Speeches by Yang.

“To briefly go back to the question of timeframes, Chancellor, when you look at the scale of the problem of the post-pandemic scarring of the labour markets, do you see that as a one, two or five-year problem? Or will it take longer than that to start to heal?”

“Congratulations, Chancellor, on your historic appointment. I hope it brings more young women into our economics departments. The OBR’s expectations of inflation are very much linked to its assessment that the UK economy is very close to productive potential, and that there is very little slack in the labour markets and…”

“Over what timeframe would you expect the OBR to be able to revise upwards its expectations for growth or revise downwards its expectations of inflation? Is that what you might expect in response to your policies on health and social care and so on paying off?”

“Mr Josephs, you talked about fiscal allusions in the outlook and you named the sale of the student loan book for below its market value as an example. Is the Government’s financial transactions control framework, which aims to stop this kind of behaviour in future, a framework that the OBR will be scrutinising and prod…”

“A number of countries have embarked on quantitative easing and are also unwinding. If you look at the UK’s performance on that and what we plan to do, are we doing it in a particularly costly way? Are there better ways of doing it when we look at other countries’ practices?”

“Mr Johnson and Mr Brewer, you both talked about closing the gap between the way we tax income and the way that we tax wealth. This is a very broad question. Do you think that our current tax system has an efficient balance between those two forms of taxation? Is this Budget moving us in the right direction? How much fu…”

“What is the timeframe for those two time runs?”

“On confidence in the data, obviously there is a tremendous amount of work in the economic outlook. Is there an argument for there to be more caveating or confidence intervals of the projections you present, given the lack of confidence that we have just described in the data inputs?”

“Professor Miles, when you say your estimate is central, do you mean that you have picked the middle of the range? I see that you have described a range of 0.15 to 0.75 in the elasticity of demand for labour. Is that just choosing the middle point? It seems like a reasonable middle point, because there is a spectrum of …”

“Mr Josephs, following on from that question, you forecast very large behavioural changes, and in particular very large emigration changes in response to taxes on assets such as in the private equity industry. There is research from the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation that suggests that those emigration effects are …”

“Thank you to the panel for spending your afternoon with us. Of course, the market expectations of inflation and interest rates are very much linked to this crucial of how much the output gap is and how much more potential capacity there is in the economy. My questions are about that and about labour supply. I will dire…”

“Mr Johnson, you talked about this high level of economic inactivity coming out of the pandemic. How unusual is that in the UK compared to other rich, developed economies? If it is unusual, in the medium run—let us say over a two to five-year timeframe—how much can that be alleviated by encouraging more people into work…”

“Mr Brewer, do you have anything to add to that? In particular, how far does the current Government package go towards addressing those questions of inactivity? How much further could the Government go in addressing those issues?”

“Thanks to the whole panel for your immense work on this outlook. Mr Hughes, I want to get into the question about spare capacity in the economy and your assumption that there is very little spare capacity left. I wonder if the OBR has been overly pessimistic about the idea that the UK economy is operating at full poten…”

“Following on from Rachel Blake’s question about planning reform, is the reason you have not yet modelled the impact of that health and social care investment due to a lack of detail, or is it simply that we are in a quite unprecedented situation post the pandemic and, therefore, you do not really know based on previous…”

“I have one final question on this. You talk about indicators of unemployment. How confident are you in the jobs market data, given that the ONS has paused publication of the labour force survey for about a year? We have had declining responses to the survey. People do not seem to want to fill it out. The Bank of Englan…”

“There is the idea that there is short-term tightness and medium-term uncertainty, depending on how many people can come back into work.”

“My constituents told me on the doorstep that their No. 1 priority was to improve the NHS. If the Conservative party were still in government, it would be overseeing steep cuts across the NHS and our public services. Would the hon. Lady be happy to be part of such a programme?”

“The hon. Gentleman mentions Gordon Brown. Yesterday’s Budget starts to restore the level of Government spending as a share of the economy to levels that are similar to those under Gordon Brown and the last Labour Government. It starts to restore the foundations of our public services. Does the hon. Gentleman welcome th…”

“Will the right hon. Member give way?”