Speeches by Glen.

“Will the NFU Mutual and others not provide financial instruments to many earlier on to make mitigations so they can plan?”

“What is the average age of farmers? Is it mid-60s?”

“Tom, you were reported to have met with the Prime Minister, and it was reported that he had indicated there would be a softening in the approach. Do you have any observations about that report?”

“Could I ask you about business rollover relief? There is a wide consensus that people who sell businesses to defer capital gains tax by buying large tracts of land are who most people feel should be dealt with. Could it not have been more effective and more targeted to use business rollover relief to tackle those peopl…”

“Why do you think that would not have been looked at? Because it would clearly have saved the Government lots of challenges presentationally.”

“Can I probe a little more in terms of the net effect? David, perhaps we will come to you in a second, but your boss, Paul Johnson, who I have done some media with, is totally relaxed about this change. He sees it as a clear loophole. But one of the things that is vexing for the farming industry is the interaction with …”

“Could I ask my last question, Chair, and could I turn this to Jeremy and Stuart? Obviously, Jeremy, you have a career of experience in terms of advice and analysis of the rural economy. Surely most savvy farmers can find ways of mitigating the full extent of this. Is there not a lot of unnecessary concern? How do you r…”

“What is the average age of farmers? Is it mid-60s?”

“A lot of things have been mentioned about profitability. You could talk about how the previous Government did not get the capital grants out quickly enough, you have uncertainty over the land use framework, you have the thresholds and the national insurance changes, the distribution of value across the supply chain for…”

“And give you space to do all the other things that you need to?”

“Robert, do you agree with Tom’s assessment?”

“Of course, there will be plenty of people who will have been quite satisfied because they did not know what had happened. They did not know what they did not know. Now they are retrospectively going to have the opportunity, as with PPI, to take advantage, potentially, of a redress mechanism. It does beg the question ab…”

“Yes.”

“That is all right up to a point. You are the longest-serving chief executive of the FCA. You have gone through a massive transformation programme where you are trying to empower decision making further down the organisation. You must have an instinct. We as politicians want you to succeed and we want the economy and th…”

“Blame me!”

“No.”

“We did.”

“Of course, yes.”

“I was the Economic Secretary for four and a half years. Therefore, we had a lot of interaction—me as a Treasury Minister—with the FCA. That was a situation where there was a market failure. It was deemed to be partly the responsibility of the FCA to have stopped that from happening. What happened was that there was an …”

“To examine one of those that happened on my watch with London Capital & Finance, there was a situation where there was a—”