Speeches by Hatton.

“Just for clarity, your view is that the two main reasons for underpayment are either deteriorating health or poor public trust in DWP in terms of making sure that people get the correct amount of support.”

“It is really useful to see the different tones we have from the DWP compared to similar sessions we have with the chief of HMRC, when they look at tax fraud versus benefit fraud. It is helpful for this Committee to understand the similarities and the different ways of working in terms of pursuing enforcement. If I migh…”

“In a nutshell, whether or not you decide to pursue criminal prosecutions with the CPS or a civil penalty, is DWP’s main motivation a cost-benefit calculation in terms of how much this could end up costing the public purse? You were maybe suggesting—correct me if I am wrong—that you are adopting more of a deterrence app…”

“Permanent secretary, you have these new enforcement powers alongside the ones that you had before. Could you explain a little more to the Committee the approach of DWP in relation to both criminal prosecutions and civil penalties for benefit fraud? What thinking goes into whether you pursue either criminal prosecution …”

“I would like to focus my questioning, if I may, on the safeguards that you are putting in place to ensure that particularly the new powers that you have around enforcement are being used proportionately and effectively. It would be helpful if you could start by outlining what safeguards there are and whether you feel t…”

“Would you accept that, in that move away from unification and then back towards unification, the MOJ took its eye off the ball and allowed inaccurate and out-of-date information to inform its thinking and, therefore, allow us to get to a situation where you have half the staff required to run sentence management?”

“Permanent Secretary, having heard those remarks from Jim Barton but just taking a step back, would it be safe to assume that, if you have a severely understaffed Probation Service, coupled with a severely understaffed prisons estate, we are in a really quite dangerous and worrying situation when it comes to the future …”

“So you agree. That is why you are undertaking it.”

“That aside, do you share the concern I have that, if we have a severely understaffed Probation Service, which is what this report states, and a severely understaffed prison estate, we are in quite a worrying and dangerous pattern, where both are under great pressure and each is perhaps unable to rely on the other to su…”

“Looking more to the future, how confident are you that the MOJ now understands the true extent of the staffing shortfalls in probation? Do you foresee that estimate changing again? It has been revised, so do you see there being further revision in the future, or do you now have a grip on what the true extent of the sta…”

“What about before then?”

“Can the right hon. Lady explain to the House what it would mean for the 1,360 children in her constituency, and the nearly 1,700 children in my constituency, who would remain in levels of relative poverty if we chose to pursue the two-child benefit cap for many more years, as she is suggesting?”

“Does the right hon. Lady not share the concerns already articulated by the Confederation of British Industry that simply to scrap the Climate Change Act and the important work of this Government in pursuing net zero targets would be a “backwards step”? That would actually be to the detriment of people’s energy bills an…”

“I am sure that you can understand the concern of the Committee, though. If a secondary school was operating with around half the staff required to operate, there would be so many stakeholders who would know about that. The parents, the school governors, the senior leadership at the school, the local authority and proba…”

“That is quite shocking.”

“We have already established that performance within the Probation Service is far away from where it ought to be. Permanent Secretary, could you very briefly outline just why it is that the MOJ so badly underestimated the number of staff required for sentence management prior to last year?”

“Regardless of the decision to unify the services, why was it allowed to get so bad? Given that particularly jarring conclusion in the NAO Report that the Probation Service has been operating with around half of the staff required to run sentence management, how did it get to the point that it was that poor before the M…”

“Just to confirm, it was a surprise to the MOJ when we found out that there were half the staff required to run sentence management.”

“That sounds like the same as what I was saying, though, which is that it was a surprise.”

“I appreciate that there have been some innovations that are, hopefully, going to bring down those caseloads, but we are starting at a consistently high point. Do you not share the concern that, because of that, we are still just working through a retention crisis and are going to see more and more people in the Probati…”