Speeches by Lowe.

“Well, they are generating their own money. They are not just spending.”

“That does not entirely tally with the pre-meeting we had with the Departments, but we can—”

“Yes. On your shared services, you said that you have an audit and presumably you use different auditors. When you talk about turnover, I am assuming that a lot of what is going through your various bodies is spend rather than turnover?”

“Those are fine words—thank you for them—but when will we actually know what the structure is and who will populate that structure?”

“I have seen that there is a White Paper, but when will we actually have a firm structure so that everybody knows what is happening? I think that Ofwat is dysfunctional, that DEFRA is dysfunctional, that the Environment Agency is dysfunctional—I do not know about the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Put those all together a…”

“If I could just ask you a top-down question, I am a great lover of Victorian Britain, and Victorian Britain believed that water and power—clean water and cheap power—should be in public ownership, even though it was far more capitalist than we are today. Listening to the debate and reading these papers, do you think th…”

“I know the structure. But intellectually, do you think that water companies would often be better? I listen to this conversation and I have concerns that the skill and knowledge base both within the civil service and within the ministerial pool—which I look at with horror—is not capable of actually holding the public’s…”

“There is a mismatch between the capability in the private sector and the capability in the public sector, I am afraid. Everything we are talking about now is overly complex. My view is that Ofwat has definitely been regulatory captured in the past. When things get too complex, it ends up being a pig deal—forget all the…”

“Not just the teeth, but the capability. Capability is the key here.”

“And then can we judge whether they are up to the job?”

“I am not blaming you, as you have been there for only a nanosecond. What I mean is the history of it. I would not blame you, as you have not been there long enough.”

“We need this structure and the people as soon as possible. It does not fill me with great confidence to hear that a whole load of legislation has to be passed first. That sounds like a long time to me.”

“Hear, hear.”

“In my experience of running businesses, they do not work when they are in silos. It strikes me that government is operating in silos. Furthermore, it strikes me that this is now a national emergency. I would like to know, as part of the Committee, what exactly you will do to ensure that all Departments work together, t…”

“It’s very important. We have got to have transparency on this if we are to get to the bottom of it, and I don’t think we have transparency. We haven’t got transparency because very often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.”

“It is in the “Summary” of the NAO Report, paragraph 5.”

“I think that must be a priority. What concerns me is that when I use my parliamentary office to ask questions of the Home Office on these issues, on virtually every occasion I get: “The Home Office does not hold the information sought in these questions at the level of granularity requested.” That is for questions abou…”

“I think my question is for Simon Ridley. From your CV, Simon, I see you have been involved in other national challenges such as covid-19 and the Brexit situation. You have been doing this since ’23, so you obviously have a great deal of knowledge about it. I read the Report—I am not quite sure I understood fully your r…”

“I have not found it to be transparent myself as an MP, and it has been difficult. We live in a high-trust society, and a lot of the people coming here are not from high-trust societies. I do not think that your short-term, reactive fixes are going to work, so we need absolute clarity on what you are doing, and we need …”

“This has been a very interesting discussion today. I have a very simple question to all of you collectively. Given the damage to Britain’s local communities of the hotel policy, and given the fact that those people who have been damaged are paying for it, will you collectively, across all Departments, commit today to p…”