut capital expenditure I think you know most people would agree that that was high on the list of mistakes though let's not get into the list of mistakes because it's a boring conversation but Matt's then talking about this kind of growing focus on the old and the sick and spending money on old people and sick people is I mean it's good I don't oppose that it is morally good you know you will get lots of people saying how you judge a society is how it treats the poorest and the weakest and that's reasonable right but those are social choices they're not investment choices and actually if the state is more and more being occupied with economically inactive people having nice lives which is a good thing it has less and less resources available to actually grow the economy and it's a funny sort of shift that we're facing the more they don't really talk about they don't talk about welfare they don't talk about they're nobody celebrates the fact that the incapacity benefit and its replacements have expanded as a proportion of the welfare state nobody's excited about that in fact it's basically a kind of catastrophic policy failure because for 25 years politicians have been talking about reforming disability benefits in order to stop leaving people on the scrap heap and enable them to get into work and become economically inactive so there's a huge shift between the narrative about investment infrastructure and the reality of money going more and more and more on the economically inactive and I think there is a problem unless we all just sign up to modern monetary theory which I don't think is going to go down well in this room nor any sensible room is that actually if you carry on increasing spending and you cut taxes and you're not even spending money on the stuff that grows the economy you will end up with a bigger and bigger whole and at some point the making up as you go along strategy of not caring about fiscal rules does become a real problem because we have this kind of demographic, huge demographic shift it's incredibly difficult to take money off old people very easy to give money to old people there's an extraordinary thing about TV licences for pensioners I can see some people who might be eligible in the room for it so I'm going to dangerous thing is of course pensioners should not get free TV licence just randomly by being 75 if people have need because they are lonely because they're desperately poor of a free TV licence great but the idea that it's a sort of reward for just getting to be old to me is completely ludicrous people say oh I've paid in all my life I know I deserve a free TV licence but like I've bought chocolate for the last 40 years at what point I don't get free chocolate maybe I do maybe that's a policy that I should vote for but so we have this very bizarre way of treating old people which is that they can't be cut and so as the group of old people gets bigger and bigger and bigger that is a spending problem we then got immigration another huge demographic change we don't really have any way of reducing immigration Theresa May as Home Secretary and Prime Minister tried desperately hard to reduce immigration fine we will end freedom of movement when we leave the European Union but nevertheless the shift in the way people live their lives around the world more and more people living outside their country of origin and our need demographically for more and more people means that you will have a growing population and a growing increasingly diverse population and for all that we might wish that it wasn't so that makes it harder to build solidarity narratives about I should pay money in order to help those people when some of those people are newcomers foreigners or other sort of ghastly things I don't really think they're ghastly just to be clear plus then you've also got technology the shifting the tax base you know we know how hard it is to tax petrol but we are moving from petrol to electric cars which is a good thing but means that we need to find a way to tax electricity in order to replace that you've then got the shifting kind of tax base of these global digital giants so getting our hands on taxes is becoming increasingly difficult whilst the spending pressures rise I'm just sort of repeating what Matt has said and I guess what I really worry about is that if the way we make these decisions is that every five years or perhaps every two years God forbid we have an election where people promise impossible things that pull us further and further away from reality we are in serious trouble because at some point at some point deficits do matter and at some point reality will start to constrain decision making and I think we need to find a new way to engage the public around tax and spending decisions so that people aren't asked to choose mutually incompatible things like lots more money whilst for all the public services you care about with way less tax and I think that has to involve people in a deliberative process to actually engage with the challenge of this growing tax gap and I worry that our politics isn't really fit for purpose so that's very cheerful Great, thank you for that Polly Elections are expensive we learned Ben Good day Do I click a button? Does anything happen? Great So I'll just look at where the British public is on this and the bottom line is that the British public is not anywhere near as ideological as some politicians so they seem to want at the moment a society which tends to be a bit more about collectiveness rather than sort of one where everybody stands on their own hind feet and what we've seen since the crash is a shift in that direction so in 2006 people were sort of split between whether you want a society that was a bit more sort of Scandinavian or a society that was a bit more American what's happened since the crash is that we seem to have shifted back towards wanting a bit more of a collective view we've just got global data on that so we're far below Denmark and Holland where it's sort of 70% plus and we're nowhere near like America where actually the numbers are pretty much the other way around so the Americans think everybody should