Speeches by Gardiner.

“Frame this, please, Mr Duncan, in a recommendation that the Committee should put into its report to Government. That is where we can meet the need that you are expressing.”

“But if you look at something like what FirstPort management have been doing, as many Committee members have experience of, people have been ripped off.”

“So they control the price.”

“They control the management of it.”

“I agree with you if you get it up front, but it is an unknown cost if you do not, isn’t it? As a purchaser, I want to know my outgoings. I can gauge what my electricity will be. I can gauge what my gas—although soon we will not have it—and my water and so on will be. I do not know what I will be charged on the biodiver…”

“Sorry—say that again?”

“So more ecological officers in planning authorities to help you, but also proper resource for the Environment Agency and Natural England. Thank you. I want to talk about estate management companies. When it comes to the maintenance of the BNG, it seems to me that if I were buying a property with net gains in the develo…”

“Thinking about the recommendations the Committee might wish to make to the Government, would it be to resource the statutory consultees appropriately to make sure that the process is speeded up? If you want to deliver 1.5 million homes in the timeframe the Government have set out, you cannot do it unless you have prope…”

“With inflation it is a good deal less than they originally had 21 years ago.”

“They have exactly the same resource that they had in 2006 when they were set up.”

“What is the consistency of the advice you get from the Environment Agency or Natural England?”

“I am not sure that the Berkeley Group has, just as I am not sure that all the members of this Committee have yet signed my early-day motion on swift bricks. Five have but I know the culprits, Chair. It is great that you have done that. I wanted to ask you a couple of things. First, how easy do you find it to work with …”

“Thank you very much to you both, and to you, Chris, virtually, for your Windsor Gate development, and to you, Mr Spearing, for your Burghley Green development, in which you incorporated 50 swift bricks in the Windsor Gate and 85 at Burghley Green. Mr Thompson, I understand you have signed up to the homes for nature ple…”

“Of course. I am not saying you get it in one year. What I am saying is that you are making that valuation, that judgment, and you are using all the market conditions to make that risk assessment, and you then manipulate it to make sure that you are making the maximum value on each site at the right time. If you did not…”

“That goes back to what you said about being properly resourced.”

“No, you are. That is what it is. It is the gross margin in the landholdings.”

“You do so to maximise the profit that you can make on each of those sites. You will do that, and that is why you make the assessment of the economic and market conditions. It is precisely why you look at the sales and input prices so that you can maximise the profit. If you did not, surely you would then come back to m…”

“Both of you said that.”

“That is not the issue here, is it? The issue here is that you are making, by your own admission in your annual report, a risk-adjusted assessment of the potential gross profit for each of those sites, and you do so taking into account the economic and political backdrop, the planning and regulatory regime and the sale …”

“It says: “This represents management’s risk-adjusted assessment of the potential gross profit for each of the Group’s sites, including the proportionate share of its joint ventures, taking account of a wide range of factors, including: current sales and input prices; the economic and political backdrop; the planning an…”