Speeches by McFadden.

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

“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.”

“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 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 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…”

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

“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 …”

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

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“A lot has changed. My goodness, since 2010, when the last Labour Government left office, the two most obvious things have been Brexit and the experience of the pandemic. They both had a big influence on Government and what they did. When we left office in 2010, we were just coming out of the great financial crisis. An …”

“It has not really been a shock. There we are.”

“No!”

“We have officials and people can be invited in. I am keen to open these things to outside expertise so it is not just Ministers—so that Ministers are there, but others are too.”

“The systems do not always focus on delivery as much as they should. There are a lot of process, and processes are there for a reason: people like to do things properly. What I think the Prime Minister was saying in using that phrase was, “Let’s focus on delivery and focus on outcomes,” which is very much the spirit of …”

“There are not very many of us because we were out of power for so long, so most Ministers are new. We have some collective experience of the past, but not a huge amount. Machinery of government changes might have their fans; they might have their sceptics. On the sceptical side, you could argue that they can take up a …”

“If there was a dispute, it would be elevated to the biggest authority in Government: the Prime Minister. We prefer to work in a collaborative way, but ultimately the reason we have stocktakes with the Prime Minister is so that he can press us. The function of the meetings is to ask if we are going far enough, fast enou…”