Good afternoon, colleagues, to this, our final meeting of 2025. Who would have thought it? The ghost of Christmas present is among us in the form of the right honourable Darren Jones. The ghost of Christmas past, played by Cat Little, is with us. Luke Taylor will, of course, play the part of the ghost of Christmas future, I have little or no doubt. Anyway, I am now going to end any form of Christmas-themed stuff. You are both very welcome, and thank you for finding the time to join the Committee. Let me turn to you, Mr Jones—and I say “Mr Jones” because I have a cornucopia of titles that I could use. I am not quite sure whether I call you the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. Tell us about those roles. In particular, what is the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister?

First, it is great to be with you. It is the first time since I was appointed in September.

Yes, and belated congratulations.

Thank you so much.

I should have said that at the start. Forgive me.

They are two separate jobs. Over the summer recess, the Prime Minister decided to create a ministerial role within No. 10. No. 10 is not a Department. It is, in fact, a business unit of the Cabinet Office but, as the Committee will know, it functions as its own business unit. He wanted additional ministerial capacity to help him with the day-to-day work of his priorities in the No. 10 building, so he created a Minister of State role, which, at the start of September, was an attending Cabinet role. It was technically part of the Cabinet Office ministerial team but specifically within No. 10, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. Then, of course, the reshuffle happened and the Prime Minister asked me to become the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which meant that I was then running the Cabinet Office and sat with full rank around the Cabinet table. They are two separate roles. Functionally, though, they are trying to do the same thing, which is to ensure that the system of government is focused on the Prime Minister’s and the public’s priorities, that we improve delivery and solve delivery problems where they exist, and that we better communicate with the public about what Government are doing and show the difference that we are making in their lives. In practice, that means that I tend to focus my time on policy issues, delivery issues and reform of the Government Communication Service. I also have oversight of the National Security Secretariat and support the Prime Minister on those issues too. I spend broadly half my time while I am in London in No. 10. I am there every morning for the Prime Minister’s daily briefing. I spend more of my time there on Mondays and Tuesdays with Cabinet, and I spend the other half of my time in the Cabinet Office, which tends to be in the afternoons and evenings, and a bit more back-ended into Wednesdays and Thursdays.

We have a Cabinet Secretary; the Prime Minister has a chief of staff; there is a Government director of communications; and we have a Deputy Prime Minister. Then we have you. This is quite a complicated Venn diagram. Where does the buck stop? You have some element of responsibility in the Cabinet Office for national security, which most people would automatically think was the purview of the Home Office. I think that I am right in saying that you have some role in foreign relations, which many people would say was the purview of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Secretary. Is this the creation of an Office of the Prime Minister almost by the back door? There are many of us who would welcome the creation of an Office of the Prime Minister. That is the first question. Secondly, where is the buck going to stop, with so many eyes on so many issues?

Just to break that down a little, the Cabinet Office has always served the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. That still happens. What we do not do is duplicate the work of Departments. We are there in the centre to support Departments with their delivery, so we do not try to deliver instead of them. We are there to add value as and when needed by Departments or when the Prime Minister is engaged on a particular issue. In terms of the distinction between the roles, we essentially work together as a team. The Cabinet Secretary and Cat Little sit at the head of the civil service as the profession and ensure that officials are being tasked with doing the work that Ministers are instructing them to do. The chief of staff is more of a political role supporting the Prime Minister on political strategy. My role, as I say, tends to focus on policy and delivery.

That is a new role for the chief of staff, surely, because there is a political director within No. 10 who does the politics. Traditionally, the chief of staff has done the driving forward of policy.

The chief of staff is the head of the units that do political work, including the political director and the communications functions. As I say, I tend to work with not just the chief of staff but the deputy chiefs of staff as well, where we have broadly separated out political and communications strategy, policy and delivery, and private office, visits, events and stakeholders. Essentially, I work alongside the Prime Minister across everything that he does, but the proportion of my time is predominantly on domestic policy and delivery issues.

So, when you speak, you speak, effectively, as if it were the Prime Minister speaking.

Yes.

Is that readily understood across Westminster and Whitehall?

Yes.

Something that Ms Little and this Committee have discussed is the merit in the Cabinet Office being the banger-together of heads to say, “Look, I don’t really care if you are not particularly happy with this. This is what we have decided to do. Just damn well get on and do it. Stop the messing around. Just crack on. If you don’t like it, you can always resign, but just do it.” The system that we have is very siloed, with Secretaries of State and permanent secretaries running their own mini empires, effectively, under the broader umbrella. Are you being, and do you feel that you have the power to be, more muscular, in driving things forward to the point of delivery?

Yes, but you also want to do that in the right way. The centre is quite small compared to all the other Departments, with all the experts that they have within their teams. As I say, the measurement of success for me is that we are adding value to enable and speed up delivery of the public’s priorities, and to be able to communicate that. There is a role for Secretaries of State to be involved in cross-governmental discussions. One change that the Prime Minister and I have made is to restructure the Cabinet Sub-Committees, which was published recently, to ensure that there is a space for those conversations to be had, so that you do not end up in a position where lots of disagreements or disputes surface all the way up to either me or the Prime Minister, but get resolved more effectively downstream as you bring the whole of Cabinet with you on those questions.

We will come on to mission-led Government in a moment, but you have mentioned twice the people’s priorities. What are they?

People want to feel better off at the end of this Parliament than at the start of it. They want to know that their public services, and particularly the national health service, are fit for the future and there when they need them. They want to feel pride in our country, whether that is in relation to communities or the security of our border and those types of issues. The public are very clear about what they want from Government. It is our job to be able to show that Government and democratic processes, quite frankly, are able to deliver on that promise of change in a really tangible way. For me, that means that you take quicker policy decisions in Government. You understand that delivery is different from policy. Whatever is written on a page in Whitehall does not mean anything to the public at home. Delivery on the ground is what matters to them. Then we reform the communications service, where we are completely losing the war at the moment in the new media landscape, to be able to prove to people that it is Government intervention that is making a positive difference in their lives.

How have HMG discovered that that is what the public want?

We were elected on that mandate as the Labour party. The Prime Minister has been very clear that those are his priorities. We know, through testing and insight work, and focus groups and feedback with people across the country, that those are the headline issues. Irrespective of your voting intention or demographic, those are the broad, general things that the public care about and expect to see progress on.

I could ask you whether that included the family farm tax, for example, but we will not get into the weeds of tax policy at this hearing. We could be here all day.

Good afternoon, Minister. Is the centre of Government operating effectively?

No, and it needs to change. That is not a criticism of civil servants. It is a criticism of past decisions about how the centre operates. At Cabinet this morning, I presented the changes that the Prime Minister and I have been implementing in the centre of Government, as a reflection of our work over the last couple of months about why we think the centre is not working properly. If I split it down into three diagnoses, one is that we have not been prioritised enough across Government. There is a lot of business-as-usual activity that happens in all Departments, with lots of things happening all the time. We need to make sure that the whole muscle of Government is focused on the public’s priorities. The second, to which I have just alluded to the Chair, is that the system often confuses policy and delivery. Policy papers are one thing. I need to understand supply chain delivery objectives and what is happening on the ground. That involves, for example, making sure that we get co-ordinates from Departments about where they are spending money and what is changing, so that we can see what is happening in particular places and show that to the people in those areas. Thirdly, we have to be quicker. We are too slow. We are too focused on inputs and outputs—“We have to do something. Let us have a process, a strategy or a review, or work together.” We are not focused enough on outcomes, and that is the thing that we need to push the system to be really clear about.

Since your appointment, have you made as much progress as you would have liked in those areas?

Coming in in September, if it was as easy as me just deciding what would happen and the whole thing happening, that would have been great, but there is a lot to do. I have had to prioritise my time and be clear about what I am going to do. It is a team sport, and it is about bringing colleagues with you, within Departments, around the Cabinet table and elsewhere, to make sure that we are all delivering against the same agenda, which is essentially what we were talking about at Cabinet this morning, and which will set the tone for 2026 as a year of delivery.

