Speeches by Jones.

“Normally, Departments would use financial transactions because Government borrowing is cheaper than commercial borrowing. Some Departments will use their financial transactions not to make profit; they have to make enough to pay off the cost of the borrowing, but they might have it at a lower-than-commercial rate becau…”

“I say “persnuffle” but tell me if you disagree. Essentially, that is our definition of debt, where we move from public sector net debt to public sector net financial liabilities. As the Committee will well know, it means that when accounting we can measure the benefits of our investments as well as the cost of borrowin…”

“You would have to ask them.”

“I did a roundtable with chief financial officers from big global businesses that had done similar things in their private sector organisations. I said to them, “I would rather do this in a year, but is that normal or not?” and they said, “No, it takes quite a few years to do.” We are working with some of those private …”

“I am told it is going to take two to three years.”

“It was quite high level. It was really just about overall spending numbers to help us do the whole-of-Government accounts and the Debt Management Office work, but it did not get under the hood of programme-level performance. One of the projects that I funded in the spending review, and have agreement from the Prime Min…”

“I do not know; it is a great question. I will need to talk to my colleagues but let us take that away. Maybe that is something that we can pick up. Secondly, there is an IT project. I was very conscious coming into this job that we did not have real-time sight of what was going on in other Departments. We had to ask De…”

“I will try to answer that in two ways. One, to monitor outcomes and performance management, the Treasury, Cabinet Office and No. 10 are currently agreeing a shared framework so that we are not duplicating compliance requirements across Departments. There will be a whole-of-Government performance framework that we will …”

“There is one very niche project that I am personally very excited about, which is integrating finance and performance systems. If that answers your question, I will carry on but tell me if it is not quite hitting the nail on the head.”

“We were genuinely collaborative through the spending review. We worked hand in glove with No. 10 and the Cabinet Office. We used some of the evaluation taskforce’s expertise. There were a number of Cabinet Secretary-led deep dives where they pulled senior officials across Departments, predominantly because one of my ex…”

“Yes. Lots of the situations of the past, where councils were allowed to use the Public Works Loan Board to make risky commercial decisions and then over-expose themselves to debt, and failed commercial enterprises had already been tightened up by the last Government, so we had inherited a framework where we had—”

“I see what you mean. What was different with the mission-led approach were the inputs, the data analysis and the evidence. We were told that Departments genuinely had not come together before to think about how a decision, maybe in the Home Office, would affect the CPS and the court system at a system level. We made th…”

“No. We have not changed the constitutional arrangements where Departments, through their accounting officers, are accountable to Parliament and to their relevant Committees in the normal way. That is true.”

“I don’t think I said that, to be fair.”

“Sure. But secondly, I think it is legitimate to need a space for private negotiations. If everything were public, it would make it quite hard to work through that with and between Departments.”

“Not necessarily, but I would make two observations. One is that there is not just one neat submission. If I think about all the work that we have done over the last six months or so with Departments, you work with the mission boards, they all submit their plans, they work together, they try to think about their deliver…”

“I would be happy to consider it, and I recognise the criticism. I think it is true, and I have said it myself in the past.”

“I hope that it will be better, at least.”

“The criteria for that drove that behaviour. We told Departments that the money had been put aside, and that it would be considered separately from normal budget considerations, but investments had to be match-funded, have cashable savings in the scorecard period and be genuinely transformational. That drove Departments…”

“I do not think there are institutional obstacles. We have talked about this internally before, and I wanted us to do more on it. In response to my requesting it, the Department built this algorithmic system, working with universities to trial it. It happened because I asked for it—there was no friction or obstacle arou…”