Speeches by Yang.

“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…”

“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 …”

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

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

“That was not the question. The question was, can you explain your massive operating losses for the last few financial years?”

“These are your public accounts.”

“The experience that many of our residents come to us with is that they ask their local managers on their estates for transparency over invoices and service charges, and they are met, time and time again, with professed ignorance. It is very difficult for us, as representatives, to see whether the people they are speaki…”

“I feel like I am not going to get an answer to the question about the collapse in turnover.”

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

“In advance of that change, if residents in those managed estates were to agree now, before the new legislation is brought forward, to leave FirstPort or for the local authority to adopt their estates, would you be willing to accept that?”

“Given that you have the right to exit these agreements right now, as the managing agent, would you be willing to exercise that right if your residents wanted it?”

“Yes.”

“Is it the same case for you, Mr King?”

“If you had legal right, as the person in the contract with the freeholder, to exit that arrangement, in those cases would you be willing to let residents and local authorities have their say?”

“You do.”

“Ms Riva or Mr King, would you welcome the Government’s new legislation if it did ban such embedded agreements? Yes, or no?”

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