Presumably, the Prime Minister and Government are following a grid, in the way that Governments normally do. Is that something that you have ownership of and responsibility for?

I have oversight of it as Chief Secretary in No. 10. There is a shared diagnosis, both with special advisers and with civil servants responsible for communications reform, that the system has become addicted to announcements. Just because we have a grid, it does not mean that we need to announce something else on a Tuesday because it is a Tuesday. We have to be very focused on priorities. One thing that you will see from us in the new year, as we work through the changes, is a better approach to modern communications, better storytelling, not just with Ministers but with members of the public, and what I loosely refer to as delivery comms, which is showing that we are getting on with things as opposed to just announcing something else and adding it to the pile.

You have mentioned a few times the need to improve communications, and that is one of your responsibilities. Can you give some examples of where you have made a clear difference to Government communication?

It is not just me. We have Tim Allan, who is the executive director of communications in No. 10. We have David Dinsmore, who is the new Permanent Secretary for the Government Communication Service, who is housed within the Cabinet Office. One change that the Government have made and that has worked really well, which was courtesy of my predecessor, Pat McFadden, and one of the special advisers in No. 10 at the time, was something called the new media unit. I often joke that this is not new in the world, but it is new to Government. It is, essentially, about how you communicate through digital platforms and social media channels as opposed to just giving a press release to a newspaper in Westminster. It is a fairly small team of about 20 FTE staff. They have managed to bring some budgets together from across Government, where the Government have chipped in with their communications budget to prove the model. It has been much more effective at engagement and sentiment than traditional communications. That is one aspect that has changed in the year that we have gone through already, but there is much more for us to do. What you will see as a consequence is that the grid will change in its nature. The way that we engage with the bubble versus the rest of the country will change, and the content that we produce on platforms and elsewhere will start to become more creative, more interesting and, we hope, more engaging for the public.

There have been a few examples of where communication has not been so good when you have been in charge. I am thinking about the Budget, the speech from the Chancellor and the briefing, and then the U-turns when the Budget came. Then you had the briefing against the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, the night before he went on the media round. Do you have any reflections as to what went wrong, and do you take responsibility for that?

I cannot take responsibility for everyone across the whole of Government, so, no, I do not. We have to respect the autonomy of Departments. There is a co-ordinating role that we can enhance in the centre, where we do not do that currently. That is not about centralisation or taking budgets or power away from Departments, but about saying that by working together in this new media landscape, we can have a more positive impact in terms of engaging with their stakeholders and with the public. That is the work that we are going to be doing with Cabinet in 2026. Can I stop politicians or political advisers from chatting? No. Would I encourage them to do it less? Yes.

What action did you take after those incidents that I gave as examples, in terms of trying to enforce the policy that you have just articulated?

All of that is in the public domain. At Liaison Committee yesterday, off the back of political briefings, the Prime Minister not only made it very clear that that is unacceptable, but also changed some of the processes within No. 10 about who can speak to journalists officially on behalf of him and No. 10. That is, essentially, now just the executive director of communications.

Do you police that? Are you responsible for that? Is the system that the Prime Minister has now put in place your baby, basically?

It is an expectation of everybody in the building. Do I go around every day with a clipboard and ask, “Who have you spoken to last night?” No. I would not get anything else done in the job. The Prime Minister’s wishes are made clear. If anyone decides to go against that, there will have to be consequences for it. In respect of the leak in advance of the Budget—I am thinking in particular of the leak to the Financial Times on the Thursday before the Budget—the Chancellor has given evidence to the Treasury Select Committee on that, and the permanent secretary is conducting a leak inquiry to understand where it might have come from and how, including, for example, how the named list process works. I am particularly conscious that there is still too much hard copy paperwork. I would much rather that things were electronically presented on dashboards and screens, where you can control access more effectively and know who looked at what and when, as opposed to printing out A3 Excel spreadsheets, which we tend to do a lot around the Budget. Too many people are on the named list, in my view. There are improvements that can be made where there is very sensitive information, which is often the case for national security material, but we can up our game on other economic security-related matters as well.

Lastly from me, in relation to unauthorised briefings, it was reported in the New Statesman back in November that sources within No. 10 were suggesting that your appointment had not been a success. Do you have any reflections on that?

Yes. I disagree wholeheartedly.

The policy of clamping down on these briefings is maybe not working, or not being policed as well as it could.

As I say, we can all give ourselves hundreds of KPIs. We have to focus on what is important to the public and make sure that we are delivering against that.

Chancellor, you rightly said that there is nothing new in the new media that the new media unit is looking at. This question may sound harshly political, but it is not intended to be; it is seeking a frank and honest answer, which I know that you are more than capable of giving. There will be a lot of people who will be reflecting at this year-end on the first full year of the first Labour Government since 2010, and who will be scratching their heads and saying, “It all just feels a little under-prepared,” as if their victory came as the most scintillating surprise to them, and no preparatory homework was done to prepare a programme for Government or to think about how to communicate in the mid-2020s and so on. There is a feeling of running to catch up, which, in a five-year parliamentary term, one does not have the luxury of. In all candour, is that a fair assessment? When Mr McFadden appeared before us, he intimated that how to do governance in the UK had changed almost from analogue to digital between 2010 and 2024. Is that a fair assessment?

I would say that any Opposition party has limited resources. When you are fighting a very significant set of elections, a lot of your resources tend to go into campaigning, so it is hard for Opposition parties of any colour to do the type of work that you can then do in government, when you have the resources of the civil service available to you. You have to be clear on what your political priorities are.

But you have people such as Mr Bell running important think-tanks. You have the research facilities of trade unions on public policy, and so on and so forth. You have the world and his wife offering a putative Government advice. I accept the Short money point, but Oppositions are not short of good people giving advice.

There is a difference between being able to conduct your own work and receiving advice from others. Think-tanks play an important role, but they cannot be seen as a substitute for Opposition parties compared to the civil service. There is just a natural gap; that is factually representative. Has government changed? When I talk to counterparts who were in government last time that Labour was in government, yes, absolutely. As one colleague described it to me, the system of Whitehall feels very similar; that has not changed very much, but the velocity of issues happening in the world has increased rapidly. That is partly a reflection of the media and social media, and how you are responding to issues every day, but it is also reflective of lots of the challenges that we face in the world. There are lots of things that I am proud that this Labour Government have achieved in their first 18 months, but there is no denying the fact that challenges in the world—geopolitically and in trade, and all of those types of things—have a very significant bearing on government. It is right that, when you are in government, you step up and respond to that, even if you could not have anticipated it in advance of the election for your manifesto. [Interruption.]

I do not know what those of you who have just come in have done to upset your school for it to inflict PACAC on you this close to Christmas, if this is your school Christmas present. I am sure that there are some faces that I saw at the Liaison Committee yesterday. Were any of you at the Liaison Committee yesterday? No? It must be a different school. Anyway, you are all very welcome. It is now a sell-out, Darren.

They saw my name on the agenda.

It is standing room only. They will be selling ice cream and Kia-Ora. Talking about Kia-Ora ages me, does it not?

Good afternoon, Minister. It is fair to say, probably for people outside, but maybe even for some people who are in Westminster, that mission-led Government is a bit of a black box. How do you understand mission Government, and is this still a mission-led Government?

Mission-led Government means two things to me. One is focusing on tackling long-term structural issues that the country faces, as opposed to what the Prime Minister in the campaign called sticking-plaster politics. Secondly, it means making Government work together, which might sound obvious but, as we have already alluded to via the Chair, every Department is essentially constitutionally its own organisation with its own authority and decision-making powers, so it is about how you bring them together. Are we still mission led? Yes, in so far as the missions are still Government policy and Government priorities. Do the mission boards still meet? Can they convene across Government? Absolutely, they do. What has changed is perhaps more of the internal wiring of mission boards. We came into Government giving mission boards the status of a Cabinet Sub-Committee and thinking that it may be effective as a delivery mechanism. What we ended up not doing was giving a mission board equivalent status to a Department, because that was, in many ways, too difficult to achieve in the first six to nine months. Mission boards have ended up becoming a very useful convening mechanism. They were very effective, in my view, in the spending review when I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury and we allocated money against mission priorities. In the end, the money went to Government Departments, with accounting officers and permanent secretaries reporting to Parliament with Secretaries of State. It is policy and it is important, and you should think about the long term, but has it fundamentally changed the constitutional principles or the set-up of Government? No.

