Speeches by Carling.

“In terms of factors, your pipelines and processes within Government for thinking through these things and how you balance things, we said earlier that an announcement in the House is not the most interesting to members of the public a lot of the time. This is the whole point of a press conference; the media gets intere…”

“I know it isn’t.”

“At Fletton Quays in my constituency, managed by Gateway Properties, leasehold residents are reporting that service charges have increased by as much as 150% in the last two years. Flats are under warranty and faults should be fixed by Weston Homes, which built the property, but instead are being fixed by Gateway, which…”

“11. What steps she is taking to reform the leasehold system.”

“If I may I will just come in there, Chair, as we did not necessarily hear the answer on a couple of the points there. Sir Robert, when you approached someone in the organisation and said, “This report’s happened; can the board see it?” you said they did not say no but essentially rebuffed you. Who was that? Who did you…”

“When was this done?”

“In what month, roughly?”

“Thanks. As the Chair has said, I am just trying to build up a timeline here of all these reviews that say very similar things and when they happened.”

“So we have from March 2023 to September 2024. Sir Robert, can you just remind us what you said just now in terms of when you found out about the 2023 report?”

“That was before the subsequent exercise on culture that has just been mentioned. So when you found out about this in May 2024, you took it to the head of people and said, “Why didn’t we see this report?” The response was, “Oh, things have moved on; a board discussion isn’t needed on it now.” But actually things had not…”

“I am interested to understand a little more about the board’s input into the TLFS process and at what point the board started to ring alarm bells. Sir Robert, you said last time we met that the board had intervened on the issue. At what point would you say you became aware that the early designs of the TLFS were not re…”

“Just for time reasons I will curtail that line there because we have what we need from that.”

“So at this point, are you saying that the board is not so much concerned about the design of the survey but about the timeline for switching over?”

“Sure, and I know that there is a reference in those minutes to the board requesting that the TLFS became a standing item to provide additional scrutiny, which was certainly the right thing to do. Since then, the board has essentially encouraged the ONS—as far as I can see from the minutes—to be clear that the final dat…”

“I am glad that you have brought in so much reference to external views on this because that is what is really critical here. Were external stakeholders involved from the start of the process, or was it a case that the board had to point out to those leading on it and essentially say there are not enough stakeholder vie…”

“I appreciate that is the later on stuff. What I am really keen to understand is to what extent stakeholders were properly engaged at the start of the process.”

“It might be helpful if you are able to write to us later with some more details just to the extent to which they were being consulted on the detail of what data needed to be included, what their key objectives are and what they are using the data for so we can understand if they were being involved early on. One more t…”

“But when would the board have gone a bit more nuclear? You had been raising these issues for months and months and nothing was happening. What would your next step have been? What was your next step?”

“I was going to move on. I would just ask my final question at that point.”

“My final question is for Mr Humpherson around the overall governance structure at the UKSA. The board structure seems to be pretty unique in terms of the OSR and the ONS reporting to the same board, despite the OSR regulating the ONS. Is that working?”