Speeches by Jones.

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

“I do not have one.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 th…”

“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 opport…”

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

“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 steppin…”

“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. Milesto…”

“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…”

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

“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 ac…”

“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 p…”

“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 priori…”

“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 poli…”

“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 all…”

“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, ess…”

“They saw my name on the agenda.”

“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? Whe…”