How often do these Cabinet Sub-Committees meet? Can you provide an example of where they have driven the kind of delivery that you were just talking about?

One reason why I have changed them is that we were not using them effectively enough. In the structure that we had inherited broadly from the previous Government, they were quite wide-ranging. We had a Sub-Committee, for example, called home and economic affairs, which, basically, was anything that was not foreign policy or national security. They were being used predominantly when there was a need to force a decision when there was a disagreement across Government, because they can use the collective authority of Cabinet to make a decision. As a consequence of that, they were not being used as a business-as-usual vehicle for cross-Government collaboration. That was happening elsewhere. We have changed the structure of those Sub-Committees to focus, as I said earlier, on the economy, public services and communities. I have said to Cabinet that we want to use them more effectively next year to facilitate cross-departmental debate on strategy, policy and delivery, as well as on decisions when they need to come to that setting.

Do they meet monthly or less frequently?

We are setting the agenda for the new Cabinet Sub-Committees for January at the moment. The first meetings next year will be about our priorities for 2026. There are quite a few Sub‑Committees, so my expectation is that they will probably meet every four to six weeks, but it might move a bit, depending on prioritisation, availability and agenda items that need to be brought forward.

Since taking office, the Prime Minister has said that successful mission Government would require nothing less than a “complete rewiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform”. From your earlier comment, it does not sound like too much progress has been made. What else needs to happen, and what is your assessment of progress to date?

There are probably quite a few chapters of a PhD under that title, to be honest. To go to a few things that I have been particularly interested in, one that I started to talk about earlier was this conflation between policy and delivery, and being process-driven and not outcome-driven. We do not have as many delivery professionals in the civil service as we might have. I think I am right in saying—Cat, you should correct me if I am wrong—that it has often been seen that, if you are ambitious and want to become a permanent secretary, you need to do lots of policy jobs, but not necessarily get into the weeds of infrastructure delivery, project management or IT transformation. I want to encourage more delivery experience, more innovation and more private sector expertise, because the current system does not move quickly enough. This is the rewiring that the Prime Minister is talking about. As I say, the system has historically thought about announcements, statements to Parliament and strategy documents, all of which are important, but the public do not really care about any of that. Being really clear about what outcomes matter, making sure that you understand, if you are measuring an outcome, whether it is the type of measurement where a member of the public will say, “It is that that will make me feel better” about whatever issues they care about, and having that focus, has to be really important. Have I misrepresented delivery versus policy?

It depends on what you mean by delivery. About 56% of the civil service is in what we call the operational delivery profession. They are the people on the frontline, serving citizens and delivering day-to-day public services. What you are alluding to are the very specialist, big programmatic skills that we have, and there is definitely a gap in our big infrastructure programmes and the project managers who drive change. I have discussed with this Committee before some of the big deficits in transformation and digital skills. Let us face it, everything that we are delivering has some element of technological underpinning. There are some big gaps there that we have to shift very quickly in the civil service.

What does that mean, Minister, in terms of how Departments engage with each other, particularly on, for instance, the five priorities that have been set out in mission-led Government?

As I say, mission boards played a very important role in the spending review. When I ran the spending review in the Treasury, Departments would make a submission. They come and see you in the Treasury and make the case. We also asked the mission boards to do that, so they made their own submission, where they agreed across Departments how they were prioritising different parts of the mission and bidding for money to do that. Even though the money then went to the Department, it was on the understanding that that was, essentially, for mission delivery. That continues. It is different in different priority areas, though. If you take the elective waiting list, that is predominantly a DHSC responsibility. There are some equities in other Departments, but it is predominantly within the one Department. Compare that to, say, violence against women and girls, where you need lots of Departments working with each other in order to have the type of effect that you need to deliver.

Just sticking with the spending review, a lot of us noticed that explicit references to the mission were quite absent in the Chancellor’s speech and in some of the accompanying documents. Is it your position that things were happening behind the scenes, but that the Government have not been particularly good at articulating how that has come out in processes such as the spending review?

Do you mean the speech that she gave at the time of the spending review last year?

Yes.

I cannot remember what was in the speech, to be frank, so I would have to check. The allocations that went to Departments were clearly labelled “mission bids”, if they came in as a mission bid. You end up producing what is called a settlement letter for each Department that ends up being quite long. Some areas of spend are ringfenced, and they can spend it only on those particular issues. They have reporting requirements against other types of spend. Mission delivery was embedded in that process and in the settlement. From memory, we did talk about it in the spending review document that came to Parliament, but whether it featured prominently enough in the speech I would have to go back and check.

We have talked about the five missions, but the Government have subsequently also announced six milestones and three foundations, as well as quite a few targets.

Is there a partridge in a pear tree as well?

Yes, indeed. Even as a Labour MP, being completely transparent, I do not necessarily know whether I could name the vast majority of them.

Let us see whether Mr Jones can. Mr Jones, what are they?

I will go through them. The way that I would articulate them is that there are foundations such as national security, border security or economic stability—ding—that are important to the country, irrespective of who is in government, and the public expect us to get that right. That is why they are foundational. Milestones were about things that we could deliver early in the Parliament. One of them, for example, was 2 million extra appointments in the NHS, which I am sure everyone has heard the Prime Minister say we have not just delivered but gone above and got to 5 million. Other issues include starting breakfast club roll-out, thinking about teacher recruitment, setting up GB Energy, and having more community police officers in our streets. They are delivery milestones over the course of the Parliament. The plan for change metrics, which embody what missions mean and hold us to account for that, are what happens over the course of the Parliament. Are you better off? Is the NHS performing better? Are you on the track to clean power by 2030? I can see why labelling different things might make it seem confusing. It is, essentially, a framework for Government, and it is our job as politicians to then articulate the destination story of where the country is going to as a consequence of all the things that we have set out being delivered.

Are Government doing a good job of setting out that narrative?

I think we are. Could we do better? Yes. You will see a new approach to that in 2026, because some of these things take time to deliver. It is understandable why the public are eager for change. We cannot just say, “Well, it is going to take a long time and it is quite difficult.” We have to be able to show the stepping stones that we are walking on to get from A to B. Evidently, we need to do more of that, more effectively, given public sentiment at the moment.

Why in particular were those additional KPIs for Government needed? Are you confident that they are all complementary?

They are needed because, as I alluded to earlier, Government do a million different things every day. There are always problems. There are always priorities. There are lots of Ministers who have their own interests, and so on and so forth. You have to be clear with the whole system. Day-to-day is fine, but these are the things that the Government are accountable for, and you all have to be accountable against that. KPIs are important from the delivery unit perspective, because it is something that you can track and hold people to account against. If you are going off course, it enables you to have a conversation to try to understand why, and what you can do to fix that. Are they complementary? In so far as they measure against the public’s concerns as they articulate them themselves, yes. Are they interdependent on each other? No, not necessarily.

Do you give a lot of thought to how some of the targets around immigration might have an adverse impact on economic growth, for example?

Do you mean the targets around legal migration, the occupation shortage list, and those sorts of things?

Yes.

The public were clear that they wanted migration to fall. In the occupation shortage, there was—remarkably, I thought—a tendency for employers to recruit overseas in areas such as engineering or science and technology jobs, where you would want to make sure that you were doing everything possible to create those opportunities for young people being educated in the UK so that they could have good careers in those spaces. There was clearly something misaligned around training, apprenticeships and access to work, and it may have been just a bit easier to hire someone overseas to do that work for you. When we think about opportunities for young people, we have a pretty big problem in terms of young people coming out of mandatory education and not being in work at the moment. That is why the Work and Pensions Secretary is bringing forward the youth guarantee. We want to make sure that we are doing everything that we can to create those conditions for people in the country.

