Speeches by Kane.

“Do you think that you are?”

“Then it would put the burden back on you, and not on local authorities. I am just trying to investigate why we are not looking at that.”

“14. What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to support economic growth in Scotland.”

“Does the Secretary of State agree that yesterday’s SNP budget, which metes out another round of civic vandalism to local authority budgets, demonstrates a failure to understand that economic growth is built from the ground up and requires well-funded local authorities delivering schools, infrastructure and clean, safe …”

“Thank you, Chair, but I was just going to make a general observation, which I think is going to get picked up shortly. With what I am hearing from this panel on data collection, and what I heard from the previous panel, it is almost like we are talking about two different subjects. That is just an observation, and I wi…”

“Just for complete clarity, you take the point that you have mentioned a lot of additional people and additional sources who can help to achieve that, but one of the key people who can do that is you yourself.”

“You mentioned the leadership development programme. You have mentioned various other internal things that you are doing. Can you just speak briefly about how they are going? I am less interested in the mechanics of what they are doing and more interested in your reflections on what positive change you are seeing that i…”

“Good morning, everyone. I am looking at paragraph 13 of the NAO Report, which identifies four main causes of the programme not progressing as intended. It states that several Government bodies, including the IPA, the Cabinet Office, the Government Internal Audit Agency and the Treasury, concluded that “NS&I had a weak …”

“On one specific thing, the decision to look at multiple contracts rather than one, I believe you had three options: like for like, single contract, or multiple contracts. The NAO Report states: “NS&I set itself an overly optimistic timetable for the Programme. Decoupling a highly integrated operation, splitting it into…”

“Thank you for that look at the positive picture. Will you reflect a little on what made you annoyed, or a little angry? Looking back, talk about some of the things that you have looked at and thought, “Oh, this can’t happen again,” or, “I understand why that happened.” You used the example of covid, which is an externa…”

“James, may I ask you exactly the same question?”

“I want to ask about culture. Paragraph 3.5 in the Report says, “Programmes also need the correct culture and leadership”. Here is an interesting line from NAO colleagues: “In our previous work on major programmes, we have observed good news cultures presiding, where decisions are not made and disagreements between stak…”

“Again, there are a lot of external factors, you are speaking to other people and taking advice, but a lot of the tensions or problems seem to come from an internal problem. What did you look at in terms of your own assumptions and approach to evaluating some of this information? Were you alive to the possibility that y…”

“Thank you for that. I will just dig into one final part of this. Paragraph 2.3 of the Report talks about the Infrastructure and Projects Authority gateway review in September 2020, which found that “the Programme had not developed its understanding of alternative options as comprehensively as for its preferred option.”…”

“I will leave you with more of an observation than a question. This Committee is happy to take statements like that as long as the evidence is there to our satisfaction that the statement is underpinned by the processes and that they are robust. What we are seeing here is that, when it comes to the robustness of the thr…”

“That was a really good example of good news, and possibly good news culture, in your answer. So can I put it to you that in that line they were talking about NS&I, and that there is a good news culture that is causing problems? And maybe I can just get you to reflect, if that is the case, on how you would take that, ho…”

“Those are welcome processes to do that. However, there are a lot of things that you in your leadership position can do as smaller steps to ensure that a good news culture does not prevail. There do not have to be lots of sweeping reviews and sweeping changes. So I wonder whether you could talk about your senior leaders…”

“It does. I have one point on a line in paragraph 20, which says, “there remains a lack of clarity about the role of boards, and NS&I staff think that decision-making can be slow and hierarchical.””

“Moving on to something that is about information, paragraph 9 states, “Given the way NS&I report Programme performance, we found it challenging to identify spend to date, and forecast spend for the remainder of the Programme.” Matt, what are you doing to ensure that the programme produces the correct management informa…”

“What is that figure?”