Speeches by Yang.

“But the formula—the process itself—is within your remit. You could change it if you wanted to.”

“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?”

“Is the valuation process itself going to stay as complicated as it is right now?”

“Minister, you have set out several times in your responses to us how the system of business rates taxation is complicated, and you have done a lot of education and online videos explaining the complications. The valuation process falls under HMRC now, with the Valuation Office Agency coming in-house, so all the complic…”

“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?”

“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.”

“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?”

“Coming out of the experience of the OBR leak inquiry that Dame Harriett mentioned, will the Treasury change the nature of its engagement with the OBR going forward, for example the number of different rounds of information passing to and fro, the number of forecast rounds and so on?”

“To clarify, will the OBR produce an assessment of headroom at the end of the forecast period?”

“So the only difference is that it will not be giving us the confidence intervals for that?”

“So you take all those different factors in the round, but if the MPC were to vote one year to slow down QT dramatically, for example, I presume your advice to Ministers about the capacity of the gilt markets would change. Is that the kind of decision making and advice that you give?”

“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?”

“Could you talk me through how the Treasury decided how much funding to provide HMRC for closing the tax gap?”

“Given that the Treasury has targets for how much you want to raise from closing the tax gap at different fiscal events, how confident are you that the amount of investment you have put in gives the level of staffing—the number of compliance officers and so on—needed to actually meet those targets? Have you made an asse…”

“Following on from what Dame Harriett asked about the impact of quantitative tightening, Ms Whelan, does the DMO have its own assessment of the impact of QT on gilt markets?”

“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?”