As a final question from me, with reference to the Chair’s earlier comments around preparation for government, mission-led Government is a relatively new idea. You have hundreds of years of siloed departmental approaches, and that culture within the civil service. With the benefit of hindsight, were you prepared for the scale of that challenge going into Government? Did you get it about right?

Implementing change in Whitehall is hard because it is, in a very British way, structured around constitutional principles that are not really written down anywhere. I could go on to a diatribe about how it was the sinking of the Belgrano that led to the structures that we have, and it is all a bit mad that that is the basis for how we structure Government, but maybe I will do that another time, unless you invite me to do so. I can write to the Committee afterwards about it.

I am waiting for the musical.

Yes, very good. I am too. How you modernise the state is hard, but there are many of us, including me, who would call ourselves modernisers. The public expect us to get this right, to take it seriously and to be radical about it, and we will be making some further announcements on these types of issues in the new year.

Are you confident that, by the end of the five-year term, presuming that it goes that long, you will have made those big changes to the way in which the civil service operates to deliver that mission-led approach?

We definitely will have made progress. Will the state be in the form that I would like it to be in by the end of five years? No. It is a longer-term project.

Before anybody winces, I am just going to invite you to take out your thermometer.

I do not have one.

Take out your metaphorical thermometer. What is the temperature of the civil service bathwater at the end of 2025?

I do not understand the question, Chair. Forgive me. Could you try again?

Quite early in his premiership, the Prime Minister described his frustration that the civil service was sitting in a tepid bath. It is the Goldilocks porridge bit. It was all right. It was not frightfully hot, and it was not frightfully cold, but it did not exactly move people forward.

Is this the boiling frogs?

This is the boiling frog. Are you heating up the water? Are you waiting to see them twitch? [Interruption.]

Forgive me for laughing. To extend the metaphor—

I approve of extending metaphors.

—I would rather quick showers and get on with the job, as opposed to any suggestion of baths for anyone, quite frankly.

Are these showers hot, tepid or cold?

Whatever gets people moving. I do not particularly mind.

That was a diplomatic answer, if ever there was one.

That was a very good answer. I enjoyed that. Just to loop back on the previous section—I thought I understood this, because I did my homework—we had five legacy missions, as they were, from the manifesto from back in the day. We then had an extra one, which was the foundations, and those gave us national security, secure borders and economic stability. We then had six milestones to measure how well we had progressed over the first Parliament in delivering them, with broadly six first steps that grouped them. You confused me when you were explaining previously. However, our understanding from our previous session was that all of that sits under the mission delivery unit. We understand that that has been closed. Is that the case?

Yes.

Can you give us an explanation for how that came to be?

The first thing that I should put on the record is my thanks to all the officials from across Government who worked in the mission delivery unit, or MDU as it was referred to. They put a lot of energy into setting up that team. The observation, though—and this is a failing of us collectively as politicians, as opposed to the officials—was that this ended up becoming a bit of a PowerPoint presentation-driven set of updates for Ministers, which is fine in and of itself, but does not improve delivery. You spend a lot of time looking at graphs of things going up, ideally, most of the time, or down, depending on what it was, and not focusing enough on what the problem is and how you fix it, before moving on to the next problem—“How do you fix it? Go, go, go.” The other problem was that the MDU was in the Cabinet Office and not integrated into the No. 10 team, which is important. The new delivery unit is essentially an integrated team between No. 10 and the Cabinet Office working together. The important thing to try to understand in terms of the delivery unit and why it is different from policy is that the policy unit deals with lots of things coming in every day. It is the day-to-day business: “There is a disagreement on this. There is a problem with this. Something has gone wrong over here. How do we advise the Prime Minister to respond to that?” The delivery unit has to focus on those longer-term outcomes for people across the course of the Parliament and on making sure that if you are off track, you are able to hold people to account, bring together the right people to fix the problem, and get back on track, without being distracted by the day-to-day, but focused on those core priorities. That is how the No. 10 delivery unit is now going to operate. The Cabinet Office is part of that. The particular thing that we add is, if there is a problem somewhere that needs extra support—it might be expertise in procurement, commercial contracts, HR or property, or a relaxation of certain rules so that you can make decisions more effectively for a particular priority—we can surge in the support around that to fix a problem and then to crack on. The delivery unit still exists, but it has a more outcomes-focused set-up as opposed to just an accountability and performance management function.

Forgive me for trying to play that back. Rather than looking at the progress of the steps that are being taken to achieve your milestones, that is now back up at the mission level to broadly test the temperature of the culture and the teamworking, rather than checking how many of the 6,500 new teachers you have delivered.

We in the centre should not think of ourselves like Ofsted, in my view. We should not be going around every Department and saying, “You, Department X, have said that you are going to deliver these 100 things this year, and I am going to check on all those 100 things.” The reason why I say that is that the Secretary of State is accountable for that. They are accountable to the Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament for it. They do not need us coming in and checking against all of it. What we are supposed to do is, where something is a PM priority and, therefore, a public priority, if there is a problem, to come in to try to help fix it and add value to what the Department is delivering. Ultimately, delivery comes through the Departments, not through the centre of Government.

To evolve the question, parliamentary scrutiny is at the old-fashioned departmental level. When we are trying to align that with the first steps, the milestones, the foundations, or the overall delivery of the missions, do the changes made or does the structure at the moment make that scrutiny more difficult, or is it really about the way that the Cabinet Office can sit across and provide answers, responses and information that is more reliable?

It does not change the accountability arrangements, because missions never became their own, as I say, quasi-Departments. It was always the existing Departments that were accountable to their Select Committees in Parliament for their performance. That has not changed.

Moving on slightly to mission boards, you referred to them in one of your previous answers. How active have they been across the piece up to this point?

As far as I can tell, they have been very active in the first 18 months. I do not have the statistics on numbers of meetings to hand. They were very busy in and around the spending review, predominantly because I asked them to come together and agree some priorities, and to pitch them. They periodically come together to have updates on performance around the metrics that they have signed up to deliver. They are chaired, though, by the mission leads, and it is up to the mission leads to decide to convene those boards. As I say, that is a bit different in different areas. Because health is largely delivered within their own Department, they do not need to convene a meeting to ask themselves the question, whereas VAWG or economic growth, for example, involve other Departments, so they tend to meet more frequently on that cross-departmental basis.

Just to use the NHS as an example of the mission board, the mission is, “Build an NHS fit for the future.” The mission board there seems relatively straightforward on the interpretation or how that is delivered through the milestones and the first steps. In addition to departmental governance, what has that provided? In the example that you gave during the budgeting round and the spending review, did it give more impetus to that or did it have additional expertise that it could apply to the departmental structures?

It is both, and I will just flesh that out a bit. This may sound obvious from a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, but everything is in the spending. If a Department does not have money to do something, it is unlikely that it is going to be able to do it that well, unless it changes prioritisation of the budget. The spending review process is super important for setting expectations and giving money to things to happen. The mission boards were very active around that, and the settlement letters are very clear about what was mission delivery. That is important in individual Departments, because they are very clear about what they are being expected to deliver against the spending settlement that they have been given, but it is also really important, when a Department relies on another one to do something, to help them. An example might be the role that healthcare professionals play in DHSC in helping children have the best start in life. DFE cannot direct public health or NHS officials to do something that DFE wants to do, but the Health Secretary can. When they come to an agreement on that, it brings that together and focuses on the outcome. That is where that has really added value.

Has the composition of those boards changed since inception and, if so, how?

The ministerial members are the same. They will often, though, bring in external people for particular questions or subject matters, and so external contributions change depending on the issue that they are talking about.

There is general agreement that there is very little public understanding of this process. While it is not necessary that you have a column every week in a broadsheet newspaper explaining what the mission boards have been doing, has it been a mistake not to give more detailed explanation of how the sausage is being made?

