Speeches by Jones.

“I understand. I would just point you to what the Health Secretary said about the last review and the last policy proposals from the former Government which we were not able to implement. I just point you to his words about why, specifically, we did not agree with that. As you have alluded to, we have asked Baroness Cas…”

“Reforming social care is a necessity. The Government recognise that it is also just very complicated. This spending review, you are right—”

“There is a specific fund for technology capital, which is to drive productivity. Again, that is one of the key outcomes from the Darzi review. We also made a commitment, including a post-spending review commitment in the infrastructure strategy, on long-term stable maintenance budgets for fixing up existing buildings, …”

“First, on capital, remember that the Department got a big uplift in 2025-26, which was baselined, and then you have the commitment from 2026-27 onwards. So, in cash terms, I think there has been a doubling.”

“The key thing there is the productivity challenge. It may be 4% on the then levels of poor productivity. Evidently, we do not want to keep funding a broken system. We want to invest to fix the system and that is why the productivity target—”

“No, I expect them to be addressed. A 3% increase is below what I think is the long-term average of 3.5%, but it is still a huge increase. And in cash terms it is by far one of the biggest increases for public services across—”

“I think the productivity targets are realistic. If you look at acute services at an NHS England level, at the moment they are already above 2%. So it can be done. I am not saying that it is easy; it definitely is not. But you have seen a lot of action from the Health Secretary and the team on NHS England and the integr…”

“The NHS budget, by its very nature, is always the biggest, or one of the biggest, in a spending review settlement, just because of the size of it. As a Government, we have obviously prioritised getting the NHS back on its feet. You have seen that in the plan for change, which is why the NHS got a bigger slice of the pi…”

“Because we thought, based on performance from across Whitehall, that was a sensible target. As you say, some Departments have been better than that in the past. The NHS, for example, is already doing quite a good job in projections on that spend. Then, there are some Departments—particularly the small Departments that …”

“On the technical efficiency savings and zero-based review, that was a kind of spending-review, top-down process. The admin budgets are more of a good housekeeping target, where we expect Departments to be thinking really carefully about specifically their administrative costs, not delivering frontline public services—”

“The Departments have to live within the budgets that have been set, so they are incentivised to crack on with these reforms. Where up-front investment was required to enable them to do this, we have put that money in, including through the transformation fund. So I don’t think there are any excuses for not getting on w…”

“If they don’t, there are implications for their budgets, because they have assumed they can be more productive and they want to then put that money towards other priorities. The spending review is settled. We are returning to the right position, where the reserve is genuinely only for unexpected—”

“You will have seen that we published the efficiency plans at the spending review. This is where for the first time, I think, we have published what the Departments have told us about how they are going to achieve their efficiency targets. As I say, the Office for Value for Money have gone through this with them through…”

“He’s very good!”

“Yes, but take, for example, the work on mega projects, which built a lot on the work that the NAO and previous Committees in Parliament had done. We adopted their recommendations, alongside the James Stewart review, on the governance of mega projects and how we are going to take a different approach to oversight, going…”

“They provided an enormous amount of added value from my perspective, because we were able to dispatch them to do particular studies across Departments. They were able to go and talk to officials and permanent secretaries in other Departments. They provided that extra layer of pressure and accountability, especially on …”

“Yes, as far as I am aware, unless someone else decides otherwise. It is a small team—I think it is about 15 in total.”

“That is a good question. We could provide more information to you if you would like to have it. The Office for Value for Money—I think your Committee has taken evidence from it—is a temporary function. It is not going to become a permanent function in the Treasury.”

“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.”