Speeches by Hall.

“On the capital, do you think that, rather than pots of money being intermittently available to bid for, it should be a more sustainable, long-term influx of funding so that local authorities, if they choose to do so, can follow the invest-to-save programme? In my experience of the children in our children’s homes, it h…”

“I declare an interest: before coming to Parliament, I was the cabinet member for children’s services in Warrington for several years. I fully recognise a lot of the challenges and the issues that have been raised. During my time we started a programme to bring children’s homes back in-house, which has proved to be very…”

“I understand that, and it sounds great but, in terms of that support, the project that I talked about before—the children’s mental health and complex-needs hub—came on the back of a conversation that I had with my director because nothing else was being proposed. There were no other streams of funding and no other supp…”

“Thank you; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furness. I am grateful to colleagues for securing a debate on this issue, because it is something that I am hearing more and more about in Warrington South. When people come to see me about it, they are usually exhausted and upset. Their home is supposed …”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. On roads where people have raised families for decades, homes are being bought up, divided and converted into HMOs, often in what feels like a matter of days, and often by scalpers from out of town who are looking to turn a quick profit. My constituents tell me t…”

“According to NHS data, while the number of people waiting for an autism assessment is levelling out, the time they are waiting is rocketing; the average wait time is 200 days more than it was a year ago. In order to reduce waiting times, integrated care boards should follow the NHS England national framework and operat…”

“In Warrington, Platform is transforming the former Unilever site where Surf and Persil were once produced into a next-generation modular data centre that will provide the capacity, resilience and connectivity needed to power the UK’s AI revolution. From Persil to pixels, Platform is taking a brownfield industrial site …”

“5. What steps he is taking to encourage investment in businesses.”

“To carry on with my favourite topic—legacy systems—what practical improvements are needed in data capture and collection, Bonnie and Andrew?”

“On a more granular level, the NAO Report gives examples of techniques like job costing, process costing and activity-based costing. These are things that are happening in the private sector. Are they things that could be passported over?”

“Thank you, Chair. I want to focus a bit more on the benefits of understanding the costs of services. We know that identifying the drivers of the costs gives us the basis for understanding the full cost of the services. With that in mind, and looking at how we realise those benefits, what are the quick wins to give a se…”

“I suppose the faster you can do it, the more you can benefit from and utilise a lot of the AI. A lot of the legacy systems, as we said before, and data are not usable at the moment. You said that there is a road map, and that is great, but we really need to focus on having those milestones to work towards rather than a…”

“You must be working towards something, though. You must have an ambition as to when this needs to fit together.”

“It is not just sharing; it is capture and collection. It is the whole thing.”

“Realistically, how long will those improvements take?”

“One of the issues I hear about is that a lot of the information is very siloed at the moment—it is based in the Department and not cross-departmental. Is that going to be changed down the line? It would obviously cut down a lot of time, for instance.”

“With a culture change this significant, having that wraparound support is going to be absolutely critical.”

“And if things are not quite going the way that had been planned, I guess you also have that financial support—that knowledge—to say, “Let’s sit down again and look at how things can be done a little bit differently and tweak them.” Is that how you are actively doing it? Rather than coming up with a plan and then disapp…”

“Yes.”

“In terms of helping to persuade Departments to provide support, how do you foresee that happening?”