I do not think so. I do not think that the public really care how we structure ourselves in Government. They just want to know that they are getting good value for their taxes and that we are delivering the type of country that they want to live in. They elect us and they elect a Government to get on and do the business, without knowing what is on the agenda of a particular mission board. I am sure that there is an audience for it, including, quite rightly, this Committee and others. If we need to explain to our stakeholders more effectively, we should do that, but the general public rightly hold us to account for the changes they experience in their lives. To go back to my earlier point, I do not want people spending too much time thinking about internal processes, strategies and meetings. I want them focused on real change for people across the country.

I have some questions mostly around civil service workforce. The spending review included cuts of 16% to administrative budgets across Government by 2030. What reduction in civil service headcount is that likely to entail? How many civil servants are we looking at having by the end of that period?

I will let Cat come in on the specific numbers. On the politics of it, as I am sure you will know, there is a difference between administrative budgets, as in policy and central departmental officials, and programme delivery, which might be running a jobcentre, a prison or a hospital. The reason why we focused on admin budgets was that we do not want to cut frontline capacity for public users, but we want to ensure that we are being as efficient as possible in the back end, which is partly around digital transformation and how we structure ourselves in Government. There are some implications where it has an impact on the total number, so we have had to hire additional officials into HMRC and DWP to tackle fraud and error, which is why you see a growth in some of those areas compared to efficiency gains in other parts of the civil service. On the particular numbers, I will hand over to Cat.

As this Committee knows, we are currently producing our first ever strategic workforce plan, going out to 2030, for the civil service. Very importantly, the 16% is a reduction in the administrative cost. That is, of course, not just about people. It is about estates. It is about all our corporate services and the overall on-cost of the civil service. As we produce the strategic workforce plan, we will be setting out what that administrative cost impact is, where there are FTE reductions associated with it, but we are not yet at the point where we have all the detail underneath it. That is because we are in the middle of the business planning round for the whole of Government. The SR sets the top-down budgets. We translate that into detailed plans. I will be able to answer your question much more accurately with FTE once we publish the strategic workforce plan for the civil service.

Thank you. That is really helpful. It is useful to recognise, as it does not always happen, that a lot of those savings do not necessarily come from headcount reductions. It is useful to have that point on the record. You have anticipated my next set of questions about the strategic workforce plan. We were originally told that that plan would be published alongside the spending review, and then it was delayed until later this year and we still have not had it. I just wonder whether you could outline why it was not published alongside the spending review.

Very simply, we have to do further work to take budgets into action, and that takes a little bit of time. The normal process is that the SR sets multi-year spending envelopes. We then allocate that money at a much more detailed level across the whole of Government. We are right in the middle of that process. The Government committed in the Budget to publishing that strategic workforce plan at the end of that planning cycle, which we would expect to conclude by the end of the financial period. There will then be a decision for Ministers to make as to what period we want to publish the information for, but we would expect that to be in the public domain over the course of the next three to six months.

That, again, very helpfully leads into my next question, around when it will be published. It is an entirely fair answer, and I very much respect that, although that then creates a question around why an expectation was created that it would be published alongside the spending review in the first place.

When we originally started doing the strategic workforce plan—remember, this is the first time we have ever tried to do it for a workforce of this size—we were hoping to be able to set out quite simply the overall shape and size of the civil service. As this Committee will know better than any other, when we have got into the detail of the questions about what skills we need, where those people need to be located, and the deficits that we have to make up in the shape and size of what we do, it became very clear that this was a much more complicated exercise. We never want to mislead Parliament or the public, but it is right that this is a robust exercise that stands up to scrutiny and, importantly, is useful in delivering change and transformation for the Government and our effectiveness.

It is also worth just bearing in mind that we are seeing voluntary and compulsory exit schemes across Departments already coming online. When we do not have that strategic workforce plan, how are decisions being made at this stage around who can be let go under those schemes versus who should be kept?

First off, at the latest count, there are 36 voluntary exit schemes under way across Government. We need to reduce the size of the civil service, and we have clear direction under Government policy to do that in administrative back office functions so that we can protect vital frontline citizen services. Under that direction to meet our budgets over the course of the next two years, that work is already under way. It is important that we protect digital skills and some of the services that we know are absolutely vital to our ability to deliver priorities. That work is happening at departmental level. The Cabinet Office oversees all the voluntary exit schemes and works with Departments to make sure that, where cuts are being made, we understand how they are being made and also what sorts of skills are being retained as a result of those programmes.

That is helpful. That comes on to what I was about to say, but I will ask the question that I had planned anyway, just in case you want to add anything. What measures are in place across Government to make sure that we are not seeing lots of senior officials, who have developed lots of expertise over time and will be in a lot of demand as a result of that, taking advantage of those schemes and thereby causing quite a loss of experience and expertise from the civil service?

Every Department can design its voluntary exit scheme in a way that is relevant to its business. If I take the Cabinet Office, we have just concluded a very large voluntary exit scheme. We stipulated the skills and the levels of performance for people who would and would not be eligible for that scheme. We very specifically said, “If you are a digital expert, if you are delivering work that is a Government priority, or if you are categorised as a high performer in our performance management framework, you are not eligible for the voluntary exit scheme.” Every Department will have its own version of how it runs the schemes to protect skills and priorities, depending on the business that it operates.

That is helpful. Finally on this topic, before I move on to something else briefly, is there a sense of how many voluntary exits and voluntary and compulsory redundancies we have had through these schemes, particularly in 2025?

Yes. From those 36 schemes, we are forecasting around 5,000 exits from the civil service by the end of March 2026. In terms of compulsory exits, the process, in accordance with the civil service compensation scheme guidance, is that you have to go through a voluntary exit process before you can be considered for compulsory exit. At the end of the financial period, we will come back to whether that has been the case.

I would just add, if I may, that it is right to question the size and the cost of the civil service, but the more important question for me is the productivity of the state. It is fine reducing headcount and cost, because we have to live within our means in these difficult economic circumstances that we are operating under, but we have to shift productivity, which is really about skills, training and digital transformation, and thinking about what we do in London and what we do in other parts of the country. There is a bigger picture here, which is more of the prize that the public will expect us to try to secure.

That is helpful. Minister, in April, your predecessor, Pat McFadden, announced a review and rationalisation of arm’s length bodies. This Committee is doing quite a lot of work on various arm’s length bodies at the moment. At Liaison Committee yesterday, I noticed that the Prime Minister used some quite interesting phrasing, and I am going to quote him on this. He referred to the arm’s length body landscape as creating “a sort of thicket of reasons you can’t do anything, rather than a clear path through at speed.” Bearing that in mind, is that review of arm’s length bodies still a priority?

Yes, it is. I suspect that the Prime Minister was talking about more than just ALBs in his comment. There is a whole plethora of things that we end up doing, sometimes because we have to by law, which is fine, but a lot of the time because we just do things in that way, and I am not entirely convinced that we have to do that.

Just to clarify, because I was at the Liaison Committee, he was talking about ALBs, regulation and the obsession with consultation.

Yes. Obviously I agree with the Prime Minister, but I do agree with him. Often when you are trying to do something, the immediate response is, “You’re going to need a Bill. It is going to be big. It is going to cost a lot of money. You need to consult.” It is important that you consult stakeholders, manage legal risk and do things properly, but the Prime Minister’s view, which, as I say, is right, is that we probably gold-plate it too much sometimes, and the process slows us down in getting to the outcome that the public are expecting us to deliver. ALB reform is still important to the Government. We have made a number of announcements in the first 18 months as well, including on NHS England, Ofwat and others. There will be more announcements coming next year. There is also a piece for us to do in the Cabinet Office, in that, when we are making changes to the centre of Government, if we are keeping an ALB, the ALB should be seen as part of the machinery of government and should come on that journey with us, and not be operating in a different way. That is especially important on back office IT systems, digital transformation, productivity requirements and those types of things.

