Speeches by McFadden.

“I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s response and for his broad support for our response, including on the resilience directorate academy and the full pandemic exercise. Let me turn to his questions. On mapping, the data is getting better. The Government’s ability to gather and use data has improved over time, …”

“I would like to make a statement on the Government’s response to module 1 of the covid inquiry. In July last year, Baroness Hallett published her report from the first module of the inquiry. It concluded that the UK was not as prepared as it should have been for the pandemic and that more could and should have been don…”

“My hon. Friend is right to underline the need to thank the key workers, many of whom were low paid and many of whom did come from ethnic minority backgrounds. They kept the country going, and sometimes had to put themselves at risk to help and protect the rest of us. I thank my hon. Friend and those who represent worki…”

“There is variation around the country at the moment and we live with it. Some places have better bus services than others. There is this phrase, “postcode lottery”. There is always a tension if you can get something in one part of the country and not in another. In the nature of devolving power, you will get difference…”

“These test and learn projects should involve residents. It is never a perfect thing to do, but they should be doing it. As I said earlier, this is about better results for citizens, so why would we not want to do that? At the more macro level, in a democratic system like the one that we have, the truth is that if a Dep…”

“I am not redesigning the whole of local government, but there is an English devolution White Paper coming. There is an offer to parts of the country that do not have mayors to have them, but it is an offer. My own personal view is that elected mayors have been a successful project in the country. We started it when I w…”

“No, but I am saying it has not been updated for 13 years. There is no doubt that the document is out of date. It still has us as members of the European Union, as you may be aware, and various other things, so it will need to be updated at some point. But you will know the point I am making is that there has not been a…”

“It is a good question. If you go through the different policy areas, some are reserved and some are devolved. If I take the example of energy, there are aspects of energy policy that are reserved, but there are also things like planning frameworks which are devolved in different parts of the country. The dialogue on th…”

“It is a very good point. Regarding homelessness, there are well-documented examples of people bouncing around between different services, probably in a cumulative way, not getting a good outcome for themselves and costing an awful lot of money. There was a famous article written many years ago called Million Dollar Mur…”

“The team spirit between us and the Treasury is very good, so there has been no need for any shouting.”

“A lot of them cut across Departments. If you want children to have the best start in life, which is one of the things we talked about in the document, that involves the Department for Education, but it also involves the Department of Health and Social Care. It also involves making sure there are enough decent homes in …”

“No one is going to be excited by a label, but there is a serious point underneath this, which is a loss of faith in the capacity of Governments to deliver outcomes because people are seeing their tax burden rise, but there is a feeling that things do not work as well as they should. Waiting lists are longer, we do not …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I do not know that society is moving away from entrepreneurial risk-taking. Society likes the fruits of entrepreneurial risk-taking. There are companies that we use every day: Airbnb, Spotify, and WhatsApp that did not exist 20 years ago. They were all built on the basis of entrepreneurial risk-taking and they have cha…”

“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.”

“We will not try and replicate it.”

“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…”