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The funds will be invested in innovative small businesses with potential for growth, to provide the finance that they need to expand. This will support up to £1 billion of new investment.

In 2017 the OBR forecasts growth to slow to 1.4%, which they attribute to lower investment and weaker consumer demand, driven, respectively, by greater uncertainty and by higher inflation resulting from sterling depreciation.

To support savers, NS&I will offer a new three-year Investment Bond with an indicative rate of 2.2% from spring 2017. The bond will offer the flexibility to put away between £100 and £3,000 and be available to those aged 16 or over.

We are listening to as many organisations, companies and institutions as possible – from the large PLCs to small business, from the devolved administrations through to councils, local government and the major metropolitan bodies – to build a national consensus around our negotiating position. We are doing this through meetings, visits and a series of sector roundtables, led by the Secretary of State. You can read more about the work of each roundtable, as well as future roundtables and Ministerial visits here.

We said in our last report in February that, in the absence of economic shocks or other strong evidence, we thought that the default for the NLW would be a straight line rolling path to the 60 per cent target - spreading our (annually updated) estimate of the increase in relative value needed to hit the target evenly over the remaining years to 2020. Our recommendation today reflects this approach, but the cash level is somewhat lower than expected in the spring when we projected £7.64 for April 2017. This reflects automatic adjustment in the level of the NLW target in view of weaker pay growth and forecast pay growth.