That is useful, and I am glad that you made that comment at the end there. In our work with ALBs, we have had a lot of discussion around the balance between accountability versus independence. It is good to hear that the way that the Government are thinking of it is very much on those systems levels. Finally, it is still a priority to review those ALBs. We have been made aware that there are now only three people in the public bodies team within the Cabinet Office. Is that really enough to be supporting that priority?

I do not know whether the number is right or not, but Cat might know. The key thing is that the ALBs are the Department’s ALBs. As you saw with NHS England, it is a DHSC-led process because that is a DHSC responsibility. Ofwat is a DEFRA-led process. I would look not just at the co-ordinating role that we play in the centre but at what capacity is being put into play across Departments.

We have a very small public body unit. I will double-check whether three is absolutely right. That does not seem at odds with my understanding of the size of that team. It is a very specialist, small co-ordination team. We work very closely with sponsorship bodies within Government Departments. As the Minister just said, ultimately the majority of ALBs have sponsor teams who understand the complex frameworks and the reasons why they are established. We should not be there to man-mark and check everything that those sponsorship teams are doing. I certainly feel that we are able to do the work that we need to do to run the review, and we have made lots of progress working with Departments collaboratively to make progress.

That is really helpful.

Can we just return to the Prime Minister’s thicket? Your predecessor was very keen to say that he wanted to encourage a greater appetite for risk among the civil service, which also included learning lessons from failure, as an iterative process, and not putting off taking decisions for fear of something not working out quite as intended. Is that still a motivational force from the Cabinet Office? At the base of a lot of the answers that you have given, and of the questions that we have asked and that we all hear in our inboxes, surgeries and so on with constituents, is, “We don’t want to see how the sausage is made. We just want to see some stuff delivered.” Sometimes it is the fear of the failure: “We have to consult. There could be a judicial review.” Not taking a decision saves my career, as opposed to taking, albeit in good faith, the wrong decision. How does one instil across the whole army of the civil service and Ministers, “Just get on with it. Just do something. Deliver something. Show people that you are interested in doing stuff rather than strategies, reviews, papers, plans and so on”? As you say, those do not deliver anything meaningful for citizens across the country.

My sense is that this is still a political priority for the Government. Cat should tell me if I am wrong, but my sense is that, where Ministers are saying to the system, “I, as the Minister, am telling you to take these risks, and I am accountable for them,” that works. Civil servants will respond to your requests and do things in a different way. If you take a particular taskforce approach to trying to speed things up, for example, that can work. Do I think we have built a culture in the civil service with the right incentive structure that makes people think innovatively as opposed to maybe worrying about traditional legal, political or accounting risk? I do not think we have yet. There is definitely more we can do about that. There is something in there around performance management, bonus schemes and promotion-type opportunities, which are anchored in innovation and delivery experience. One assumes that that means you take some risks in order to make a difference.

Before you leave that, is there any merit in having a more uniform template for that across the whole of Government, rather than this very individualistic, departmental, siloed approach to what good looks like, what is defined as being risk and how you reward it? Particularly if you are collectively serious about delivering cross-silo mission-led stuff, this differential between each Department surely ties one hand behind your back before you even get into the ring.

It does. It also reflects the fact, to go back to our constitutional principles, that each Government Department is its own employer with its own hierarchy and organisational structure. We can provide guidance and we can take collective decision making to implement that, but it is ultimately still done on an employer-by-employer basis across the different Departments in Government.

I know that, but is that fit for purpose today?

No, I do not think so, but changing it is very hard.

It may be, but is there an appetite to have a go?

I always have an appetite to have a go at these things. We have been looking at some application of this kind of argument in different areas. We will be saying a bit more about that in 2026, but you probably cannot just do a big-bang reform, all in one go. You have to bring colleagues with you.

Where do you see the main force of resistance? Is it Secretaries of State saying, “Darren, get your tractors off my lawn”? Is it the civil service? Is it the unions? Who could be the log jammer?

We have not pushed it that hard yet, so I cannot tell you for sure. Change is difficult for people. Departments, no doubt, enjoy their autonomy and will want to protect that. There is some argument for that. You would not want to completely undermine it. If there was any process of change in that direction, I suspect that the trade unions would be a really important partner in that because of what it might mean for terms and conditions, employment status and all those types of things.

You can maintain policy autonomy, but the rewarding of excellence, whether it is in the Ministry of Defence or the Department for Education, should broadly be the same. It is one Government with collective responsibility.

Yes.

Could I perhaps flesh out some of that? It really matters that there is clear political and senior official direction to say, “It is okay to take risk. We are empowering you to innovate, to try some things and to learn from it. It is all right if it does not go 100% to plan because we will learn and we will make sure that the next time we go back in and try something, it is better”. That needs to happen more consistently as a leadership mindset across the whole of Government. It is not happening consistently enough. We are working on how you scale models of delivery, whether that is through taskforces, programmes or experimental test, learn and grow ways of working, to try to get some case studies and examples to show people that it is okay. If I might say, performance management for good is not the issue; it is what happens when you get things wrong. We need to make it okay to get things wrong, as long as we do the lessons learned, scale it, share it and get on with it. People are scared of saying, “I tried something that was out of the risk appetite that we would normally take, and I failed to deliver the thing that you told me to deliver.” We need to reward the heroes who, every single day, are walking towards difficult problems, and are getting up every single day to try to make things better and not always succeeding. The performance management structure for the civil service has to do that more consistently.

We will monitor that, and we look forward to seeing further progress over the next quarter or so.

In simple terms, yes. We are evolving them. As the Minister alluded to earlier, the bits that are going to stay the same are adding value, citizen-centric outcomes coming first in the way in which we use taxpayers’ money, and the very basic principles of, “You should have a plan, you should stick to it and you should be able to articulate how you have used taxpayers’ funds to deliver the outcomes that you have said you will deliver.” All those features will stay the same. We are now rebadging them as strategic plans for Departments. Every Department will be required to produce a strategic plan. In the Budget, we committed to those plans being published in the spring, starting from spring 2026.

That is merely a function of the cycle. We need to set out our plans for 2026-27, which is the first year of the spending review.

The system was rubbish, basically, in my view. The ODPs were set up by Gordon Brown when he was in the Treasury. They played an important role, but they became very manual and technocratic. It is essentially an Excel spreadsheet that permanent secretaries fill out and submit to the Treasury to say what they are delivering against their spending review settlement. When I was at the Treasury, I was not satisfied that that data was rich enough or being used well enough to inform decision making or to spot problems earlier on, before they became big problems. The other thing that I was not satisfied with at the Treasury was that we burdened Departments with ringfences, compliance reporting and all these types of things. They were spending far too much time having to deal with that, as opposed to getting on with the job. One thing that I started at the Treasury, which is now being implemented by James Murray as my successor, is a reset of the relationship between the Treasury and Departments. Departments are being given more autonomy to make decisions without constantly having to get Treasury approval up to a certain delegated level of spending. In return, we expect more real-time access to day-to-day spending and performance data so we can spot problems earlier through better IT systems, as opposed to waiting for an Excel spreadsheet that has been written but does not really tell us very much.

Yes, they are called strategy documents for a reason. It will be about strategic outcomes against spending. With time, we are integrating finance systems across Whitehall so that we can share near real‑time data, which will replace the manual Excel spreadsheet system that we inherited from the last Labour Government.

That is exactly right.

Moving on to digital ID, because Liberal Democrats like to talk about this sort of thing, why are you the Minister responsible for the digital ID project?

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology co-ordinates technology procurement, build and deployment across Government, as the technology Department, but the Secretary of State for DSIT was very conscious that this particular project is one that will require a lot of cross-Government co-ordination. While they procure and build the tech, it is the Departments that will use it in an integrated and interoperable way in the future. She asked for us to formally support the deployment of that programme, which we have agreed to do. The Cabinet Office is responsible for strategy through the Cabinet Sub-Committee on Digital and Technology. It will be responsible for the White Paper, the consultation process and the legislation that comes to the House. In time, it will be responsible for co-ordinating the onboarding of services from across Government Departments on to the gov.uk app or other means in the future.