but there aren't many countries in the world where people want individuals to look after themselves but it does seem to be the shift on from globalisation, liberalisation of trade get citizens to get her minimum and then help them stand on their own two feet to a world we're now there to be protected against globalisation against immigrants, against people buying up our companies etc etc and there's the global data so you can see America down at the bottom only 35% of them want it the Chileans who are rioting at the moment are at the top, they're very keen on some sort of collectivism but we're sort of mid-table so we're as usual and on most of these things we're pretty sort of mid-table, next to Russia or the Russians don't get anywhere near as much as people here do but when you start to break this down and look at it by things like Brexit again you see that labour remainers very keen on a sort of social and collective provision of welfare there's labour leave, a bit less keen there's conservative remain getting bit into standing on your own two feet and I haven't shown the Brexit party on here but conservative leaveers anyway definitely stand on your own two feet so we are divided about that and these same divisions apply on a whole load of other cultural things but we're not going to talk about that today because we're talking about the state generally we saw a decline towards 2010 in the proportion of people who said that government services should be extended even if it means taxes going up since 2009 that number has gradually increased again generally people always say in Britain that we should spend more on public services and other people's taxes should go up that's the challenge of course and one of the challenges for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonald is whether his tax rises will be for the many as well as the few and I'd be interested to know what the panel thinks on that but generally the public likes spending more money and particularly hypothesised taxes on things like the NHS at the moment we can get two thirds of us to say that we will personally at least tell me they will personally pay more money for the NHS so that's the challenge and I think that the key thing in this is not so much left, right the public wants to see a bit more public spending we've heard that both parties are going to spend a lot more but ultimately we'll come down to perceptions of competence as many people believe that Tony Blair would put up taxes in 1997 as believed Neil Kinnock would in 1992 Blair won by a landslide Kinnock didn't why, well partly a bit more austerity in real terms by 1997 but also actually people believing that Blair would spend the money wisely Kinnock they were less confident and that is the challenge facing Labour they are not ahead on things like the NHS that you might expect them to be so people are pretty downbeat about what's going to happen in the NHS they've become a little bit more cheerful recently as more money has been announced but generally they've been pretty negative even when money was pouring in around, this is around 2007 before the before the government change people were saying it was going to get worse rather than better so we tend to be pessimistic about the future but we're certainly not buying it that it's all going to be wonderful so you might say this is good because the public is going to be realistic we know in other polling that only about 14% believe that the money that's been announced is actually going to fix the NHS so perhaps they're a bit more realistic than we might think they also think that crime is not going to get any better if I can have that one is policing going to get better probably going to get worse rather than better so we're not particularly cheerful the reason of course my Boris Johnson is visiting hospitals is because he has to neutralise labour on the NHS and it's been fascinating to look at his election promises these are the areas that people want prioritised the NHS, education and the police benefit payments and defence down at the bottom because obviously I'm the undeserving poor etc a few more people interested in housing but really it's all about those things of course that perhaps not stupidly Mr Johnson has said that he's going to put money into so the public is he's focusing on the things that the public so they prioritise and we will see how that plays out in terms of the result in a few weeks time what I would say is that the one thing that unites people in Britain is that they all want everything to be the same everywhere so whether you vote orange, red or blue should the NHS be the same everywhere in Britain? yes should recycling be the same everywhere in Britain? yes we just want a government that will fix things for us and we're not particularly ideological about exactly how big it is it will ultimately come down to who is believed to be more competent in delivering this although all politicians at the moment have some of the worst ratings we've ever measured we have the most unpopular leader of the opposition ever and we have the most unpopular new prime minister ever, the end, thank you just competing with Polly to end on the most depressing fact although Matt did have his graphic of health that was as bad as each other right, let's just pick up on a few of those points before we go to questions so on this one strange thing which is where are the Libertarian Tories gone? a while back you had what does Liz Truss say about all this? well she doesn't, that question has not been asked yet but for those not spending their time in the weeds clearly a Conservative party brought up in lots of ways in the 1980s where their USP was controlling this state that had become too powerful freedom was delivery of freedom was part of the core purpose read the 1979 manifesto that's what it's all about and you have Conservative politicians who grew up in that all the way through the 2000s that's still their motto and as you say, Liz Truss is the queen of freedom twitter everything is about Uber, Deliveroo, the new freedoms you can get getting planning regulations out of the way, a small estate that side of the