Speeches by Hatton.

“Finally, where do we go next with this? This Report was published some time ago, but what is the thinking—your own and that of Government—on how we have a much better and more cohesive relationship between commercial and digital or other parts of a Department to get the best value for money for the taxpayer and the rig…”

“I have one final bit, if that is okay. It has been touched on by Chris and Clive. Fundamentally, do the Government have the digital expertise needed to negotiate with the likes of Amazon, or are we in a position where we are being outgunned by them?”

“Are those experts always being deployed effectively, bearing in mind the example that I gave earlier?”

“What is quite concerning is that there are sometimes Government Departments going into these negotiations around acquiring cloud services or whatever with companies such as Amazon, where they are being outgunned. There are certain Departments where there is not the digital expertise and experience needed, the guidance …”

“Do you share my concern that, because there is not a single voice, particularly perhaps for smaller procurement contracts that are less than £1 billion, Government do not speak with a single voice? You have lots of different Government Departments or public bodies that are going to these suppliers, via their commercial…”

“Andrew, you said that perhaps there is a problem within a Government Department where the digital and commercial teams are not always co‑operating or fully integrated in their approach to dealing with suppliers. I would like to know whether you accept that view, which you were starting to build on earlier, that actuall…”

“One thing that I have found quite striking from listening to contributions today, but also from reading the Report, is about whether we can have confidence that the way the Government work with big tech is essentially a very fair one. I take very seriously and understand what the Report has said, and I am sure that you…”

“Both Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority share that analysis, which is that, particularly when it comes to buying cloud services, you have two companies, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, that completely dominate the market. Going back to my bit at the start, saying that changing is really disruptive and c…”

“I appreciate that these concerns are not unique to Government. They will exist in the private sector as well. I suppose that the difference, and the reason why we as a Committee care about it, is that this is taxpayers’ money that we are talking about, so people want to know that we have the right expertise making the …”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Jessica Toale), a fellow Dorset Member of Parliament, for securing this important debate, and I welcome the Government’s decision to introduce high street rental auctions. My constituency is n…”

“Yes. I think one thing I am sure members of this Committee share but that we felt on the Public Accounts Committee was that the valve approach was not one that was going to provide long term financial sustainability. It was very much coming in when the situation has already deteriorated quite substantially and trying t…”

“On the Public Accounts Committee we recently had a report on SEND and we were concerned, in particular, about the safety valve agreements and related interventions—that they did not provide long-term financial sustainability and in fact it felt more like a piecemeal approach where we were just trying to pick off those …”

“3. What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of steps taken by the British Virgin Islands to tackle illicit finance.”

“The BVI will soon close the consultation on its proposal to grant only limited access to a register of beneficial ownership. That proposal means that it will be virtually impossible for even a select few to trace those using the BVI as a place to secretly stash their cash, and this comes some five years after the first…”

“May I put one final point to you? A constituent came to one of my coffee mornings and raised a particularly frustrating issue. When they went on to the NHS “Find a dentist” website, it listed some dentists as taking on new NHS patients, but when they picked up the phone or sent an email, they found that was not the cas…”

“I suppose the million-dollar question is how quickly do you think we can expect to see those sorts of changes, so that communities like mine and those of many others on the Committee will see a dentist practice begin to take on new NHS patients? That is what is really important for patients in my part of the world. The…”

“That is a significant structural change. As I said earlier, there isn’t a single dentist practice in my constituency that is taking on new adult NHS patients. Do you believe that the engagement and consultation at grassroots level has been sufficient that we can begin to turn around the structural problem so that for t…”

“It would be really useful for the Committee to get a better understanding of what the main challenges are that dentists and the wider workforce come back to you with when you do this bottom-up engagement with them. Even with these schemes, things are obviously deteriorating. As we have seen, most of the figures are goi…”

“As we learn from what has happened in the last few years and look to what comes next, particularly around the golden hello scheme, I am keen to know what has been done at the grassroots level to talk to those providing dental care, to make sure that the scheme does deliver what we aspire to be delivered, which I think …”

“Do you think that, having learned the lessons of what went wrong and what worked, we can address the issue that Professor Whitty highlighted when he said that while the number of dentists overall has gone up, the number of those providing NHS care has gone down? Will what you are talking about now ensure that we can ad…”