That sounds like all of it.

The Department for technology will be engaging with technology providers and procuring technology. It will be looking at how the system is built, operated and deployed across Government. Where there is policy co-ordination, that is where we play our role.

It is implementation versus co-ordination and the strategy of such. As a follow-up, this does not signal digital capability moving back to the Cabinet Office more broadly; this is more about a delivery mechanism for the technology.

That is exactly right.

That is fairly straightforward.

If only the delivery of digital ID was as straightforward, life would be a doddle.

The technical consultation to clarify the details of the digital ID scheme was promised before the end of 2025. We are hearing that it is going to be pushed to the new year. Can you confirm that that is the case, and why the delay?

Yes, because I said so. I wanted to make sure that we were consulting in a different way. I do not want this just to be a gov.uk web form. I want it to be a more engaging process with the public across the country, through MPs, through Parliament and with Select Committees, because I recognise that it is an issue that garners a lot of interest. It is important that we engage on it and build the policy and the technology in a way that brings people with us and shows them the opportunity of digitally led public services. We needed a bit more time to build out those broader and more innovative ways of engaging with the public, which is what we will be deploying next year.

Are there any particularly innovative new mechanisms to consult that you want to highlight today?

I do not know whether I am allowed to announce it yet. I have to sign off some things.

You can do anything here. You are among friends. Go on.

Let me come back to you in the new year. I am very excited, though, so I hope you will be as well.

Just finally, what is being consulted on? When can we expect to see the results? Do you have a timeframe in mind?

We are hoping to be able to get going towards the back end of January. It is a genuine consultation. We have not pre-decided what we want to do and are not consulting just to manage legal risk. We want to make sure there is sufficient time to engage on the issues that people care about in terms of privacy, security and citizen control over their data and how it is used, but also the technical build and standards, where we want to work with existing digital ID companies, the banking system and those types of things. We will need to legislate in some form in the second Session. We will want to make sure that we go through that consultation process properly, have time to properly consider it and then start to draft any legislation that we may need.

Will it be the case that you are allowing consultation on the broad principles for those people who might have concerns, or is it going to be more of a narrow and technical “how we do it” kind of consultation?

It will be both. There will be broad principles. The public may want to be involved in some of the broader discussion about their current experience of public services; how things are not working, perhaps with telephone hotlines, paper-based forms or having to tell your story five times to different Departments across Government and local authorities; and what features they might like in relation to their banking app or their shopping app, and how that might apply to public services in the future. There will be a lot of interest in the technical build as well, in terms of how the technology is built, how it is structured, where you put user data, how that is in the control of the user, how you protect it and how it can interact with other services. Depending on your level of interest, you will be directed to different parts of the consultation to make sure that everybody gets the full opportunity to contribute.

Can I just clarify something before I ask Michelle Welsh to take up the questioning? You have just said in answer to Ms Edwards’s question about consultation that it would be on both the technical implementation and the principle. Your “when we introduce legislation” was a definitive, but if you are prepared to consult on the principle, and if the public and stakeholder response to the principle is that the country is not persuaded at this time, that legislation is not required, is it?

Yes. I do not know what will be in the draft Bill because, as I say, we have not consulted.

The consultation may say, “We do not want to get into the weeds of whether we think this could improve management of immigration, access to health, how DWP works or access to whatever else. In principle, we do not like this. We think this is the state going too far for the sensibilities of the UK population.” If they say that very clearly, do the Government then say, “Okay, we are not progressing,” or is it, “We are progressing, and all we want to do is find out what the finessed detail should be—that is, what this digital ID card should cover, rather than consider the principle of the thing”?

Let us just step back and ask, “What are we delivering?” It is the ability to log into a Government app and prove who you are in order to get better access to certain services.

That is not how the Government kicked this off. They kicked off all of this several months ago by saying that this was a key and important tool for the control of immigration, through access to employment and housing. Minister, as you know, there is already legislation governing those things. When that did not land particularly well, the narrative moved on—some might say shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted—to, “Ah, but for the legitimate citizen this is going to make life a walk in the park.” I am not convinced people have thought that. The Government have not done a particularly good job of trying to sell it, have they?

I would say a couple of things. The right-to-work check is already mandatory by law, but the Prime Minister has announced that it will have to be done digitally from 2029 if you are working and getting a new job. That is an application of the technology, but the technology itself—

It can do more.

—can do a whole host of other things in the future. It might make it easier for you to claim your entitlement to funded childcare. It may make it easier for you to engage with HMRC and those types of things. The technology enables the application of the digital right-to-work check, which we will do digitally because digital checks of the right to work allow for better enforcement of illegal work in the country. The consultation will be on how we build the ability to log in and prove who you are to a Government app, how that should be structured and what types of things you might like to do on it or not. I have read the transcript from the Westminster Hall debate on this issue recently. The key thing is that nothing about using the app to access public services, beyond the requirement to prove your right to work digitally, is mandatory. It will be entirely up to you to decide whether you would rather call a Department on the telephone at 8 am or fill out a form and put it in the post, or whether you would rather just open the app and do it for yourself in the same way you do for banking or shopping. The consumer experience in the private sector suggests to me that the public would rather have their public services delivered as effectively as their banking and shopping services. I am very hopeful that the consultation will end up with a positive response that enables us to get on with the programme.

The OBR has identified that the implementation of digital ID cards will be a significant pressure on departmental spending limits in the 2025 spending review. As it stands, there is no specific funding identified. Will the Cabinet Office be funding this project solely from its own departmental spending limits?

The first thing to say is that the OBR number was an assumption that it made based on the public information that was available at the time about what the cost range might be. The Government do not recognise that number because we have not consulted yet. I cannot tell you how much it is going to cost because I do not know what I am paying for yet. That is why it is a genuine consultation. At this stage, we are paying for the team of people we need to build and run the consultation, and then to start to think about what we might procure in the future. That is being funded from Cabinet Office core budgets for staffing purposes. In the long run, the hope is that digital public services will unlock savings in other Departments because they no longer have to run manual processes in the way that they currently do, so the savings that come back to the Exchequer will be offset against the cost of deploying the technology in the first place. We will not know the precise number until we have come through the consultation and made some decisions about what we might want to buy in the future.

Do you know any numbers?

No, because it is a genuine consultation. We will have to buy something, but the reason you could not put a number on it in the Budget is that we have not consulted yet. There is a whole spectrum of options. You could try to build the whole system yourself in Government and totally replicate what the private sector has done in this space, you could do something in partnership, or you could just rely entirely on the private sector. Each of those options has different opportunities or risks for the programme and they all cost different amounts. As I say, we are not coming into the consultation with predefined views about what the right answer is.

My next question might have the same answer. The Tony Blair Institute has estimated that a digital ID scheme would cost around £1 billion to establish, but the OBR has provisionally forecast it as £1.8 billion. Do you know why the scheme’s projected cost has nearly doubled?

I do not know why. I do not know how TBI came up with that number. You would have to ask them. As I say, the OBR was making some assumptions, which it recognised were broad assumptions just for the OBR’s purposes. It rightly identified, to be clear, that this is something that is not yet fully formed, which is why it put this in its forecast for the future. We will come back once we have figured out what we want to buy, because we also need spending authority from Parliament to do it. When we bring legislation, it will have to set out what we think the spending authority is for the programme, and Members of Parliament will get to vote on it.

Will the cost influence the end product? As a Government, we have no idea how much this is going to cost. We have no idea how much digital ID is going to cost. For people out there, that is quite difficult to understand and comprehend. Anybody else who manages a project, whether it is a building or whatever it is, has a roundabout figure. Sometimes it costs more and sometimes it costs less. Even if you change the plans, you know the limit that you are starting from and what the minimum requirement really is to do the bog standard one. This has been done in other countries of course.

