Speeches by Reed.

“My hon. Friend is of course an outstanding champion for his constituents in Stoke-on-Trent North. During 2024-25, more than 800 compliance inspections were conducted at Severn Trent Water sites. The Environment Agency will be attending more minor pollution incidents and will continue to attend all serious pollution inc…”

“I am happy to send the shadow Minister the list of media coverage I got from the Royal Cornwall Show. He does not seem to be any better at googling than remembering who he sat down with at lunch. I am delighted that the spending review was welcomed by the environmental NGOs and the National Farmers Union as it funds ac…”

“Which Department is doing well on them? Do we know?”

“I don’t want the full table, but who should we look to?”

“I am satisfied, but as we were saying earlier, over the last three days we have had 250 PQs, so that is quite a challenge. I suspect that if I look at the tracking on those 250 the stats will not be good, but hopefully that is not a new normal, and the number will go down again. I think you probably need to give it a f…”

“Okay. The Home Office is in the same building, so—”

“We had clocked this internally as a problem before the Committee approached us about it, and I recognise what Becky is saying there. We became concerned about the quality of replies, and then I think we put in place too much checking to try to make sure that the quality was always high, and that checking created a bott…”

“That would be—I refer back to the comments I made earlier—particularly since the letter that the Chair sent in April. We did change some of the processes at the end of last year, but I think the over-checking probably added to the bottleneck. We have a different system now. We are tracking much more closely. I am recei…”

“We changed it again, yes.”

“That is particularly true at particular times of the year. Once the weather starts to improve, people are going out more and they discover that a local beauty spot is horrifically polluted. They then contact the MP, among other things, and the MP puts the questions to us. We are dealing with that, but probably not mana…”

“I am Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.”

“There is a lot to unpack, because it is a process, and there are bullet points at various elements of the process, but can I first thank you for inviting me here? It is important that we welcome scrutiny and challenge. It is a very important part of the democratic process, so we were more than happy to come here to exp…”

“You would expect that it would, wouldn’t you? But there should be some kind of flag on it to say that a response is required within a given timeframe, and then that should be chased if the response is not given within that timeframe. Maybe it is structural, but maybe it is also about the systems.”

“It is more with the policy teams. We only have a very small central processing team. We have put in place more senior management, and I will let Becky come in in a moment, because she knows a lot more of the detail than I do, but we have a relatively small team receiving the PQs, which are distributed to the policy tea…”

“It is an interesting question, though. It is a very broad Department. Performance has been poor since 2021-22. In that time—it is only four years—I am the fifth Secretary of State, and it has persisted through all of us. I do wonder whether there is something to do with the structuring of the Department or the nature o…”

“I recognise the stat, but I have not been in any other Department, so I do not have anything to compare it with. Becky, do you think there is anything structural that would lead to that?”

“I am very in favour of self-service in that sense. That is a very good point. The Department’s IT is quite poor. We have lacked investment in IT over many years. I think we are the second worst in Government for digitising things. Just in this one Department, we inherited over 300 different websites when we came in. If…”

“We have a weekly political team meeting, and that will be an item we cover. There are stats as part of the daily brief I get on where in the process the blockages are happening. That includes special advisers, Ministers, the policy teams and the directors. I can see exactly how many are in the system, how many have met…”

“I will let Becky speak to the stats on that, but that was one of the reasons why we became concerned about quality towards the end of last year. We then put in a process that required more checking, but the checking process itself created a bottleneck. We have moved instead to having quality guidelines, and training to…”

“Absolutely. I think that is sensible. You are right that we are not unique in that respect, but we have one of the highest numbers of arm’s length bodies of any Department, and we are a relatively small Department. That is not to make excuses; we need systems that can deal with that better—I agree with you. From the po…”