Speeches by Yang.

“I want to go back to the point that various panellists made about cash ISAs and driving an investment culture. There is an issue about risk aversion, particularly among low-income customers and particularly among women, who take up many more cash ISAs than men. They are opting for that for a particular reason; there is…”

“I am hearing you, Mr Stone, talking about changing the incentives as opposed to getting rid of cash ISAs and funnelling people through compulsion.”

“Given that behaviour takes a long time to change, and there are reasons why low-income people are more risk averse, if you were to do that scrapping, as you suggest, or limit it at £5,000, is there any modelling of behaviour that you would expect—I see Mr Byrnes shaking his head—so that people would change that into an…”

“Do I hear both Mr Byrnes and Ms Fairweather as saying, “Keep the cash ISAs and their level until that work has been done”? Is that what you are saying?”

“Councillor Foale, anything you want to add to that?”

“Would you advocate moving to a needs-based funding system?”

“I have a couple of quick follow ups on this question, which is very pertinent to me because my local authority of Wokingham is one of the least well-funded in the high needs block, and the F40 is showing a disparity of about three times between the lowest and highest funded. Mr Williams, from the perspective of school …”

“Has such an exercise already been done? What is the back-of-the-envelope scale of this?”

“My last question is to Dr Luke. If we were to move to some form of needs-based funding system, what would that mean for national budgets in different Departments and how would you allocate that if you could choose? Mr Haslett might have a view on this as well.”

“Do you have any sense of the magnitude of the uplift needed? Are we talking about billions, hundreds of millions?”

“Right now, there isn’t enough data in the public domain for you to make that assessment?”

“Putting aside again the historical decision to start the indemnity process, which was made long, long ago—many previous Governments ago—does the Treasury, or do you, have a view on whether, given the current fiscal and macroeconomic outlook, the commercial banking sector needs that £30 billion a year from the taxpayer?”

“I don’t know whether you are looking at millions of spending lines across all Departments, but do you have a sense of how many of those have social value estimates?”

“Ms Russell, you mentioned earlier that the Treasury is also conducting its own zero-based review of its own costs. Do you consider the Treasury indemnity to the Bank of England’s asset purchase facility as one of those costs? I note the publication from the Bank yesterday that estimates around £30 billion a year is bei…”

“Does anyone on the panel know which subjects the Office for Value for Money is looking at? I think you mentioned two or three subjects.”

“We look forward to that. Secondly, I know that efficiency savings are a goal of almost every single Government. Have there ever been reviews of previous efficiency savings and whether they have led to a reduction in service provision?”

“I suppose the definition of efficiency savings, as I understand it, is about trying not to lead to a decrease in provision. You are trying to find other ways of saving cost, for example on the procurement side.”

“I am concerned about sectors in which productivity is more or less fixed. For example, you need one teacher for, say, every five toddlers in a pre-school. You cannot change that ratio very much, unless robots become very effective in the next few years.”

“In those sectors—particularly in unprotected departments, such as funding for local councils, which fund social care, SEND in schools and so on—it is predominantly women who pick up the slack and withdraw from the workforce when services are cut back, as we saw during the pandemic. Is there an assessment in the spendin…”

“Will you conduct an equalities impact assessment? If so, how long and how rigorous will it be and how will it be done?”