Speeches by Jones.

“In terms of the multi-year settlement, we did get Departments together to talk about reform priorities, which they welcomed because it meant that Departments were accountable—in a room like this—to each other. When we needed to commission work or data to support one another, we did that formally through the spending re…”

“I would want to keep the mission-led approach, and to go to the Chair’s question at the start—it always seemed mad to me that, in the past, you did not get the Ministry of Justice, the Law Officers’ Departments and the Home Office together to talk about a system-level view of delivery, when they were so intrinsically l…”

“Adversarial, yes—thank you. That kind of arrangement, where the Secretary of State and their team walk in, and you are on the other side of the table, and you have a bit of a robust conversation about whose data is right. It just did not feel very productive to me, to be honest. We made a number of changes in this spen…”

“Based on the evidence, that is a perfectly legitimate criticism. I suspect that Governments of all colours have, over the years, said, “We are going to be x% more efficient,” and then costs go up. During the spending review period, we used the Office for Value for Money to go into Departments and scrutinise their plans…”

“You would have to call them to give evidence, Chair. I had to do a small spending review for a year when we came in, because we inherited no spending plans from the last Government. Since then we have done a multi-year spending review. I was quite clear in the first spending review that things needed to change. It was …”

“I quite enjoyed the process, to be honest.”

“Treasury officials work on our internal view around the growth impact of our spending decisions. Breakfast clubs, school-based nurseries—these are good examples of where we believe policies could increase participation in the labour market and allow people to work longer hours if they want to, which will evidently have…”

“We obviously make the case to the OBR about what we think of our policy decisions. The OBR, as an independent forecaster, has the right to agree or disagree, and to publish its forecasts in the normal way. I am not going to make a judgment on the OBR; I will leave that for this Committee, which holds it to account. But…”

“As the OBR is an independent body, you will know that I am not going to comment on the OBR’s forecast; I will allow the Committee to take a view on that. The one thing I will point out to you, though, is that in recent OBR forecasts, the OBR has scored the growth potential of policy decisions that we have taken, which …”

“Yes, because ultimately, at the end of the day, it just seemed to be building up a whole host of headaches that we have had to deal with. The last Government tried to deal with some of them in the final few years. Cutting a load of police numbers and then rapidly trying to increase them again is not a long-term, sustai…”

“Instead of just setting a target and hoping for the best, we have worked with Departments to understand their plans. Much as with the rest of the spending review, our job now—and particularly my job—is to make sure that we are going back around that with all the Departments and making sure that they are delivering agai…”

“As a Government, our assessment of that was that because of cuts to public expenditure—particularly in those early years post-2010, in the austerity years—and specifically cuts to capital programmes in our infrastructure and our public services, the last Government missed a trick, essentially, to try to stimulate produ…”

“Well, we do not want to be, so we are working hard to bear down on that subsidy and make the train lines commercially viable again. That is why you see a bit of a dip in the RDEL numbers for transport; we are pushing down on that. Compared with what the original plans were, we have increased transport capital spending …”

“You are right that defence and energy security got a big chunk of capital—defence for perhaps obvious reasons, given that our commitments in the defence budget are predominantly capital, because they are buying military equipment. On energy security, we have obviously made quite a big commitment on nuclear energy in it…”

“It is a question for the Chancellor. We are always guided by our fiscal rules.”

“I was pretty matter of fact about it. We had a budget, and we needed to divvy it out to deliver the plan for change priorities. We have got to a place now where we have a spending settlement that allows the Government to get on with delivery against the plan for change commitments and our promises to the country. I am …”

“I am not going to comment on individual negotiations.”

“That is a good question. I do not know what the most difficult choice was—there were lots of difficult choices.”

“I cannot remember if we ringfenced it specifically. There was a specific ask that we funded through the spending review. A lot of this ends up, for Home Office purposes, being a policing and community policing question, so you would need to ask them precisely how they want to split it up. I know we funded a VAWG ask fr…”

“We made a specific funding allocation to the Home Office for its support of the violence against women and girls mission.”