Paul Johnson

In a word, no.

We're dealing with symptoms rather than underlying causes.

Surely the government has to do loads and loads to support people through an energy crisis, dealing with these short-term issues, even though some of them are potentially contrary to any idea of long-term growth.

I think there are two problems with this.

One is that we're dealing with symptoms rather than underlying causes.

We've got underlying causes of the cost of all of these things.

You're related to the cost of energy.

That's down to government policy.

The cost of housing, that's down to government policy.

So one issue for me is that we're treating symptoms, not causes properly.

But more generally, this is not particularly helping low-income people.

The biggest gainers from reducing planned petrol duties will be relatively well-off people who drive a long way.

Reducing VAT is not particularly well-targeted.

I think if you wanted to actually do something specific here –

As Rachel Rees has said, she might.

We probably should be looking at some targeted help through the winter when fuel bills really do go up.

But the fundamental problem is that we've had poor economic policy for such a long time that people are suffering in ways they really shouldn't do from what's happening to world prices.

We're treating the problems after they happened, and we've partly created the problems.

Well, I mean, not entirely.

The reason that people are fed up and feeling this cost of living squeeze when remember inflation at the moment is really not very high.