Speeches by Kane.

“There is a cultural element of any organisation where striving for excellence is built into its DNA. Whether it has got a small contract or a big contract, that striving for excellence should be evident to you, and it should give you pause if you have evidence that it has not had it in the past. We recently had a heari…”

“The phrase, “once bitten, twice shy”, comes to mind. You have been here with Capita before, and it did not go well according to the last Report, but your Department has confidence that things have changed enough to give it the new contract. Can you share with us some of the thinking that gave you the confidence, to try…”

“To be clear, I was not saying, “Why can’t you unilaterally do it?” I was asking why you cannot strongly suggest that this is something that might be worth doing. Or are you strongly suggesting that?”

“The unions are saying to us that they want recognition now, not in six months’ time.”

“The union is seeking recognition. You are giving a reason as to why you are not doing it, but it is seeking representation. Why not just say, “Okay”?”

“To drill down on that a little further, you have said that you are not recognising the union because you have an employee set-up that you have put in place in advance. That seems reasonable, right up to the point where your employees want union representation. I am unclear as to why there is an issue here. You say you …”

“A quicker way to ensure a good level of service is not to let people leave, or to incentivise them to stay. The incentive can be more money, but it can also be a better working environment. What are you doing to ensure that your work practices are not driving people out the door quicker, regardless of whether there is …”

“I think you said it took six weeks to train somebody up to answer questions in the call centre. Are you finding that the temporary staff are providing a good level of service by the time you get them trained up? If you have well-trained workers, I would expect the complaints to start going down, regardless of whether t…”

“Does the Minister agree that it is only because of the Barnett formula and a Labour Government that Scotland—including communities in Stirling and Strathallan—now has record funding of £50 billion this year, and it is deeply concerning that the SNP Government in Scotland have no clear plan to invest this funding proper…”

“We always have a bit of a laugh about how acronyms make it very difficult for people to understand things. “Section 106” is probably the most insider-language term in Government—and we have a lot of inaccessible terms. When I sat on my local planning panel, I often found that the language that we used meant that commun…”

“I am interested that you are talking about the need to look at having more structured forums. That is quite exciting. In terms of recruiting planning officers—in Stirling, it was planning officers and bridge engineers; we could never get bridge engineers, and there were not enough planning officers—there is definitely …”

“I think it is fair to say that, whether it is getting more affordable housing or more GP surgeries, everything we are talking about is eerily familiar to me from Scotland. You have maybe given me a glimmer of the answer to this, but how would you characterise your shared understanding of what is a UK-wide problem—it is…”

“As a former Scottish local authority leader, I am listening with interest. It is interesting to hear that my colleagues in England and Wales have the same observations and thoughts as we have in Scotland. It is section 106 in England, section 75 in Scotland and, I think, section 76 in Northern Ireland. What conversatio…”

“To gently push back, I do not agree with your point that the language only matters to civil servants. The more we can make everything we do more accessible to the public, the better it will be for them, so sometimes questioning the terminology we use is important. I would add that, when you have local planning authorit…”

“You have talked about bringing everything together, but what new powers and authority will NISTA have to drive improvements? How will you ensure that you are not just moving things into a central pot but you are getting the additional powers that you need to do things?”

“We talk about mayoralties and the way that we are interacting with those, but we do not have those in Scotland, where I am from. Can I get an assurance that the changes in the Green Book are not predicated on the way that we deal with things in England? You have differences in devolution. I am the one on this Committee…”

“My experience of the Green Book is from being a council leader in Stirling before being elected. An observation that I and the senior officers had was that the Green Book approaches to a £20 million project and a £2 billion project seem very similar. It does not seem to be weighted. It is harder for smaller organisatio…”

“Can I ask you about the Green Book, please? It is Nick or possibly David I want to talk to. The spending review says you are going to introduce place-based business cases to bring together the projects needed to achieve the objectives of a particular place. How are the changes to the Green Book going to ensure that pro…”

“Jon, can I just pick up and develop your point on AI for a minute? AI is obviously very exciting and is a major project in itself for Government going forward, but where we are in the development of AI needs a degree of enthusiasm, balanced with a degree of cynicism, just to make sure that it is developing the way it s…”

“Given where you are in the creation of NISTA, what is the confidence that you are expressing based on?”