Tory party has just disappeared under Boris Johnson I don't know what they would say because I haven't heard them being asked at any journalists here you can ask them but where's it gone? I think they've just shown that they're very pragmatic in all sorts of ways including the ERG group who are now cheerfully seeing Northern Ireland set up border controls with the rest of the UK so it just appears that political pragmatism is the order of the day is there any public appetite for proper libertarianism? not much, no people generally prefer we tend to we tend to want well-funded public services admittedly we don't necessarily want to pay for them but we believe in strong public services particularly the NHS on the Liberal Democrats did the social democrats is the takeover of the Liberal party so compete that there's no real liberals left? I think it's complicated, the party shrank so much in terms of its parliamentarians that it's quite hard to have factions among nine people oh I don't know so the Labour party can manage the Labour party would definitely manage that obviously it's expanded but there's a lot of it's all about Brexit and obviously having a single enemy helps to unify a whole range of different factions I think the sort of libertarian conservatives are their youth movement actually it's really interesting to see Darren Grimes and then there's this called some turning point this sort of like the it's called turning point it's just like the momentum of the young Tory movement and they do all these really funny little skits sort of IEA type tax payers alliance type things they're dreadful it's like giving comedy lectures about Marxism and how bad it is as if they're Owen Jones anyway and they are libertarians most young people do not vote conservative but at least those who are passionate about it seem to be this group of libertarians who idolise Liz Truss which is a life choice that's the thing to do everyone has to do what they do so the flip side of this is one reading of what we've been saying here which is both for political reasons plus for demographic and other pressure reasons everyone's now a social democrat at a time when no party wants to call themselves a social democratic party so we're going to get a bigger state we may or may not pay for it so the interesting bit then in some ways in this election the last few elections have been generally more spending for our labour less spending for the Conservatives here we're now in a race for who the right amount of extra spending unlike in 2017 Labour is proposing tax rises but the Conservatives rather than proposing basically not a lot on tax are proposing big tax cuts probably probably what's the demand for and that's weird because they spent 10 years paying by the deficit but now they're promising more spending and tax cuts is there any problem on proposing tax cuts I wouldn't say there was a problem on proposing tax cuts and their target groups will feel under pressure they'll feel as you have demonstrated time and time again they're going to feel lots of people would still be grateful for a tax cut particularly also at the same time says he's going to put money into the health service so let's see everybody and everybody tends to think that people earning a bit 10 grand more than them 20 grand more should pay more tax they're always quite happy with that we looked back to the 2000s one of the things the Conservatives learnt from a number of election defeats was promising tax cuts can be heard as your public spending will be even if you don't say it but I think this time they've gone loud and long on the spending before they've got and we don't yet know that they are going to do the tax cuts and therefore borrow vast amounts of money but you could easily see it coming but they haven't done it yet so who knows now Matt what about on just on this older state thing which is so one reading of what we've shown here I don't know if you can follow your charts but so spending shoots up in the crisis as a share of GDP it's really doing that because the economy is shrinking as a share of GDP it's a really bad recession so it's measured as a share of GDP even if you're spending pretty constant you get a big spike and one way of thinking about the last decade is it's getting back from that spike 46.6 from memory cent of GDP back down to around the levels we were at in the mid 2000s but one the sales pitch for what's happened if you were here I'm kind of giving a sales pitch for the first five years of this decade this is moving nice is that look the state is going to become being about old people in the health service anyway and so basically we just did that and in the end we were going to have to do it a bit faster because this big recession but broadly we just did what the times demanded is that our reading of history I think that not to be unkind sounds a bit too strategic I think there was what matters to voters what matters to the the public image you present as a government is what you do with the most vulnerable and the most visible in society and so the NHS is obviously always going to be a priority for whoever's in power and supporting older people is obviously going to be a priority for those reasons and all that is happening is in a world in which there just isn't as much money to go around of course those are the areas that end up dominating and I think that is more down to it's just residualisation than a clear strategy and the problem now of course is that demographic movement that is coming that wasn't applying in the last ten years very very slightly we've not yet seen the baby boom as move into retirement at any significant number so the idea that we're already in a position where those are the spending priorities that are dominating all else before we've even had the demographic that just makes it much more difficult now to react to that if one of your reactions is to say well actually we're going to have to de-prioritise some other stuff you've already de-prioritised it so where are you going to go Polly? Yeah I think it's fair I think there is a massive absence of strategic thinking and but the coalition government was