Speeches by Yang.

“I fully share your frustration about that fact, but given that even the confidence intervals will be taken away, surely there will be more focus on that single-point estimate, not less.”

“Ah, but they do.”

“Coming out of the experience of the OBR leak inquiry that Dame Harriett mentioned, will the Treasury change the nature of its engagement with the OBR going forward, for example the number of different rounds of information passing to and fro, the number of forecast rounds and so on?”

“I am sure that all of us on this Committee will be interested to read every page of the OBR report along with every chart and statistic when it comes out.”

“But if you compare the experience of a member of the public, or even a member of the financial media, from the last spring statement to this coming spring statement, will virtually nothing have changed?”

“I have a couple of quick operational questions. First, the OBR is no longer going to publish its forecasts on its own website, but on the gov.uk domain. Is work on that going ahead as planned?”

“I think my leaseholders would agree with that. Moving on to stamp duty land tax, Minister Rigby. I appreciate this is a tax question, so I hope you can answer broadly. The Treasury Committee heard from Professor Tim Leunig that every single person in the country is a loser from stamp duty because it restricts people fr…”

“Minister Pennycook, an assessment was made by the previous Government in May 2024. The former Minister of Housing, assessing the impact of ground rents on different institutional investors, wrote, “Ground rents represent, at most, a small percentage of total UK pension assets.” Is that still your assessment today?”

“I completely see that government is about making trade-offs, but it is helpful to know how much and in what manner those trade-offs are weighed when talking about the impacts to, say, residents in flats in south Reading who are paying increasingly high ground rents and getting into financial difficulties, versus those …”

“To clarify, was the choice of 40 years, as opposed to a shorter period, an attempt to balance those two considerations?”

“Yes. I will just go back to Minister Rigby. Looking at the conceptual trade-offs there, £1 of ground rent to a freeholder could be redirected to the leaseholders paying the ground rent. In terms of striking that balance, were you concerned about systemic impacts, or was it simply a distributional question of who gets t…”

“What I am trying to get at is that whenever you—”

“My question is more about how the Treasury made that assessment—quantitatively or otherwise—of the balance of impacts. In some ways, you are improving the income stream to leaseholders, who will no longer pay such onerous ground rents. You are reducing it for those investors who hold the ultimate freeholds. What quanti…”

“The Government have announced a cap on ground rents of £250 a year, reducing to a peppercorn amount over 40 years. Minister Rigby, how did the Treasury assess the impact of these reforms on leaseholders and on the institutional investors and other ultimate owners of the freeholds that benefit from ground rent income?”

“Sure.”

“Is it a substantive debate, rather than a general debate, that you are proposing? Is that what you are saying?”

“Yes, I am very happy to broaden it to regulation of the sector or of the company. Coming off the back of the previous debate on service charges, I thought it would be beneficial to look at the issue from the business perspective and to talk about a specific business and its functioning, as opposed to service charges in…”

“Thank you, Chair. FirstPort is the largest property managing agent in the UK, as I am sure you know. The debate would follow a series of informal sessions that different party groupings have had with FirstPort over the last year. Labour MPs, Lib Dem MPs and Conservative MPs have separately had scrutiny sessions with th…”

“I assumed you do. Where do you make profit other than from your management fees?”

“You do.”