Speeches by Yang.

“Do you think that the presentation of it can be improved, so long as it is a loan on paper and you are going to get a loan balance? Is that the fundamental sticking point?”

“Moving to the distributional effects and the question of winners or losers, I take it that the panel is agreed that given the scarce resources and the need to prioritise, your top priority would be to tackle the thresholds. Is that generally the case? Witnesses indicated assent.”

“What really strikes me about what you have both said is this lack of transparency and the idea that people going into loan plans cannot predict whether there will be retrospective changes, and also might not know all the conditions. That did come across in the submissions to the Committee. Has there been any evidence t…”

“And interest rates are lower down the list of priorities, because the change in the interest rate really affects only the top-earning graduates who will ever have a chance of repaying their loan. From the submissions we have had, as others have mentioned, what is really psychologically oppressive for most plan 2 gradua…”

“Finally, I have a much broader question about intergenerational fairness, which came up with the previous panel. When we talk about the overall shape of the tax and benefits system, as you said, Mr Gardner, there is a risk that students and young people feel—understandably—like they are the cash cows or that they are l…”

“I appreciate that you are speaking to a Committee of ageing millennials and above, but there may be many young people listening to today’s Committee, which is being livestreamed on BBC Parliament. Does the panel have any words of advice for those who are going into university or maybe repaying their loans right now, bo…”

“Mr Whelton, the question that my colleague John Glen raises about the Treasury’s tendency to go in and tinker is also a political question. Partly because of the technicalities and otherwise of the student loans, it is perhaps seen as an easier target than taking money from other parts of the tax and benefits system fo…”

“Ms Stern, you mentioned this asymmetry of information between what the Treasury knows and what independent researchers, universities and so on can know, to have this debate about fairness. Do you think the Treasury should be sharing more anonymised information about loan repayments?”

“To go back to the theme of intergenerational fairness, my concern is that a lot of the levers that the Government now are and previously were pulling, whether that is changing the interest rate or the threshold for repayment, are really a conversation about cross-subsidy within the current or previous cohort of graduat…”

“Does that have any impact on monetary policy?”

“I just want to press more on my colleague’s line of questioning about the Treasury’s measures. Would it be normal, when the Treasury is looking at interventions that change prices—lowering the cost of living—to have that conversation with you to understand your reaction function to different measures, or is that not pa…”

“Do you see volatility as introducing more uncertainty, or is it directional, if you see what I mean, in terms of rates?”

“Has some of that modelling been published?”

“I will start with my second-favourite topic, the gilt market. Dr Mann, you gave a speech a few days ago, talking about the increase over the past few years in hedge fund trading in the UK gilt markets. What impact does that have on volatility and on monetary policy, from your perspective?”

“We have taken the hint.”

“I have a question about your responses to potential new data and new measures. In our last session, we talked about how the Government’s intervention on energy bills, in terms of fiscal policy, had brought down headline CPI. Given that all three of the scenarios that you have projected have quite a significant output g…”

“There may be fiscal and other measures—we will talk about food later in this session—but what do you see as the purely macroeconomic impact of that reduction on CPI in terms of how it affects the output gap and inflation?”

“Understood.”

“That takes me to my next question, on everyone’s favourite topic: quantitative tightening. The MPC is due to make a decision later this year about the pace and scale of that. In explaining your decision from the previous year, each of you had slightly different ideas about how quickly the pace of QT should go. I would …”

“Looking forward to this year, with the changes in inflation expectations that you have now—”