probably marginally more strategic than the current crop seems to me that people are just not addressing the scale of the problem at the top of our political leadership Tony Travers said it as everyone knows there isn't going to be a tax gap of 100 billion so we're not doing anything about it well we've got to do something about it and the coalition need to make big decisions and they are big and difficult decisions which the public might struggle with because it's perfectly reasonable to want more public services and for somebody else to pay for them of course people want that why should we expect everybody to be thoughtful and honourable and worry about the entire architecture of the state you can't expect people to think that when the only power they have is to vote once every four minutes in an election and actually compressing the election schedules into 2015, 2017, 2019 means that people are even less strategic because they are just thinking about okay now is the moment and I guess when the Labour government came to power in 1997 because it won such a big majority it was thinking about being in power for 10, 15, 20 years and it did things like set up a strategy unit and worry about what the fiscal rule should be or what a long term approach to growth should be and I honestly said you David's barely the chancellor, Boris Johnson's team make all the decisions about whether he's even having a fiscal event sorry I'm not expressed we'll muddle through the one big contradiction we were saying which is you're saying what the public cares about yes everyone's going to spend more but they care about confidence a lot but Paulie's reminding us that you can get away with making stuff up so how do those two things get reconciled is that judgment of competence and ultimately if you come to the NHS there is a tipping point so people only really recognise Labour's doubling of investment in the NHS and spend on the NHS towards the end of their time in office when suddenly they got waiting times down to 8 weeks there isn't a linear relationship between public perceptions and concern and what's actually happening at the moment is getting worse but it's a bit like the frog in the saucepan it hasn't got hot enough which is why the Conservatives in some polls are actually leading Labour on the NHS which is again a major challenge for Labour I would suggest we'll see what happens during the campaign but your number of the children was it 60-70% thinking the NHS is getting worse yes yes they always do they did in the last years of Labour as well so they're generally negative they're generally pessimistic they're always pessimistic about crime rising it's just how much they think it's rising even when it's going down they think it's going up so we're pessimistic as a nation we should reflect in this panel but I think that where it will come to is when finally there will be another Rose Addis type incident somebody on a trolley somewhere who will have a famous child or something like that and then suddenly it will tip and it's like a big gorilla in the room it's sort of sitting there quietly chewing but once public opinion is awake then whoever's in charge then the Treasury prints money well I'm going for an operational Wednesday so I may live with that let's get some questions so the gentleman here and the lady at the back go ahead sir question for Matt could you say something about the effect on GDP of some of these proposals and do deficits matter when inflation and interest rates are low great question there and the lady at the back hi my name is Yasmin I work for the Treasury Select Committee and managing an inquiry on decarbonisation so earlier in the summer the government legislated for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and that's going to require a whole economy transformation and will likely create spending pressures across many government departments and maybe not the priority ones that you discussed earlier like health and pensions so I was wondering what the panellists think about the extent to which both the public and the major political parties are bought into the spending needs around this great question and anyone else want to come in I've won the front here and then we'll go back to the panel William Plexusmith in the 70s when I was around one of the ways in which we used to judge the size of the state was by the number of people employed by the state and that's something that seems to fall now into discourse but I wanted to considerably become an issue in this election after water Jamie Corbyn said in answer to a question last week when he said that everyone supplying national health services should be directly employed by the national health which might have come as a bit of a shock to pharmacists and dentists GP is GPs Great, we've got a lot to cover there Matt, do you want to kick us off on this modelling is obviously all in static terms in terms of what you do just to increase spending without we're taking GDP as a given but Obviously the focus that we are implying from both of the main parties on investment would suggest that if that is productive investment then you would hope that that would boost GDP some years out and that seems to be a clear message that the parties want to get out there and I think situating that within the fiscal position and again this sort of goes back to the event we had last week what that probably means is that the new fiscal rules of the either party wants to put in place are some combination of thinking about not focusing anymore on the overall deficit but thinking only about getting to balance or some new rule on current spending and allowing themselves to borrow in order to invest because it means explicitly they've said it, interest rates are low we are in a new low interest rate environment so of course it makes sense to be borrowing more in order to invest as long as that is the right type of investment and so I think we'll see a new rule which is current budget based but also on the debt side where we will add up then there's a question for the parties as to what's their new approach to debt and for the last 5-10 years we've been in a