Speeches by Cane.

“You touched earlier on the fact that the register of lobbyists and the transparency register both had very thin evidence and it was therefore difficult to cross-reference them when you were trying to do investigative work to identify any breaches. You talked about how long it took: do you have enough resources in the t…”

“Is that partly why you wrote to all the former MPs, to try to avoid that?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank the petitioners and my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for leading this important debate. We all know from our inboxes that the system is not working and that change is necessary. It is incumbent on all of us to fix the situat…”

“Earlier on, in answers to the Chair, you said that you were pragmatic and that you would apply flexibility. Do you think that there is any room for applying flexibility to improve transparency?”

“Where do you see the place of the Registrar in the wider ethics and standards landscape?”

“The current Registrar has highlighted a number of areas where lobbying transparency needs to be improved, but it does not look as if the Government are in a hurry to address them. How would you try to deal with those weaknesses?”

“Continuing with transparency, what balance do you envisage between your role in applying the legislation as it stands and, as you have touched on, advocating for ways to improve it?”

“I rise to speak in support of new clause 2, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) and has cross-party support. I really hope that that cross-party support holds up in the vote. As we have heard, disability does not stop at peak times. I represent a rural constituency…”

“Sunnica solar farm, which runs through my constituency, was given permission by this Government, and there are more solar farm applications in the pipeline. My constituents are concerned that these applications are being made without a land use framework, which would have provided reassurance that the competing demands…”

“Okay, thank you.”

“I am going to ask mainly about the culture of the organisation. We have heard from other witnesses, and it came out of Sir Robert Devereux’s review, that there is a culture where open discussions regarding challenges are not welcomed. Do you recognise that description?”

“In your answer to the Chair’s question at the beginning, you talked quite a bit about having open meetings, but you talked about those meetings being quite large—in one case, you said it could have been 1,000 people. You also talked about trying to get your managers to cascade down. How well do you feel that that worke…”

“You have talked about systems for getting your message out and for cascading messages down—systems that may not, in themselves, have worked as well as you liked. What systems were there in place, other than the questions, for cascading things back up again?”

“You said that quite a few people came to you in 2021.”

“Did that continue? Did people continue coming to you? Do you have any idea why that might be?”

“This Committee is clearly of the view that the HR function was not working particularly well. You have said that colleagues of yours raised concerns with you about HR and how things were operating. You were aware of the problems, and yet you effectively promoted the leader of the HR operation to be a director of operat…”

“When did colleagues first raise concerns with you about HR?”

“So not until late 2024?”

“You seem to be saying that it was a function that was actually doing a pretty good job, but there were mitigating reasons why people felt unhappy with it. In the time that you were at the ONS, did you really feel that the staff culture and staff morale were good?”

“Did none of your direct reports report any concerns or issues about staff morale, either that they had or that had been raised with them by their direct reports?”