Speeches by Yang.

“Would it be counter to them?”

“To the Governor, we have a situation where the UK has an unusually low participation rate and people are unusually unlikely to participate in the labour force survey. What needs to be done to solve this problem? Who needs to do it? Is the Bank doing any work to solve this problem as well?”

“How confident are you that the ONS can solve this problem? By when do you expect that to begin?”

“That is one channel that is closed off to the Bank. You mentioned the importance of that interest payment on reserves for other means. I presume you mean the monetary transmission mechanism. The Bank made technical preparations three years ago to introduce a tiered reserve system to see whether that was possible. Of co…”

“Are there better means, technically, of ensuring better value for money so the Treasury has to make fewer payments of that kind?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I welcome this opportunity to discuss the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) for bringing this debate to Westminster Hall. I also thank my constituents who have made it here from Earley and …”

“Can I just clarify something, Governor? You previously said that tiering reserves might run counter to your objectives when it comes to increasing value for money on QE. In what way would it be counter to your objectives?”

“I will move on to ask Ms Lombardelli about distributional impacts. What is your latest assessment of the impact of QE on inequality? Is QT undoing any of that impact? Is there a risk of a ratchet effect where it is much easier to increase rather than decrease the level of inequality?”

“Over 5,000 Hong Kong families have settled in Reading over the past few years, including in my constituency, and I have stood alongside Hong Kong activists in peaceful demonstrations here in the UK. The onerous sentencing of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong will give people a broad reason to fear transnational repr…”

“Similar to Dame Harriett’s question, you have previously spoken to the Lords Committee and told it that the Bank could not act to change that arrangement of paying interest on the reserves on its own. What partnership would you need from other parts of Government? What conversations have you had with them on this issue…”

“I take that point, but value for money is a consideration for the Treasury as well as for the programme and pace of quantitative easing. Is there any value-for-money consideration in that arrangement?”

“Over what timeframe would you expect the OBR to be able to revise upwards its expectations for growth or revise downwards its expectations of inflation? Is that what you might expect in response to your policies on health and social care and so on paying off?”

“To briefly go back to the question of timeframes, Chancellor, when you look at the scale of the problem of the post-pandemic scarring of the labour markets, do you see that as a one, two or five-year problem? Or will it take longer than that to start to heal?”

“Congratulations, Chancellor, on your historic appointment. I hope it brings more young women into our economics departments. The OBR’s expectations of inflation are very much linked to its assessment that the UK economy is very close to productive potential, and that there is very little slack in the labour markets and…”

“Following on from Rachel Blake’s question about planning reform, is the reason you have not yet modelled the impact of that health and social care investment due to a lack of detail, or is it simply that we are in a quite unprecedented situation post the pandemic and, therefore, you do not really know based on previous…”

“Thank you to the panel for spending your afternoon with us. Of course, the market expectations of inflation and interest rates are very much linked to this crucial of how much the output gap is and how much more potential capacity there is in the economy. My questions are about that and about labour supply. I will dire…”

“Mr Johnson, you talked about this high level of economic inactivity coming out of the pandemic. How unusual is that in the UK compared to other rich, developed economies? If it is unusual, in the medium run—let us say over a two to five-year timeframe—how much can that be alleviated by encouraging more people into work…”

“Mr Brewer, do you have anything to add to that? In particular, how far does the current Government package go towards addressing those questions of inactivity? How much further could the Government go in addressing those issues?”

“A number of countries have embarked on quantitative easing and are also unwinding. If you look at the UK’s performance on that and what we plan to do, are we doing it in a particularly costly way? Are there better ways of doing it when we look at other countries’ practices?”

“Mr Johnson and Mr Brewer, you both talked about closing the gap between the way we tax income and the way that we tax wealth. This is a very broad question. Do you think that our current tax system has an efficient balance between those two forms of taxation? Is this Budget moving us in the right direction? How much fu…”