position where debt obviously spiked, got up to 80% plus of GDP and everyone was horrified and said we've got to get it back down really quickly I think we are now in a world in which there is a realisation that actually with low interest rates that's not necessarily the case but the parties need to tell us what they want what is the sustainable level of debt as they see it and one of the things we've suggested is that you could turn to looking at debt servicing instead of debt stock so actually applying those low interest rates to your debt stock but at the moment we're not hearing I mean obviously it's only days in the campaign but we're not hearing any of those sorts of conversations just yet from the parties but I think it is important that we have something in place in order to ground the spending pledges that we're going to get Pauli, decarbonisation what do you reckon? I think engaging people in how and what we need to spend money on is going to be really really difficult we were just talking upstairs about Labour's policy to insulate every home and I think it sounds like they're offering loans to people which of course has been tried before is one of those kind of like obvious policy proposals that everyone says everyone borrow money and you'll save money on your energy bills and everything will be fine you'll end up better off then of course actually lots of people just live warmer lives as a result of having lower energy bills rather than actually being able to save money but you know that's there's an economics law for that I can't remember what it's called What about heating? No about where energy efficiency leads to higher energy use anyone? No anyway there's a rule I mean if they were very cold places but I think around there is just this weird thing that we separate spending and investment simply on the basis of whether it is capital or whether it is revenue spending and I think that that split is sort of weird accountancy to me because there is a real difference between building a hospital to largely give older people better deaths I'm up for that right let's spend money on it but let's not pretend that it has some massive education factor for economic growth in comparison to building a university or a catapult centre or some roads or a train right equally if you spend money on training and education you are investing in the capability of your people that ought to ideally lead to productivity growth and that but that counts as revenue spending because you didn't build a building and I think when we come to climate change we need to think a bit more creatively about this split as to what counts investment I do agree that we should just let investment rise but it doesn't all need to be stuff and actually some of the stuff that we call investment isn't actually investment it's just nice stuff that we should be perfectly happy to buy but we should buy with our taxes rather than buy with borrowing there is obviously a direct link between your first two questions which is the reasons for having different fiscal rules is that if you are looking at the next 15 years you would hope that dealing with climate change is one of the new focusses of the state wherever is in charge given that all parties are now committed to greater or lesser extent to very ambitious decarbonisation targets so you need a rule that has that built in rather than every now and again being saying oh we didn't hit our target because we did some decarbonisation stuff or worse saying we didn't do the decarbonisation stuff I mean the public have bought climate change emergency and it's shifted from being sort of worried about it to being genuinely recognising that something is happening the challenges for government to actually do it and get voted in to do dramatic things like massively increase the cost of your holiday or your heating bill et cetera to change your behaviour but I think there's actually in all of this stuff there's more the public are actually more flexible and will go along with things if they believe it's fair and they can see the reasons for it then we might think the public actually accepted austerity they actually lowered their expectations of public services Cameron and Osborne did a good job of telling people there's no money left you can argue about whether they should or done or not but fewer people in 2016 said that the state didn't meet their expectations then in about 10 or 15 years earlier so one of the things that now unites the planet was a study that we're launching in a month or two is concerned about climate change and because if you live in populous countries like India or China Indonesia you have seen in your lifestyle absolutely massive shifts and when we talk about you know there's a few of birds or something here there it's just like whole bits of the country are under concrete it's gone so they get it how we do it I don't know but we do we're in a city that has a congestion charge we did not have a referendum about the congestion charge and yet we sort of suck with it somehow the mayor we don't get people standing for mayor saying they're going to scrap it I don't think somebody will correct me and that's because we didn't have a referendum if it had a referendum it would have been like Stockholm or Manchester sawed it not happening so plastic bank tax 85% reduction in plastic banks very minor inconvenience but you know just done banning smoking there are public quite like bans in this area so banning things might be part of it and I think as we've seen people's expectations change I'm not sure that the spend on old people is actually going to go in a straight line it's a bit like housing starts you saw those charts at the beginning of the century for household formation that go like this and housing starts and you think that by now there'll be a sort of masses of people pensioners lying on the street they know where to live somehow things flex and I think that may be part of it that's because the pensioners on the streets the youth is just sharing with each other or they're really pissed off at us there's always a price to pay then there is I've got a 24 year old tell me about it