Speeches by Kane.

“Right, so there is a proper procedure that you will follow, and you will resist the urge to speed it up in order to draw a line under this matter.”

“This is a comment, not a question. I suppose the thing I am getting from this is that there is a real alarm bell here: we will hear an awful lot of you saying, “With the benefit of hindsight”. What I am really worried about, as I said, is that earlier in this process an awful lot of people were giving you advice that c…”

“If you would just indulge me on one question, I think you said that you are now the only accounting officer in the Department, but there were two before.”

“For me, as the new boy here, is it normal to have more than one, or to have only you?”

“So it is not a lesson learned to go from two to one?”

“Will you indulge me with just one more question? “With the benefit of hindsight” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in this session, and I am hoping that we are doing more than just saying, “I promise not to do it again.” What brakes have you got in place? What procedures have you written down? What can we look at …”

“We are moving on now to some questions looking forward. We have obviously had the Budget. We have had phase 1 of the spending review. You have a big savings target to meet over the next couple of years. I think it’s £2.2 billion. With the Rwanda scheme not being there, a big bit of the pressure, I imagine, is no longer…”

“What are you going to do if you cannot bring the costs down as quickly as you need to?”

“I know we are running out of time, Chair, so I am happy to move on now.”

“As a council leader up until the election, I can say that Home Office dealings always came with a bit of heightened stress for council officers. I am looking at one of the conclusions: “We are concerned that the Home Office has not engaged effectively with local authorities about the impact its work is having on local …”

“As I was a Scottish council leader, can I get an assurance that you are dealing with local government not just in England but across the devolved nations?”

“In one of your earlier responses, you talked about setting up working groups of local government associations and local authorities. That is really nice, but—I will probably make this point across the board—could you also articulate what you are doing with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in your responses? If we a…”

“Just to push one last time on this, you have described the world that we are aiming for—this wonderful destination that we are heading to—but we still have to navigate the journey to the airport and then get through security. What I am hearing from you is that with this cultural risk, which you have identified as one o…”

“Can I drill down on one specific risk? It strikes me—I wonder whether you would agree, Sir Peter—that a great one is the need for cultural change among your people if you are moving from some things being paper-based to a digital world. I know what I am like and what most of us in this room are probably like: we all ha…”

“Can I talk about the service modernisation programme, please? It is an 11-year programme moving you from paper-based assessments into the modern, digital world. It is a pretty daunting thing that you are trying to do, and I do not envy the task that you are in the middle of. I am conscious that your own assessment says…”

“Just as one of the new boys round the table. Could you explain how that works, in terms of when you are coming up with a project plan? It strikes me that, given the complexities of this, you would have at least a basic project plan. Does that exist, with indicative timescales, at the moment?”

“That does not really give me an answer, but okay. I want to ask about interaction between the devolved Administrations in tackling homelessness. Penny has talked about sharing best practice among local authorities, but what lessons are you learning from the devolved Administrations? How is that all working? There are a…”

“Sometimes it is important for us to look back. Why has there not been one?”

“As a Scottish MP, and a Scottish council leader until the election, I am used to dealing with this with the Scottish Government through COSLA, so it is interesting to come down and see it with the UK Government. I note that each of the UK devolved Administrations has an overarching homelessness strategy or action plan,…”

“That is explaining what the ability to talk to one another is; I am just wondering what lessons you have actually learned. What have you got from these discussions with the devolved nations?”