Speeches by Grady.

“Three short questions then.”

“Thank you, Chancellor. You talked earlier about the move for responsibility for intergovernmental relations from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office website lists you as a Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, but it is not included in your official lis…”

“I am happy to ask a question, Chair, if that is helpful?”

“I think it might be my good friend Mr Baker here.”

“Ms Little, I wonder if you could give us some concrete examples of how you are going to go about that, or how the Government go about that. Where do they see improvements could be made?”

“You pointed to a need for a greater emphasis on users of services, on not having a cookie-cutter approach, and a need for regional and, in my case as an MP for Glasgow East, different approaches across our family of nations, which was interesting. Something that has long vexed me is whether homelessness policy people s…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) for his opening speech, which covered many of the points that I want to make. I also wholeheartedly echo everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Dr Ahmed) said. Bonfire…”

“And the training. The Civil Service has grown significantly since 2016. In your view, is it too big?”

“Would I be right in thinking everyone in the Department has to have mandatory training on behaviours such as bullying, discrimination and harassment, and they are absolutely clear that—consistent with employment law—if they cross thresholds for bullying, harassment or discrimination, they can face very serious conseque…”

“Moving on to the consultancy spend and reduction of that, what do you think the Government need to do make sure the outcomes increase or at least stay the same?”

“It has not worked very well, has it?”

“To sum that question up, one issue you face with using the Civil Service numbers as some sort of pointer towards government efficiency or inefficiency is it is actually fairly meaningless when you pick away at it because you have policy people and prison officers; there is such a wide variety of people in it. With the …”

“If I was to sum that up to someone back in my constituency, is your position that we need to probably do less or different things, better, and that may be associated with a reduction of headcount and/or redeployment of people to the things that we should be doing from the things we should not be doing?”

“You have taken the words out of my mouth for the next bit of questioning. If you have a series of reorganisations, moving people around and redundancies in the Civil Service, how can you be sure you will retain key capabilities and competences as opposed to losing really good people? Which is actually what happens a lo…”

“I wonder if there are two other things that are worth looking at, and I will be guided by you on this. The first actually takes us back to the culture point we were discussing earlier where we had a chat discussing bullying, harassment and so on. I wonder whether part of it is, if you have less of that, you have a more…”

“I would express a slight amount of scepticism that over 50% do not need it, because data quality flows from people working for the DWP in Glasgow or Newcastle, or prison officers working in prisons. The micro makes the macro in this context, does it not? It strikes me as something that would be worth looking at.”

“Just one follow-up, if I may, on that previous chapter. On the One Big Thing training, you had around 200,000 of the Civil Service family taking part. If I am right, you have about 500,000 civil servants, so that is a delta of 300,000. Why would the other 300,000 not have participated in this?”

“Just to approach the question in a different way, I suspect what you are saying is, rather than talking about structures all the time, we need to put the emphasis on culture, shared objectives across Government Departments and skills. Endless reorganisations might be seen as somewhat of a distraction from those tasks. …”

“Is that followed up? Are you told to do it if you have not done it?”

“Following up on Ms Cane’s questions, you have a very firm commitment to this topic, which is very important and comforting. If I understood you correctly on the measurement of this, you said it is a bit of a struggle to unpick what we are dealing with in the numbers themselves because bullying, discrimination and haras…”