Speeches by Jones.

“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…”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“It is an expectation of everybody in the building. Do I go around every day with a clipboard and ask, “Who have you spoken to last night?” No. I would not get anything else done in the job. The Prime Minister’s wishes are made clear. If anyone decides to go against that, there will have to be consequences for it. In re…”

“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…”

“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…”

“I would say that any Opposition party has limited resources. When you are fighting a very significant set of elections, a lot of your resources tend to go into campaigning, so it is hard for Opposition parties of any colour to do the type of work that you can then do in government, when you have the resources of the ci…”

“As I say, we can all give ourselves hundreds of KPIs. We have to focus on what is important to the public and make sure that we are delivering against that.”

“Yes. I disagree wholeheartedly.”

“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…”

“I cannot take responsibility for everyone across the whole of Government, so, no, I do not. We have to respect the autonomy of Departments. There is a co-ordinating role that we can enhance in the centre, where we do not do that currently. That is not about centralisation or taking budgets or power away from Department…”

“It is not just me. We have Tim Allan, who is the executive director of communications in No. 10. We have David Dinsmore, who is the new Permanent Secretary for the Government Communication Service, who is housed within the Cabinet Office. One change that the Government have made and that has worked really well, which w…”

“I have oversight of it as Chief Secretary in No. 10. There is a shared diagnosis, both with special advisers and with civil servants responsible for communications reform, that the system has become addicted to announcements. Just because we have a grid, it does not mean that we need to announce something else on a Tue…”