Speeches by MacAlister.

“We are investing almost £20 billion in the school rebuilding programme to rebuild over 750 schools up to 2034-35. Some 500 of those are already in the programme—we have a further 250 to select, which we will do later this year.”

“Yes, I can do that.”

“Under this Government, apprenticeship starts by young people are up. We are going further and investing an additional £1 billion to support 50,000 more young people into apprenticeships with the new foundation apprenticeships, and providing £2,000 for smaller employers when they hire young apprentices.”

“I think we should look at what people do, not what they say. This is a Government who are reversing the decline; apprenticeship starts by young people reduced by 40% under the previous Government. We are taking a range of steps, including supporting small and medium-sized enterprises, and giving greater flexibility in …”

“Despite those delays, I can confirm that the school will be considered for the school rebuilding programme, despite those avoidable delays. I thank my hon. Friend for his continued advocacy, both raising it personally with me on a number of occasions and writing to me on multiple occasions.”

“I have not seen the terms of reference. Are there particular parts that you would be interested in?”

“That would be great. My perspective is only from the Department for Education, but the issues of written parliamentary questions and correspondence are often seen as one and the same. We manage and respond to them in a similar way, and some of the challenges we have with WPQs are similar to the challenges we have with …”

“In my experience, it definitely is not. The Department’s view is that we want to respond within the timeframe set and the expectation there. There are sometimes very inconvenient questions where you think that if the Committee had asked that next week, I would have been able to give them a fuller answer. However, we de…”

“My answer to Mary’s question probably covers that. A simple thing would be to move to one model with one set of expectations. There are some characters who ask lots of questions. My one wish would probably be to see some of those volumes drop, but that may encourage the opposite effect.”

“As an MP, no, I do not think so. There are few and far between moments where you would need an answer at that pace. On balance, thinking about what matters most for the parliamentary process and Parliament undertaking its functions—for accuracy and speed and getting the balance right—my view is that one model with one …”

“Our performance on named day questions is even worse than on normal written questions because it takes time away from the bottlenecks that we have in the standard process. It is a more acute issue. In answer to previous questions, Tony described how we have tried to compress those timescales for named day questions. Al…”

“Very rarely. I cannot think of questions where I have looked at the answer, not been happy with the feedback from the special adviser and gone back around the loop. Some of these questions drill into important parts of Government policy, which, if not totally clear, deserve some conversation and dialogue. That is no ba…”

“We have not done enough of that, otherwise we would be in a better place now. However, we are really alive to this. Neither myself as the Minister nor Tony as the official are here today to say that we have had it really tough and the volume means that it is not in a great place and then to make excuses. It is nowhere …”

“Yes.”

“Correct.”

“How many— Well, I am not here to ask you questions, Sir Christopher, but I would imagine that you had a considerably lower volume of questions being asked.”

“Tony can say a bit more about this, but across the four buckets of the process, there is an accumulation of delay that gathers through them—some more so than in other areas. With Ministers and spads, the accumulation is greater. They are at the end of the process, so to some extent you might expect that, but it accumul…”

“The 19%—which bit of the process does that sit in?”

“And we have four or five spads and five Ministers. The ratio of officials, who are not party political, to appointees, who are able to express the will of the Government, is very imbalanced. The resource allocation of that time needs to be put into the things that are most important, and that is a combination of specia…”

“There are a couple of things to say. There is a functionality distinction between our use and the role that AI could and should play in the education system—I imagine that topic was discussed at the Education Committee meeting this morning. That goes beyond the brief of this session. There are really important factors …”