Speeches by Kane.

“Just to help me understand this, I have one last question on the size of the market. If you are going from provider A and then 10 years later to provider B, and you keep going on a merry-go-round of providers, can you talk to me about the size of the market itself? If it is too small, given that you have 10 years of a …”

“To drill down on that a little further, you have said that you are not recognising the union because you have an employee set-up that you have put in place in advance. That seems reasonable, right up to the point where your employees want union representation. I am unclear as to why there is an issue here. You say you …”

“A quicker way to ensure a good level of service is not to let people leave, or to incentivise them to stay. The incentive can be more money, but it can also be a better working environment. What are you doing to ensure that your work practices are not driving people out the door quicker, regardless of whether there is …”

“I think you said it took six weeks to train somebody up to answer questions in the call centre. Are you finding that the temporary staff are providing a good level of service by the time you get them trained up? If you have well-trained workers, I would expect the complaints to start going down, regardless of whether t…”

“What did you do to test Capita’s assumption that it could do this with fewer people, based on automation and technology?”

“Can I pick up on your first answer on the reason for complaints being so high? You said it was because you have high staff turnover and you are struggling to keep people, but in your second answer you said you have the highest level of employment that you have ever had and you are getting people in. There is a disconne…”

“The union is seeking recognition. You are giving a reason as to why you are not doing it, but it is seeking representation. Why not just say, “Okay”?”

“The unions are saying to us that they want recognition now, not in six months’ time.”

“It is a timescale thing for us as well. When can we expect to see some activity around this? Is it in five years’ time? One year? At what point do you start to put action to the concept of “We need to do something here” so that this Committee can start to see things eight years out, rather than two years out when it is…”

“That is a wait-and-see question. At some point, you will have to say, “We cannot wait any longer. We have to go.” Can we park technology for a minute? I assume that you have a certain amount of time to see what happens with technology, but then you will just have to act. Otherwise, you will not be ready ahead of the en…”

“I want to ask about staffing. However, can I just quickly go back and close off something on digital from before? Given the pace of change, Cat, and given everything that is going on, how confident are you that you have the right skills to oversee this contract, and contracts in general, and to tell the difference betw…”

“If there is somebody saying, “We haven’t yet delivered this app,” or this whatever, “because we think there's an AI thing just around the corner,” that could be someone who is completely on top of their game who is saying, quite reasonably, “Give me another eight weeks; you are going to get something better.” But it co…”

“I was going to ask a question about staffing. In paragraph 3.10 of the NAO Report it says: “The contract with MyCSP does not specify a minimum staffing level, and MyCSP has struggled to maintain sufficient staffing levels since Cabinet Office’s decision to award the…contract to Capita. Cabinet Office’s contract with Ca…”

“Just to finish that concern off—going right back to what we talked about with trade union recognition at the beginning—if you have fewer people being asked to do more, one thing that will happen is that people can be overworked and stressed, and working conditions can go down. It is even more important that we get an u…”

“There is a cultural element of any organisation where striving for excellence is built into its DNA. Whether it has got a small contract or a big contract, that striving for excellence should be evident to you, and it should give you pause if you have evidence that it has not had it in the past. We recently had a heari…”

“Does the Minister agree that it is only because of the Barnett formula and a Labour Government that Scotland—including communities in Stirling and Strathallan—now has record funding of £50 billion this year, and it is deeply concerning that the SNP Government in Scotland have no clear plan to invest this funding proper…”

“We always have a bit of a laugh about how acronyms make it very difficult for people to understand things. “Section 106” is probably the most insider-language term in Government—and we have a lot of inaccessible terms. When I sat on my local planning panel, I often found that the language that we used meant that commun…”

“I think it is fair to say that, whether it is getting more affordable housing or more GP surgeries, everything we are talking about is eerily familiar to me from Scotland. You have maybe given me a glimmer of the answer to this, but how would you characterise your shared understanding of what is a UK-wide problem—it is…”

“As a former Scottish local authority leader, I am listening with interest. It is interesting to hear that my colleagues in England and Wales have the same observations and thoughts as we have in Scotland. It is section 106 in England, section 75 in Scotland and, I think, section 76 in Northern Ireland. What conversatio…”

“To gently push back, I do not agree with your point that the language only matters to civil servants. The more we can make everything we do more accessible to the public, the better it will be for them, so sometimes questioning the terminology we use is important. I would add that, when you have local planning authorit…”