Speeches by Jones.

“Yes, it is. I suspect that the Prime Minister was talking about more than just ALBs in his comment. There is a whole plethora of things that we end up doing, sometimes because we have to by law, which is fine, but a lot of the time because we just do things in that way, and I am not entirely convinced that we have to d…”

“I do not think so. I do not think that the public really care how we structure ourselves in Government. They just want to know that they are getting good value for their taxes and that we are delivering the type of country that they want to live in. They elect us and they elect a Government to get on and do the busines…”

“I will let Cat come in on the specific numbers. On the politics of it, as I am sure you will know, there is a difference between administrative budgets, as in policy and central departmental officials, and programme delivery, which might be running a jobcentre, a prison or a hospital. The reason why we focused on admin…”

“The ministerial members are the same. They will often, though, bring in external people for particular questions or subject matters, and so external contributions change depending on the issue that they are talking about.”

“It is both, and I will just flesh that out a bit. This may sound obvious from a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, but everything is in the spending. If a Department does not have money to do something, it is unlikely that it is going to be able to do it that well, unless it changes prioritisation of the budget. T…”

“As far as I can tell, they have been very active in the first 18 months. I do not have the statistics on numbers of meetings to hand. They were very busy in and around the spending review, predominantly because I asked them to come together and agree some priorities, and to pitch them. They periodically come together t…”

“It does not change the accountability arrangements, because missions never became their own, as I say, quasi-Departments. It was always the existing Departments that were accountable to their Select Committees in Parliament for their performance. That has not changed.”

“We in the centre should not think of ourselves like Ofsted, in my view. We should not be going around every Department and saying, “You, Department X, have said that you are going to deliver these 100 things this year, and I am going to check on all those 100 things.” The reason why I say that is that the Secretary of …”

“The first thing that I should put on the record is my thanks to all the officials from across Government who worked in the mission delivery unit, or MDU as it was referred to. They put a lot of energy into setting up that team. The observation, though—and this is a failing of us collectively as politicians, as opposed …”

“Yes.”

“Whatever gets people moving. I do not particularly mind.”

“—I would rather quick showers and get on with the job, as opposed to any suggestion of baths for anyone, quite frankly.”

“Forgive me for laughing. To extend the metaphor—”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”