Speeches by Davies.

“Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker, not least for the promotion that you just gave me—I hope the Whips are listening. It is a genuine pleasure, even before the promotion, to respond to the debate on behalf of the official Opposition. I am grateful to all colleagues from across the House for what I think were pre…”

“I just wanted to mention, if Dave had not, the event we have lined up for April, where we have invited civil servants to understand more about the lessons here. It is also the only Report in my time that I have written to every permanent secretary about, with a copy of the Report, to draw it to their attention. I have …”

“I totally understand that the Minister might not have the information to hand right now, so will she commit to writing to me?”

“It is always a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. It is also a pleasure to see the Minister in her place. Alternative dispute resolution is intended to provide a low-cost, efficient alternative for resolving disputes between consumers and businesses. I thank the Minister for setting out what these regul…”

“Constantly, because we want to make them as impactful as possible. It is not always about the format of the Report itself; it could be about how we make some of our findings available in other ways. We are definitely making greater use of webinars and in-person seminars for people in the field that we have audited, and…”

“Exactly, and in that case, it sits alongside the Report on the website, and we signpost to where to find detail about how system works. There will be more of that, I suspect.”

“Max does value for money.”

“Yes, of course.”

“For the reason I gave, really: it is where we need specialist expertise. If we have one audit that requires specialist banking or insurance expertise, for example, it is not efficient for us to gear up to the level of specialist staffing you would need for that. Having said that, we are challenging not just individual …”

“It is straightforwardly a value for money question for us; it is a part of our productivity push. We have challenged hard on why we are outsourcing any of our work, and sometimes it is because we just do not have the volume of expertise needed on a topic area. That remains the case for some of our more specialist audit…”

“Absolutely. Picking where it is going to have the most impact is the trick, so we are looking very carefully. There are some big well-known Government priority areas that cannot be dealt with by just one Department. With a whole set of things in the criminal justice system, we know that you need to understand the chain…”

“But I take your point: where does this work smoothly and efficiently, and where does it not? Yes, of course there is a difference, partly because the Government do not have standardised systems across every Department, so they are actually operating slightly different configurations, and partly because the level of exp…”

“We see some of it. Where we have big problems, we always bring those to you—”

“In headline terms, we have refurbished the floors that we occupy, so that we are able to use less space in total and let out more, to earn income. But it also now better reflects the way we are working, with a lot more collaboration spaces and places for teams to get together on project topics, rather than just serried…”

“The incentive is being able to give you a better account of their performance on efficiency and delivery. The audit is a by-product of that.”

“Delivering the efficiency savings they have all been required to make. Of course, not only will having high-quality systems with good information help the audit to become more efficient, but they will be delivering better services at less cost to the taxpayer.”

“On AI, we are very clear that the way in which we do our audits will be radically different in just five years’ time from now. It is already changing. The reason that you can be confident that this is a real change is what our teams are telling us: we see the need for a different skills mix. When the practitioners are …”

“Sure. Why don’t we come back on that? We produced the Report that the Committee has used recently arguing for a reduction in the reporting requirements on small public bodies, because we think they have gone too far and bog down those small teams with things that are actually getting in the way of the core business. Eq…”

“That is the bulk of our work—it is two-thirds of our work, our staff and our budget. The bit that the PAC engages with more frequently is our value for money work, which I think fits your bill of something that is tightly specified and very carefully targeted to have maximum impact. That is about 22% of our budget and …”

“There is a lot in there. Let me talk about the NAO for a second, because the accountability framework is a bit different, of course. As you know, the bulk of the NAO’s work and staffing is focused on the financial audit of Government and public body accounts. That is not something that we choose a discretionary level o…”