Speeches by Dean.

“Dr Turner, I will turn to you now, and we will play back some of those questions to you as well, but in your evidence you spoke about private investors sometimes being reluctant to invest in infrastructure in your industry because of the uncertain market conditions. Can you explain to us how the National Wealth Fund mi…”

“I was going to ask a question about PuFIns—I am not sure if anyone else has come across this term; we discovered it recently to describe public financial institutions. I do not know if you are familiar with it. My question is more about the confusion between the different ones we have. The National Wealth Fund and the …”

“I think that the public would understand well that they should share in the profits. I guess the push-back would be, “Why wouldn’t you do that on every project?”, because you would presumably want to go for a different type of investment option according to the project. Can you explain to us in which cases an equity po…”

“Mr Kumar, you have written some interesting things about the National Wealth Fund being encouraged to take up more equity positions. Could you expand on why you think it should do that?”

“I know we said to be cautious about the Canadian example, but I also have something here that says it has been criticised for deploying its capital too slowly. Does anyone have anything to say to that point?”

“That is fine. Is what I am hearing that, perhaps because it is such a nascent institution and it needs to build up a track record, the fund should be slightly more cautious, although not too cautious, because you do not want to crowd out private sector investment? Going straight away for a very risky approach could set…”

“Professor Lee, if I can come to you first. I was interested when you talked about the Canadian experience. They seem to have a much higher risk appetite. The National Wealth Fund has set a target to make a positive return for the Exchequer, and we have been discussing in Committee, in previous sittings, whether that is…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Western. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake) on bringing forward this debate on behalf of not only her constituent, but everybody who cares about freedom and democracy across the world. The Liberal Democrats are concerned …”

“Last year, during the mayoral election, Sadiq Khan claimed that a Labour mayor working with a Labour Government would be a game changer for the city, but just now he has released a statement criticising the spending review for underfunding the Met police, failing to invest in our transport infrastructure, and potential…”

“Do you think the powers in the Online Safety Act will be sufficient in the long run, or will the Government need to introduce further protections to address this area and force the tech companies to act?”

“I have one final question. Is this indicative of a broader concern for financial regulation, in that these tech firms are so big and so powerful that they are quite difficult to hold to account, and if they decide to enter other areas of the financial industry—AI and so on—it will become an increasing problem for the F…”

“When we had the ABI in front of us, I posited to them some scenarios that could come about through advancements in AI. For instance, your step counter or maybe logging into workout apps regularly could be related to your insurance premiums. We have evidence already of some insurers saying that they will provide discoun…”

“Should it be here?”

“In China, it comes down to social scoring, and there have been “Black Mirror” episodes that try to explain how that might become a problem. In terms of consumer harm, where would the regulator get involved at this stage? Would it be to protect consumers who feel ill—for instance, someone might have a stomach bug, but t…”

“Following on from that, I appreciate that you say you are incredibly active on this topic and you are working with the tech firms, but I want to know whether the tech firms are working with you. We heard evidence from Lucy Castledine last time, and she was quite critical of Meta for being quite slow. She said that gene…”

“The hon. Member has made some excellent points about the need to set a target for social homes. I believe that the destruction of council house stock is one of the most regressive actions that the country has ever taken, and that we need to replenish that stock as a matter of urgency. However, I fear that 90,000 a year…”

“Do you need more powers to get more data to be able to properly tackle the wealth tax gap?”

“I have just one more probe on the wealth regime, if I can. If the threshold is at the £200,000 mark for income or £2 million for wealth, I have seen an estimate that that is about 850,000 people. If you go higher up the wealth scale to £10 million-plus, it is 40,000 people. If you think about the fact that one billiona…”

“Do you have to have evidence of something being off in order to do that? If there are 40,000 people with a net worth or gross worth—whatever you said it was—of over £10 million, it makes much more sense to examine those thoroughly. They are likely to have financial management and you probably are going to find tax gap …”

“It sounds like you feel you have a pretty good handle on that category of people. You broadly know who they are, you broadly know how much they have and you are able to monitor their tax arrangements. I asked you to confirm that because there are some people speculating about the potential for a wealth tax to be implem…”