Speeches by Jones.

“That is from 2024 to 2025, in March.”

“Exactly right. One practical challenge for the Ministry of Justice is the availability of relevant judicial expertise for the tribunal decisions, so we have given it a budget that allows it to increase sitting days overall in the court system—it is higher this year and next year than it was in previous years—but we are…”

“If you go from one end of the system to the next, the Home Office is holding the group of people who have been waiting for a decision. I was told by the Home Office yesterday that at the end of March 2025, 106,771 individuals were being supported by the Home Office. That number is being taken down; it is 5% lower than …”

“Well, yes, and for the first time in a long time, the Ministry of Justice has got a good outcome from the spending review, whereas traditionally it was often at the bottom of the pile. We are trying to fix some of those issues.”

“You will realise that the Ministry of Justice is trying to deal with not just the asylums challenge, but the prisons crisis—”

“Exactly right. We spoke to the Law Officers’ Departments in the same way. We had a kind of trilateral discussion between three—”

“Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the Committee for having me today. We started with the plan for change—the Prime Minister’s published strategic framework for this Government over the course of this Parliament, where the missions that we came into government to deliver have been translated into certain priorities. Th…”

“Exactly.”

“The way that it works is that the Foreign Office gets what is left when the Home Office has spent ODA qualifying spend.”

“Yes, and there was a new set of guardrails and guidelines published for the use of financial transactions, I think, at the spring statement.”

“Yes, ideally it would get bigger, but you are right.”

“There is no change to the ODA mechanisms, no.”

“It is.”

“We published some information, I think, in the spending review document.”

“There are meetings that we have on a fairly regular drumbeat. As I say, a lot of my meetings with the OVFM were to understand where we were dispatching them to do what pieces of work and then to receive their analysis about what they thought we might do differently.”

“It wasn’t 15 people who came to me; it was about, I think, three or four, but they have other people to help them.”

“I suspect that we probably agree with that, which is why there is such a focus on social housing through the affordable housing programme uplift.”

“I would say two things. First, we have devolved funding—for example, the transport funding—for the reason I have just set out, which is that we believe intra-city transport in itself is growth-enhancing and that mayors and their local authorities know best where, at that level of spend, they should enhance their local …”

“Exactly, and I am asking for feedback and reflection on what we have done, and what we might then want to carry on doing, do better, or do differently in the next spending review. You are right that the purpose of my job, now that the spending review negotiations have finished, is to work with colleagues in the Cabinet…”

“I would be very happy to be.”