Speeches by Jones.

“I see the challenge. My answer is that it will all come together through the OBR forecast process, pointing into the Budget. Any work that James Murray and the team do on tax obviously is never announced at a spending review; it is always announced at a Budget, and we talk to the OBR about that in the run-up to the Bud…”

“I would need to check with James Murray whether it is a zero-based review or not—I do not know—but it is something that, of course, we want to keep under consideration.”

“I think we should always look at what we are spending taxpayers’ money on, whether it is lost revenue or direct spending. We did not do a tax benefit review in the spending review, but my colleague James Murray, who does tax policy for us in the Treasury and with HMRC, is looking at these issues, and that will ultimate…”

“AME assumptions are based on the OBR forecasting the demand of any spend, and there was not an OBR forecast with this spending review because it was not a fiscal event. That is why we did not have an AME forecast. We do not set AME budgets at the spending review. The next time that will happen will be at the Budget at …”

“The figure that we have published is the total figure that includes technical efficiency savings and then reprioritisation. So we have the total figures, which we have published. We have the assessment.”

“Each Department obviously did a different amount of work, so we would have to ask the Departments to offer up that detail.”

“It is still an overall saving because it is a demand-led spending commitment where we have to give money to the Department. A small example, but big for the Departments, is that the Law Officers’ Departments have used digital tools and stopped using human translation services for some of their translation services. The…”

“Another example is level 7 apprenticeship funding for people that had prior qualifications—we have stopped funding those apprenticeships.”

“The zero-based review process was, yes, looking at things like the NCS you want to do, but it was also looking at savings, efficiencies and productivity that we wanted them to make—it was all kind of in the same thing.”

“I can give you a couple of other examples. In the NHS, the use of temporary agency staff has been borne down on significantly and money saved in doing so.”

“I will give you one example, and maybe then, with your permission, talk about the broader process they went through. There was the National Citizen Service in DCMS, which I think David Cameron set up as Prime Minister. Our view and the view of the Department was that it was not really delivering on the youth strategy o…”

“Very specifically, Departments have to have the right capability in place to administer these financial transactions. It will not be me or any of my other political colleagues going around the country doing deals. It is essentially going to be bankers and those with commercial finance expertise within these public fina…”

“It helps the Department to do a range of different things to try to drive as much capacity as possible. We have obviously increased the capital grant through the affordable homes programme very significantly, which is where the Department literally just pays for houses to be built—and that is often the best way of gett…”

“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…”