it's your lifestyle choice we'll make mistakes in life there's still time now also to save the planet no more children yes it's a big saving I've only had one you see I'm a great climate change worry very good that's all banned we haven't dealt with world's question which is do people want more people employed by the state or is that going to be a political issue again you didn't actually people believe that spending more money on public services generally improves them they have never bought either governments arguments about choice competition and reform despite them being very popular in places in rooms like this the punters just believe resources make things better and hence I mean in a game miss whatever we say about johnson he does his focus groups 20,000 you know lots more policemen lots more lots more lots more not reform just lots more but you used to used to be able to ask in a poll you know do you think all public services should be privatised should they all be nationalised or do you just not care so long as it works and you know that was a sort of Blair mantra is what matters is what works and we have come back I think to quite an ideological debate about privatisation as if it's inherently a wrong thing the idea the profit motive because apparently taking a profit is just intrinsically worse than taking a salary in ways that I can't really understand but and I don't know whether that's a huge shift in public or just a shift in I think it's the debate I think it's the debate because the public are just you know there's about 10% of people who are like my dad who will not have an operation paid for by the state in Bupa hospital because it's not in a nature he's a sort of trot there's about 30% we call 6 man who just believe the private sector is better at everything and everybody else is sort of flexible and it hasn't really shifted okay let's get some questions from the flexible public okay we've got loads now let's have one here and then Adam we've got one at the front and then right in the back oh hi Naomi Eisenstadt in the figuring out what's going to happen to older people have you thought about I mean I think there's going to be increase in poverty in older people because of pensions aren't as good as they were occupational pensions gig economy so there'll be a lot of people who will not have the kind of savings or at least the kinds of pensions that we've come to expect in my generation so I think that's another gloomy story that just depends when you're talking about basically but go ahead sir Rob Allen I just wonder what you think the prospect itself of the debate on welfare so I think Ben's slide showed that it's consistently at the bottom of the public some priorities but by the same token Labour at least tried to talk about it quite a lot so talk about one of their chrysums of austerities the impact on the lowest at the bottom of the distribution child poverty talk a lot about universal credit what do you think the prospect is of okay great and a question right in the back we've got a mic on the move thanks Sam Smith there's been a force at society Matt aren't your slides just sharing a country to decline because in 97 we had a government elected on a mantra of education education education and actually that is clearly not going to be our future according to those numbers but I wanted to come back to the point about what we define as economic activity versus investment because we argue that we should be investing in our social care infrastructure and our childcare infrastructure because that is an investment it frees up women in particular to be back in the labour market and they're making an economic contribution by doing unpaid care work they're not economically inactive at all they're making a contribution which frees others up to participate in the labour market and if we have fewer children actually we can't afford our ageing population can we so there's a massive conflict between what's in the environmental interest and what's in our interest in terms of paying for an ageing population someone's making a case for the kids they've not made them in the room right okay we've got loads of questions there so first of all on pensioner poverty so just to be a bit perkier so we've done with another neck of the woods done lots of work on pensioner outcomes today but also into the future I don't want to say this with any certainty because projecting anything 50 years into the future is a mugs game but just I'd say we're slightly perkier we're definitely perkier so there are some small rises happening to pensioner poverty right now those are being driven by cuts to housing benefit that is the thing but apart from that pensioner poverty level is obviously very low today you're half as likely almost half as likely to be a poor pensioner as you are a poor child today and that didn't used to be the case traditionally in Britain at all poverty in Britain was about old age in the 70s and 60s so that is a big change in the future I think what is definitely right to say and tends to in rooms like this dominate the idea that the future is really bad on pensions is that the current cohort retiring of public sector workers or establishment private sector workers with good defined benefit pension schemes and a very expensive house are definitely not going to exist again in the future so the top of the distribution is definitely going to have to come down particularly men white men in the civil servants who've got very large replacement rates almost their entire income in retirement that's gone we won't see that in the future but for the population as a whole I think we should be a bit more optimistic which is we're seeing huge increases in retirement savings right now people who've never saved we've got a much better state pension when it comes to women than we used to have so the overall numbers don't look as bad you're going to get a more equal distribution for pensions housing and then housing basically complicates the rundown of people retiring without homes which will have big implications of poverty paying rent and the housing benefit bill is all quite a long way off the cohorts