Speeches by Yang.

“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?”

“However, most of the public and even many journalists will simply look at the single-figure assessment of headroom rather than the confidence intervals. Does that mean that there is effectively no real change in communication?”

“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?”

“Secondly, you mentioned to Dame Harriett that the job advert will be going up in the near future for the chair of the OBR, which has been unfilled for two and a half months. Why has it not gone up already?”

“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?”

“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…”

“I am not sure we are going to make progress on this point.”

“Yes.”

“You are receiving far fewer management fees. In the last two financial years, your turnover has reduced by something like 30 times. Does that reflect the number of people who are leaving your services because they now have right to manage or because freeholders and developers have decided to quit FirstPort?”

“Many of my residents in new build estates, including freeholders and leaseholders alike, say that they have had informal residents’ association conversations about trying to leave their current property manager, but they cannot because they have embedded management arrangements in their property deeds that essentially …”

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

“You make profit from your management fees; that is your primary source of profit?”

“Your investment does not explain your loss in revenue.”