Yes, each country has done it in a slightly different way. That is why the consultation is important. For example, it is highly unlikely that we end up following the Estonian model, which came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is probably unlikely that we follow the Indian model, which is a very centralised biometric-led system. I doubt that the public would want us to do that, so I doubt that we will do it. We will end up being able to scope the numbers more effectively next year. The one thing that I would say is that, in the spending review, we did give record settlements to Government on digital transformation, including a multibillion pound settlement to the digital centre of Government team in the technology Department, which is doing great work with the Passport Office on being able to log into and integrate other services. My assumption at this stage is that we probably can piggyback off some of that existing work and build a system that is secure and robust to the standards the public expect but is not recreating the wheel or trying to launch an enormous multibillion-pound decade-long IT project, which in my personal view is not where you want to end up with this scheme.

There has been no provision made for the ongoing annual cost of running a digital ID system, which has been estimated at £600 million. How is that cost going to be met?

The commitment from the Government is that the technology will be available from 2029. If I can make it happen more quickly, I will be very happy to do that, by the way, but our long stop date is 2029.

That is without prejudging the outcome of the consultation.

For sure, because, if it becomes a huge and complicated thing, it might take longer. If it is simple and streamlined, and just about improving customer experience, which everybody would broadly welcome, you might be able to do it more quickly. If I can deliver a benefit to the public more quickly, I will be very happy to do so. The commitment that the Prime Minister made was 2029. We have another spending review before then. We will have a spending review in 2027. So 2026 is going to be a really important year because we will consult, scope and, if we need to, legislate, which will then enable us to have the firmed-up numbers that can then go into the 2027 spending review process for those years in the future when it becomes available to be used.

Can I just have a reality check on that? You are going to scope, consult, analyse the consultation and produce legislation all in the next calendar year, when we expect a King’s Speech in May.

Depending on what we end up having to do, the legislation may have to go longer into the second Session, as opposed to the calendar year, but we will not know that until we know the depth and complexity of the Bill.

To go back to the previous question in a bit more detail, the suggestion seemed to be that cost was not really a factor or a decision in whether to go forward. It does not seem that there is much of a cost-benefit analysis of whether to proceed. Is that the case?

The minimum policy priority is digitising the right-to-work check. That is the only use case that has been committed to by the Government. As I say, we will consult on the technical route to doing that, but I do not anticipate that having to cost a huge amount of money. We may want to do other things. This is not Government policy, but, just to illustrate the point, I have many children. The childcare scheme is a nightmare. You have to get a code from the council for a paper form to claim your entitlement for your nursery’s funded 30 hours; you have to sign physically once a quarter; you may have to log on to the HMRC tax-free childcare system every three months to re-prove your identity; and you have to process your own payment every month. It is maddening. If we could build a system where parents, if they choose to use it, can check their entitlement, log on to their nursery and send it the money, people would be very happy. To get to that point is quite a complicated piece of Government work that involves HMRC, DWP and councils. Those types of things will cost money to build, onboard and deploy as an effective use case for digital public services. Until we have scoped what we think we can deliver beyond the mandatory digital right-to-work check, we will not know the cost of each of those. That is the type of stuff that we will start to be able to crystallise next year.

I go through that process with my own accounting units on a regular basis. Again, it does not feel like there is really a value for money bit of work being done. Given the complexity and the ongoing cost of the digital ID scheme—I understand the policy aim of digitising the right-to-work question and that it is aimed to achieve some other missions or foundations—I would be concerned that there does not seem to be a go/no go cost-benefit analysis that would allow this scheme not to proceed if it was not delivering those benefits.

As I say, we have to consult on how you build and deploy your ability to log in and prove who you are to the gov.uk app. The gov.uk app already exists. From a technology perspective, I do not anticipate that the process for doing the logging in and proving who you are will be expensive. What will be expensive in the future are some of these complicated systems that we have in the public sector that we want to digitise. The value for money assessment will have to be done against each of those, but my assumption, given the childcare example, is that the productivity and customer experience improvements of being able to largely automate that process will be very beneficial and welcome to people. There will be other examples of that across Government.

Let us turn to intergovernmental relations, and who better to deal with that than Mr Baker?

When we came into Government, the Prime Minister was very clear that we needed to reset those relationships. They had become very fractious under the last Government. There was not any sense, really, of two Governments working together to deliver for different parts of the United Kingdom. In the first week as Prime Minister, he travelled to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to meet with the First and Deputy First Ministers of the devolved Governments to make that case. The Government established the Council of the Nations and Regions to bring people together formally. When I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I was responsible for managing that relationship with Finance Ministers. We had inherited a situation where they did not really talk to each other. Westminster decided what was on the agenda. The meetings were very short. There were no bilateral private conversations. The answer was often just no. We changed that in the Treasury and the finance interministerial standing committee. In my work supporting the Prime Minister with the First Ministers and Deputy First Ministers, we intend to take the same approach. The key point is that they are devolved Governments responsible for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In each of those areas, there are two Governments: their Government and the UK Government. All of us have an objective to make sure that we are delivering on the public’s expectations in the nations, and in the regions of England, together.

The existing structures seem to work quite well in terms of a fairly frequent drumbeat of formal engagements, not just at First Minister and Deputy First Minister or Finance Minister level, but in other Departments too. The Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland Offices are engaged on a probably daily or weekly basis with the devolved Governments as well. Between the formal meetings, there are also lots of informal contacts. Do I think there is room for improvement, though? There always is. Take Scotland, for example. In England, we are able to make pretty radical improvements to NHS waiting lists. That has not been happening in Scotland. Could we share best practice? Could the Government in Scotland take some examples from us about how to improve NHS performance? We think the answer is yes, but in some circumstances they do not wish to do so. That is unfortunate.

The formal meetings are quite formally structured. It is quite difficult to get everyone’s diaries aligned at the same time across all the devolved Governments and the UK Government. There is then a conversation about what is on the agenda for those particular meetings. As I say, there is quite a lot of informal engagement either bilaterally or on an issue-by-issue basis in between those formal meetings. There will be lots of times, for example, where we are meeting and we will dial in the equivalent Ministers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to be part of a UK Government-led discussion. That is not a formal mechanism of intergovernmental relations; it is just two Governments working together on a particular issue at the time.

It is a good challenge. My sense is that you need a space where you can have private conversations to try to resolve often knotty or complicated issues. Devolved Governments are often asking for things that we cannot agree to, and that is okay. We can work through these things and sometimes there are points of compromise. Sometimes we can move a little bit but not all the way. From my experience over the past 18 months, there is always quite a long shopping list of things that the devolved Governments would like from the UK Government. It is right that you create a private space in order to have that discussion so that it does not become part of the media cycle. If you did not have the space for private conversations, it would make the working relationship harder, not easier.

There have been quite a few discussions about it. It is still not entirely resolved with the devolved Governments. The principle, though, stands and is operated in practice: where we need a legislative consent motion from the devolved Government, we make sure that we engage them early in that process. It is called the Parliamentary Business and Legislation Committee. Is that right? I have sat on it for a year and have always called it the PBL. It is flagged very frequently if there is an LCM requirement for any action that a Department is bringing. The team work together really well to make sure that that engagement with the devolved Governments happens. We are also very conscious we are going into a pre-election period soon. Departments have been asked to get ahead of themselves. If they anticipate the need for an LCM, they have been asked to try to get that sorted before the pre-election period so we do not slow down legislation while the parties are off campaigning in their devolved Government elections.

For pre-planned meetings, we are very happy to give notice of those things through the dashboard or other means. Sometimes meetings can just happen on the day because an issue has come up and we have put it in. We would probably not be able to do it for those meetings. For formal, pre-planned meetings, I am sure that is fine.

No other colleague has caught my eye. Chancellor and Permanent Secretary, on behalf of the Committee, thank you both for your attendance this afternoon. To everybody here—from our Clerks, who keep us well prepared and in order, to our friends from Hansard and the recording people, to my colleagues who have asked the questions, and to the panel who answered them—I wish you all a very happy Christmas and a prosperous new year. We will, in the words of Vera Lynn, meet again.