Speeches by Jones.

“Coming in in September, if it was as easy as me just deciding what would happen and the whole thing happening, that would have been great, but there is a lot to do. I have had to prioritise my time and be clear about what I am going to do. It is a team sport, and it is about bringing colleagues with you, within Departm…”

“No, and it needs to change. That is not a criticism of civil servants. It is a criticism of past decisions about how the centre operates. At Cabinet this morning, I presented the changes that the Prime Minister and I have been implementing in the centre of Government, as a reflection of our work over the last couple of…”

“We were elected on that mandate as the Labour party. The Prime Minister has been very clear that those are his priorities. We know, through testing and insight work, and focus groups and feedback with people across the country, that those are the headline issues. Irrespective of your voting intention or demographic, th…”

“People want to feel better off at the end of this Parliament than at the start of it. They want to know that their public services, and particularly the national health service, are fit for the future and there when they need them. They want to feel pride in our country, whether that is in relation to communities or th…”

“Yes, but you also want to do that in the right way. The centre is quite small compared to all the other Departments, with all the experts that they have within their teams. As I say, the measurement of success for me is that we are adding value to enable and speed up delivery of the public’s priorities, and to be able …”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“The chief of staff is the head of the units that do political work, including the political director and the communications functions. As I say, I tend to work with not just the chief of staff but the deputy chiefs of staff as well, where we have broadly separated out political and communications strategy, policy and d…”

“Just to break that down a little, the Cabinet Office has always served the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. That still happens. What we do not do is duplicate the work of Departments. We are there in the centre to support Departments with their delivery, so we do not try to deliver instead of them. We are there to add v…”

“They are two separate jobs. Over the summer recess, the Prime Minister decided to create a ministerial role within No. 10. No. 10 is not a Department. It is, in fact, a business unit of the Cabinet Office but, as the Committee will know, it functions as its own business unit. He wanted additional ministerial capacity t…”

“Thank you so much.”

“First, it is great to be with you. It is the first time since I was appointed in September.”

“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…”