Speeches by Jones.

“If I am still the Chief Secretary by then—who knows, I might be on your Committee.”

“With your permission, I might break it down into three different bits.”

“You are right that we are increasing the R&D budget. In cash terms, it is not at the rate of GDP. With the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, we are also looking at how we gear the R&D budget towards industrial strategy priorities. You will have seen the Business Secretary launch our plans in the highes…”

“Right. I do not know whether we are working from different numbers, so forgive me, but the way I would characterise it is that we have increased the capital budget, based on inherited plans, by £120 billion by 2029-30, when the capital budget ends. Your question is right, though, about the front-loading of that profile…”

“Do you mean £120 billion by 2029-30?”

“As I said earlier, any OBR forecast that looks at the broader fiscal picture, in line with our fiscal rules, is something that the Chancellor will consider at the Budget.”

“The first thing to say is that the Government policy has not changed, and we will be progressing with our reforms to the welfare system. Specifically in terms of the spending review, the bits that are reflected in the departmental settlements, predominantly for DWP, are in respect of their departmental budgets—things l…”

“Thank you for the question. You will no doubt expect me to say that I cannot comment on hypothetical future market movements. To try to answer the question more from a principles perspective, obviously the Chancellor, at Budget time, with the benefit of an OBR forecast, will look at all these things in the round and ma…”

“Yes.”

“The spending review, which goes to ’29-30 on capital, meets Government policy to increase defence spending to 2.6% by 2027, inclusive of intelligence agencies. That is all fully funded in our spending review. We then had an extant commitment to get to 3% in the next Parliament, subject to fiscal circumstances. The Prim…”

“I do not know—you would have to ask the local government Department—but it is a fact that some choose not to, and that is the point that I am making.”

“Normally, Departments would use financial transactions because Government borrowing is cheaper than commercial borrowing. Some Departments will use their financial transactions not to make profit; they have to make enough to pay off the cost of the borrowing, but they might have it at a lower-than-commercial rate becau…”

“I say “persnuffle” but tell me if you disagree. Essentially, that is our definition of debt, where we move from public sector net debt to public sector net financial liabilities. As the Committee will well know, it means that when accounting we can measure the benefits of our investments as well as the cost of borrowin…”

“You would have to ask them.”

“I did a roundtable with chief financial officers from big global businesses that had done similar things in their private sector organisations. I said to them, “I would rather do this in a year, but is that normal or not?” and they said, “No, it takes quite a few years to do.” We are working with some of those private …”

“I am told it is going to take two to three years.”

“It was quite high level. It was really just about overall spending numbers to help us do the whole-of-Government accounts and the Debt Management Office work, but it did not get under the hood of programme-level performance. One of the projects that I funded in the spending review, and have agreement from the Prime Min…”

“I do not know; it is a great question. I will need to talk to my colleagues but let us take that away. Maybe that is something that we can pick up. Secondly, there is an IT project. I was very conscious coming into this job that we did not have real-time sight of what was going on in other Departments. We had to ask De…”

“I will try to answer that in two ways. One, to monitor outcomes and performance management, the Treasury, Cabinet Office and No. 10 are currently agreeing a shared framework so that we are not duplicating compliance requirements across Departments. There will be a whole-of-Government performance framework that we will …”

“There is one very niche project that I am personally very excited about, which is integrating finance and performance systems. If that answers your question, I will carry on but tell me if it is not quite hitting the nail on the head.”