retiring at the moment are all on like 75% home ownership rates it takes quite a long time for some of the younger people in this room to go around to retirement if any of those people are retiring without home ownership by that point then there's big implications if you're paying rents and you're on a lower income then the chance of pension poverty is really high but that's a worry for so I'm a little bit more positive unless you are a well-paid white man in which case your retirement is going to be much harder than your dance retirement was and that is called equalisation of the picture relatively a good thing not for me anyway Welfare we weirdly have a welfare system which is incredibly stingy when it comes to actually helping people through a period of crisis in their lives and also so vastly expensive that there's broad public consensus for cutting it the most popular policy of the coalition for years was putting a cap on the overall benefit claim of £25,000 a year which now come down even further because people hate giving out money for nothing but they also they do quite like the idea of being helped themselves when they are ill unsurprisingly and I just think we have come so far from the principles of that average system and there is this danger that people then say oh so we need to have a more contributory based system because then you can build consent for more generous income replacement levels but the problem with that is that we have huge numbers of people who are lifetime sick who are lifetime disabled or who are facing unemployment because of huge structural barriers having been let down by the education system and actually so the numbers of people on means tested benefits is really large and we don't really have an answer to what you do about people who haven't then earned an entitlement and the way in which being stuck on benefits is I think an experience which strips people of their dignity in a way puts them at the mercy of some jobs worth down the job centre who probably actually has you know only earning £20,000 not got much experience not really much use as a work coach as much as they might try or be motivated to help and so I think we do need to kind of quite structurally rethink our welfare system and we need to do that by engaging the public in redesigning it and it is going to have to to change quite radically I think one of the huge challenges is housing benefit which does feed into the pensioner things even Tony Blair used to say he had a speech in 1994 where he said we used to spend 20% of the housing budget on welfare and 80% on infrastructure and we have failed because now we spend 80% on welfare and 20% on infrastructure but nobody has fixed that and we have a housing market which just the price, the cost of housing is far far too high and instead of trying to fix that at the market level we end up propping it up with welfare payments and I think that does have to change and I think that will help to ease some of the financial burdens in the system, enable us to be more generous around income replacement So if you want to get people if you want to point to welfare you've got record anxiety about poverty and inequality so we've got concern about unemployment has gone down and down and down in our monthly series but we have record concern about poverty and inequality it's still only 20% spontaneously and things need to go over 50% for the gorilla to really sort of be moving but also housing has seen a similar thing and there is support and I don't know where the proposals would be on this or what the resolution foundation but there is support for the state borrowing to build again as it lasted in the 1970s whether we'll hear about that during this election is another promise we'll see but it sounds as though there might be some broad agreement on some of the benefits of that in terms of outcomes and dealing with the housing benefit bill as well I know the numbers on if you ask people what do you think about welfare or the benefits then you get very low support if you ask them what do you think about child poverty going up the homelessness you see on your streets how we look after disabled people how we look after the old support for all of those things is pretty high but I get that it's not a straightforward right Matt, education there isn't any basically sounds great the country in the climate I think it's important to remember those figures are not inevitable they are what happens if you take your hands off the wheel effectively and as ever political choices will make a difference and so we're in a position where the next government and I think it is, it starts now possibly should have started sooner but it certainly starts now what direction it wants to go in and you're absolutely right that education and many of these things has probably said that we think about as being current spending our investments and our building up our human capital is it worth but there's tough choices, there's really tough choices here and I don't think we're going to hear much about them in the election campaign but it's really important that the next government starts to get on with it because what are those choices they are that you don't get quite what you thought you were going to get in retirement or what your parents got because actually the offer is different now it's that more of what we do as a state ends up in private hands or that you have to seek out the ways of topping up what the state does or it's that you have to raise taxes and if you do some combination of those things then you can end up in a place where there is education there is a focus on all those other things that we value as a society and that help to boost growth going forward and are good for us but it doesn't happen if you take your hands off the wheel and that's all those figures are showing Great, let's get one more set of questions in before everyone should release to the day there's a lady right over here and there's a gentleman in the middle here Sarah Horner from the Learning and Work Institute if we're sort of in agreement definitely in this room that investment and productivity and skills is actually