I agree with Nick Ramsay. I think we should all cheer up. I think Adam Price looked a little too much on the negative forecast that we had from the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Plaid motion refers to the UK Government budget announcement of downward revisions for economic growth and productivity. But, of course, it's the independent OBR that's come up with those changes to its economic forecast, and I think the Chancellor in his budget speech was rather more optimistic as to what was going to be happening to productivity and growth in the UK.

We should, I think, look at what's been happening to the deficit this year. It's been falling quite a lot faster than had been expected. The only reason that isn't projected to continue is, having projected for the last 10 years that productivity was going to go back to its previous trend, the OBR seems to think, 'Oh, we haven't quite been right on that for the last 10 years, so let's change it and assume, actually, it's not going to be very good at all.' And I fear the OBR is making this change to its forecast at the wrong time in the economic cycle, and, just as it's been wrong over productivity shooting up over the last 10 years, it's going to be wrong now in thinking the outlook is going to be as poor as it suggests. And I say that for four reasons. Firstly, productivity has actually shot up quite significantly, just on the latest numbers. The OBR signalled, I think a month or two ago, that it was going to be revising down its estimates, and has continued with that, notwithstanding, at least—I don't want to put too much emphasis on one quarter's data, but it was a very sharp rise we saw in the third quarter. And, if we do see that continue, even for another quarter or two, it will make it very difficult to get to the OBR's numbers for the next year or two.

I'd also emphasise that, for the last 10 years, we've had very, very strong employment growth, which, in many ways, is to be welcomed. But it's also been associated with record levels of immigration. And, at the same time, we've seen a shift in the employment base, with growth being highest in some low-wage and relatively low-productivity sectors as we had large numbers of people come to the country, often from the non-EU, with certain skills tests for some of the areas of immigration, but, for the EU migration, without a requirement for a minimal skill level, and, very often, people with very good qualifications, actually, in their home countries coming but then working in industries where they're not applying those qualifications, in quite low-skilled areas with relatively low wages and low productivity.

We've already begun to see those record rates of immigration begin to fall, and as we—post B word again—are likely to have at least some restrictions on the level of immigration that we haven't had before from the EU, we wouldn't expect to see that large increase in relatively unskilled jobs that have, in large amount, been met by higher levels of immigration coming into the country.

So, usually, as you get—in the latter part of an economic cycle, you begin to see wages rise as unemployment comes down. We haven't seen that, and at least one key reason we haven't seen that is that we have had very high rates of immigration, with people coming in from countries where wage rates were a lot lower than they are here. As that comes to an end, we would expect to see more of our growth rate made up by productivity and less by that employment growth driven by migration.

We also have seen very, very low interest rates now for coming up to 10 years, and one thing that interest rates usually do is they prevent companies that aren't returning above that interest rate and their capital from expanding, or, in many cases, continuing in business. And in an economy where workers move from one company or one sector to another—as companies that aren't doing terribly well, aren't growing their productivity very, very, quickly, as they don't expand or, in some cases, go out of business, workers are absorbed into other companies that are showing stronger productivity growth and growing more quickly. And it's really the interest rate that is one of the key drivers of shifting resources into the higher growing and higher productivity companies and parts of the economy. And that hasn't been happening for the last decade as it did before. As we see interest rates rise, I think there's a good prospect we could again see that begin to turn and productivity respond.

Finally, the OBR forecast there'll be no GDP growth at all from net trade, and, given what's happening to the exchange rate, I just don't think that is a plausible position for them to take. I think partly where they and perhaps some other people in a remainer mindset—or it's just a certain way of forecasting—say, 'Leaving the EU is going to make trade a much less open economy and therefore that's not going to lead to productivity', then that pulls through automatically to the numbers because of their assumption. But I don't share that, because I think we'll retain relatively frictionless trade with the EU and we will have free trade deals with other countries. But, even if there were some reduction in trading opportunities with the EU, the fact is we have a huge deficit in goods, and it's the tradeable goods sector where you see the highest growth in productivity rates. So, simply the effect of the import substitution of our producing more of those goods at home would greatly outweigh the productivity impact on the other side.

For all those reasons, I think the OBR has got this wrong. We're going to see stronger productivity growth and, over time, the opportunity for greater Government spending or reduced Government taxes, compared to as set out.