Speeches by Yang.

“Finally, Ms Rigby, we heard from many panellists earlier in this inquiry that they were concerned about the issue of intergenerational fairness and particularly that, during the previous Government, there were a series of changes to student loans, some of them retrospective, but all of which meant that the Treasury won…”

“Ms Rigby, would you agree with Baroness Smith’s remarks?”

“Can I read between the lines on what your next ideal step would be and say that you might consider plan 2 to be the most problematic cohort, which you would like to look at again? You singled out plan 2 in your answer.”

“I thank the Minister for her statement. Tomorrow, I will be bringing Thames Water’s management into Parliament to answer a simple question: what improvements will my constituents get in return for the increases in their bills? My constituents do not feel they are being treated fairly by Thames Water, and that makes it …”

“We need to have that plan before we can even assess how much money we are lacking. Is that your sense of things?”

“Just to go back on the apprenticeships issue, is the issue right now a lack of people applying to become welders or a lack of places for them to train and get those qualifications?”

“That follows on to my question, which is about the pros and cons of having this target. Of course, it is a part of the NATO agreement, but in terms of the management of spend, are there downsides as well as upsides to having this overall target?”

“To go back to the questioning around inflation, there are some really stark examples of how much inflation in the supply chain has gone up, partly due to improvements in defence technology. For example, the amount it costs to buy one modern fighter jet would have bought 310 Spitfires back in the 1930s. As somebody who …”

“Is your argument, then, that investing in infrastructure, skills and training generally has a lower inflationary effect than investing in other parts of the supply chain?”

“How have you seen those effects play out in comparable countries with similar supply chain issues to ours? Can we compare the distortionary effects from having a GDP percentage target? For example, there has been some commentary about inflation in the defence supply chain caused by needing to get a lot of money out qui…”

“Going back to the gap that our Chair was asking about, is there a quantitative assessment of that gap between target and spending in terms of bottom-up budgeting in the SDR? Is there any work that you are aware of, Ms Retter?”

“Ms Retter, is this historic increase in prices down to better technology or is it also down to market structure that can be improved?”

“Turning to international co-operation and procurement, there is an alphabet soup of options available to the UK that are happening elsewhere in the world. There is Security Action for Europe, or SAFE, which the UK has had difficulty negotiating to join. There is the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, headquartered …”

“Is there anything that you might want to add on the negotiations around SAFE and why the UK has not been able to enter that so far, from your perspective?”

“Ms Retter, you mentioned that the devil is in the details for the multilateral defence mechanism. Given that we will have Treasury Ministers coming to this Committee to answer our questions about defence spending, what are the most important details to iron out and what would you like to see from the MDM?”

“What really strikes me about what you have both said is this lack of transparency and the idea that people going into loan plans cannot predict whether there will be retrospective changes, and also might not know all the conditions. That did come across in the submissions to the Committee. Has there been any evidence t…”

“Ms Stern, you mentioned this asymmetry of information between what the Treasury knows and what independent researchers, universities and so on can know, to have this debate about fairness. Do you think the Treasury should be sharing more anonymised information about loan repayments?”

“I appreciate that you are speaking to a Committee of ageing millennials and above, but there may be many young people listening to today’s Committee, which is being livestreamed on BBC Parliament. Does the panel have any words of advice for those who are going into university or maybe repaying their loans right now, bo…”

“Finally, I have a much broader question about intergenerational fairness, which came up with the previous panel. When we talk about the overall shape of the tax and benefits system, as you said, Mr Gardner, there is a risk that students and young people feel—understandably—like they are the cash cows or that they are l…”

“Do you think that the presentation of it can be improved, so long as it is a loan on paper and you are going to get a loan balance? Is that the fundamental sticking point?”