important for the long term health of the government and the country how do we start that conversation with the public when very simple messages seem to get through for example the Tory party conference there were big signs everywhere saying get Brexit done more money for NHS police and schools and it was very simplistic but that message is obviously getting through because you hear every conservative politician saying it at the moment so is there a way that we can get more complicated messages across to the public and obviously we've been seeing quite a large rise in skills training via student loan subsidies in the last five years in fact 30% increase between 2010 and 2015 so they may not have talked about it but there's a lot of cash going in for some people Gentleman here Paul, one of the summer journalists how electrically plausible is it going to be for Johnson to campaign on being the new friend of public services after a decade of austerity and given continuing likely pledges of untax cards And we also want to come in and we'll wrap up Ben, why don't you take that last question It comes down to we're back to this perception of competence and so Johnson's ratings aren't good for a new prime minister but in politics as we know it's always compared to what and the challenge is literally Corbyn's ratings are absolutely diabolical so he's sort of he's saying the right things do you believe him most people won't but then most people don't believe most things politicians say but at least he's addressing the issue you could say that Matt Hancock is protesting too much endless I will not privatise the NHS etc etc but they're doing it for a reason so are they massively convincing now is the public expecting massive improvement no but are they sort of neutralising the issue on the polling evidence of the campaign so far I would have to say that they are but let's see what happens what is your just to be unfair on you a labour a labour of rising from a floor they started at 26% last time and got to 41% which is pretty amazing stuff this time they started at around 24% they're now at about 27% so you can draw a line if you like to victory if you're a die hard Labour supporter but Labour have never ever polled below 28% 29% in living memory so they were always going to go up I thought they were going to break that rule last time and I'll never say that again because they started at 26% and I thought they'd only go down shows what an idiot I am but it looks as though the conservatives are potentially neutralising this and the long list of promises from Labour because of this challenge over perceived competence it's just sort of noise all of this detail there are some weird people in here because you come to events like this most people are not paying a lot of attention which you could say cynically or otherwise the conservatives know that they're the people doing all the market research they're far more than the Labour party about trying to target those messages and remember most constituencies won't change hands this is all about 10-15% of constituencies that will be actually seriously in play and it's about those voters in those places and that's what it boils down to in modern politics great, thank you for that uplift Paulit why don't you all talk about skills tenured age do us a really annoying thing where he'd say I could get I think I'm being maybe unfair here but let's assert that he said this because none of you are going to prove it I think he said I could invade Iraq I could announce another invasion of Iraq so long as I did it in another speech about technical education I think it is a version of it is that true? no I think people love apprenticeships they will endlessly get policy pledges about apprenticeships and honestly if you can find me a business education or skills minister in the last 20 years who hasn't stood up and given a speech about parity of esteem between vocational academic qualifications then I don't know going well though right? it doesn't make any difference they just stand up and say it as if they the very important minister nothing parity of esteem and saying that these two things are equally important is job done and it's not it's also a weird dichotomy like my sister is a vet which last time I checked is a vocational qualification which comes with some esteem but never mind it's one of those I think you can you can get a lot of money George Rosen even put up taxes to pay for apprenticeships and that is a measure of how popular you can make them and it is very simple and it will have a German style economy and everything will be all great and people say that sort of stuff I think it is it is one of those really really difficult policy areas which has repeatedly had the same problem is that when the state invests lots of money in skills education and through companies they end up cannibalising what the companies were already spending and then the treasury start to worry about it saying that there's no value added here we're just dead weight and so they cancel it at which point the companies do spend it just feels like we can't get above this ceiling and it's either the state or the company spending it but getting actually up is one of those policy puzzles that I I don't know I'd be open to a solution to if anyone's got one Great. Can we thank our panel for their contributions today? Thank you Can I particular thank Matt for writing the report but also this is Matt's last week at the resolution foundation after over 11 long years here which is quite a few elections that's like we've worked out you've them this is the start of the force 65 to 66 reports nearly 100 blogs for the resolution foundation so thank you for each of those but thank you more for being a great friend over those years so everyone at RF wants to we're not going to give them gifts here, don't worry that's all we've done but we do want to thank you for everything you've done and wish you all the good luck in the world for the new job so enjoy your new job and all of you enjoy your democratic process over the next six weeks it may feel as long as those 11 years who knows have fun, have a good day everyone