Speeches by Jones.

“I thank my hon. Friend for the great work that she does in Parliament and within the Labour party as a leading voice for rural communities across our country. On Government action, I point her to the rural taskforce, a cross-departmental group looking at how policies taken across Government can have a positive impact i…”

“Mr Speaker, you will know that I take accountability to Parliament very seriously, as do the whole Government. As I said in my first answer, I am happy to take a look at that.”

“indicated dissent.”

“That is a very good idea—I have had similar issues in my own constituency. I will make sure that that idea is passed on to the Home Secretary. Police reforms will be coming to the House shortly.”

“As part of the Growth and Living Standards Cabinet Committee, the Cabinet Office co-ordinates Ministers across Government to ensure that we are working as hard as possible to get inflation and costs down and make a real difference to the living standards of the public across the country.”

“I thank my hon. Friend for the brilliant work that she is doing in her constituency with this historic money from Pride in Place, whereby local people get to decide how to spend money on their own communities. As she has alluded to, the Office for the Impact Economy will work with social investors, philanthropists and …”

“There has been no U-turn—[Interruption.] The hon. Member has asked the same question twice and has had the same answer. If he would like, I will write to him in plain English and he can read it a third time.”

“My assessment is that government conflates policy and delivery. That is why we will be promoting people from the frontline into the more senior levels of the senior civil service, to make sure that we understand the customer experience and how citizens expect their services to work more than has been the case in the pa…”

“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 i…”

“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 …”

“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 compromi…”

“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 engage…”

“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 wi…”

“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 Min…”

“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 fu…”

“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 Gover…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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 b…”