Speeches by McFadden.

“The first thing to say is they are challenging to achieve. They are not easy. This is not like me running my Saturday morning parkrun and saying won’t I be doing great if I can do it in less than 30 minutes. These are challenging things to do. I would like to think they are the country’s missions, not just the Governme…”

“The test and learn idea is an interesting one that I was just speaking to Ms Edwards about and some of this has been done. One of the examples I spoke about yesterday was the universal credit system. That was a story of two halves. When the idea was first mooted in Government it was very difficult to get off the ground…”

“For those of us who were in the House some years ago, it was very creaky, and our constituency offices were under siege from people who could not get a passport in time to go on holiday, so the service was rebooted and reorganised. Sometimes, you now hear people use it and give a bit of a backhanded compliment, because…”

“I believe it should. We need a greater risk appetite. There are a lot of things that militate against a greater risk appetite. One could argue that the structure of being hauled before Select Committees sometimes does that because people will be asked why a project failed, but that is part of our democratic accountabil…”

“The enthusiastic generalist is an old debate, is it not? How can I put it?”

“It is a very old debate. Sorry to keep referring to the speech I made yesterday—”

“You can get one for free, actually. I talked yesterday about the notion of a tour of duty. There has been a programme already but on a very small scale about innovation fellows. The idea is to ask people to come in for a six to 12-month period and help us crack a problem. They do not have to have a whole career in the …”

“Let me bring Cat Little, the Permanent Secretary, in on this because this has been tried in a small way with innovation fellowships.”

“That is the idea. The Chancellor announced a budget of £100 million for an innovation fund to fund these projects. I announced a few yesterday based on the twin challenges of temporary accommodation and family hubs. The idea is that you have policy people, practitioners, technology, and the users of the service because…”

“They will still have to account for public money and so on, but when you start this, you will realise that it will not always work at once. They may get something wrong, but if something is going to go wrong, I would rather it went wrong in a small way than in a huge way, and the cost of the status quo is often very hi…”

“That is the basic concept from the get-go. There has been a lot of talk of Elon Musk in recent months and he says that every time one of the rockets blows up in space, they learn a huge amount. They learn exactly what went wrong and how to fix it for the next time. Not everything works the first time.”

“They know from the beginning that that is the idea behind it. You are testing and learning. Failure is not a final thing, it is just the way you did it that time did not work so you can improve the way you did it for next time, hopefully.”

“It should be the spirit of the team that they are working in.”

“If they manage to deal with the two challenges that have been set in different places—these are not in the same place—then you try to replicate that elsewhere. But again, one of the things to remember is not every area of the country is the same. They have their own characteristics and so on. So, it is not always a cas…”

“We will not try and replicate it.”

“People will know what went wrong and why it did not work. They say failure is a good teacher. We should learn from failure as well as success.”

“I played those 12 records and I have been through all the iterations of cassette tapes; I showed my daughter some cassette tapes, she could not believe it.”

“We then went through the world of CDs. Now we are in the world of single songs and playlists, and it is entrepreneurial risk-taking that took us there. I could say the same for travel.”

“That is right, but when the world is changing so rapidly in the way that I have just talked about in terms of the consumption of music in the private sphere, let us take some of the learning from that and apply the ingenuity, creativity, and capacity to change to the public sphere too. It is not easy; I could give up.”

“I could say, “It’s not worth the effort. We’ll just do everything the way we have always done it. Don’t worry, you don’t have to innovate because if you never innovate you have no chance of failure.” But I do not think that would be a very good way to run Government.”