Speeches by Gardiner.

“Do you wish this Committee to make that recommendation in its report?”

“Thank you.”

“That would create greater national wealth. It is important that we get back to the good name of what used to be the Infrastructure Bank and say it is about creating wealth in this country. As we all know and as Dasgupta made clear, as well as many others, GDP is a poor indicator of wealth. It is an indicator of product…”

“Do you wish to see us move to what does Dasgupta called an inclusive wealth model?”

“Thank you. Ms McGavin, would you like to respond now that I have set up the skittle for you to knock down?”

“Thank you.”

“Do you wish this Committee to make that recommendation in its report?”

“Absolutely. I am not trying to beat people over the head here.”

“Yes. We are still adopting a model that says our economy has different sectors and one is nature, whereas in fact it is the other way around. Nature undergirds the entirety of our economy, whether we talk about the financial economy and the return the Treasury wants on it. I wonder. Dr Plumpton, the Green Alliance has …”

“I was worried that when you said it, you seemed to allude only to money and the greater financing that the Government had put in, but you recognise that we are now talking about natural capital alongside produced capital, roads, bridges, buildings and social capital. When you spoke a moment ago, you talked about needin…”

“Ms McGavin, in introducing the National Wealth Fund and the transition that you have made from the National Infrastructure Bank, you spoke of broader capital from Government. What did you mean by that?”

“You posed the question, quite rightly, of how will the farmer or landowner derive an income after 30 years or, with the SANGS, 80 years. How do we think of this as increasing our stock of natural capital as a country, which benefits everybody, but also recognising that there are people, some of them farmers and landown…”

“Ms Hammond, you used the key word earlier: “externalities”. The question that all this revolves around is who pays for the depletion of public goods, which are those externalities? On the one hand, it could be the person who pollutes, on the other hand it could be the public, or under an ecosystem services payment sche…”

“In effect, you said that perhaps it is at different levels, all three, but principally you focused on the second—somebody else getting an unjust cut of what would rightfully be due to the farmers. What regulatory action do you recommend that Government should take in order to address that specifically, that this Commit…”

“A wet year.”

“Ms Hammond, picking up on what Mr Carter said about sweating the assets, if you have a landholding of £5 million value and you are achieving from that what the previous head of the NFU said and the DEFRA figures bore out, between zero and £25,000 a year as your income, there are only three ways of looking at that. I wa…”

“Thank you. Ms McGavin, would you like to respond now that I have set up the skittle for you to knock down?”

“Do you wish to see us move to what does Dasgupta called an inclusive wealth model?”

“That would create greater national wealth. It is important that we get back to the good name of what used to be the Infrastructure Bank and say it is about creating wealth in this country. As we all know and as Dasgupta made clear, as well as many others, GDP is a poor indicator of wealth. It is an indicator of product…”

“Thank you.”