Alan Barrett
speaker
502 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard today
Alan Barrett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
We didn't have a problem with the fuel package.
We just had the difficulty how untargeted it was.
And there was a sense that, you know, there was a sort of a jump to get money out as quickly as possible.
So, you know, when you've got a situation that there's the ready availability of the revenue on the one hand and really intense political pressure on the other, it does raise this concern that public money is not going to be spent as optimally as possible.
So, you know, the next occasion in which the government is going to be under huge amounts of pressure is under the public sector pay talks.
Just to be clear, we absolutely believe public servants are entitled to pay increases to cushion them against inflation as well.
Have to be open and transparent.
I will benefit from any such agreement as well.
Our hope, though, is that both the government and the union side will have some degree of cognizance
of this sort of fragility in the public finances so that, you know, sound, rational, long-term decisions are being made and not a sort of a lazy or a weak approach to the analysis of how much money is truly available.
down tools block the roads and make it happen no absolutely there and i mean to be perfectly honest i i think it was that sort of rhetoric was one of the reasons that we were sort of prompted to think about this as seriously uh as we are so yes and i mean then the unions have a job to do we we sort of understand that as well uh but i think the the job of the sri and organizations like ours are just to sort of you know raise the concerns
make sure the issues are on the agenda.
And that notion of understanding that just because the money is flowing in right now doesn't mean it's going to flow in as readily, you know, forevermore.
And so, you know, it's always important that we send public money as wisely as possible.
I mean, normally the response economists give to that is tax cuts are fine and everything like that, as long as the expenditure side of the ledger is treated in the same way.
I mean, really the important thing here overall is the balance, you know, between these sort of things.
So if it's the case that there will be tax cuts, I mean, you know, well then obviously something has to happen on the other side.
I mean, I would be certainly slightly concerned.
Say, for example, last year, tax cuts of the sort, like the VAT reduction for the hospitality sector, there wasn't a huge amount of evidence to suggest that that was going to be a sort of a, you know, an impactful policy for a whole range of people.
You know, it was a very narrow tax cut.
Showing 181–200 of 502 · page 10 of 26
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