Speeches by Jones.

“We were genuinely collaborative through the spending review. We worked hand in glove with No. 10 and the Cabinet Office. We used some of the evaluation taskforce’s expertise. There were a number of Cabinet Secretary-led deep dives where they pulled senior officials across Departments, predominantly because one of my ex…”

“Yes. Lots of the situations of the past, where councils were allowed to use the Public Works Loan Board to make risky commercial decisions and then over-expose themselves to debt, and failed commercial enterprises had already been tightened up by the last Government, so we had inherited a framework where we had—”

“I see what you mean. What was different with the mission-led approach were the inputs, the data analysis and the evidence. We were told that Departments genuinely had not come together before to think about how a decision, maybe in the Home Office, would affect the CPS and the court system at a system level. We made th…”

“No. We have not changed the constitutional arrangements where Departments, through their accounting officers, are accountable to Parliament and to their relevant Committees in the normal way. That is true.”

“I don’t think I said that, to be fair.”

“Sure. But secondly, I think it is legitimate to need a space for private negotiations. If everything were public, it would make it quite hard to work through that with and between Departments.”

“Not necessarily, but I would make two observations. One is that there is not just one neat submission. If I think about all the work that we have done over the last six months or so with Departments, you work with the mission boards, they all submit their plans, they work together, they try to think about their deliver…”

“I would be happy to consider it, and I recognise the criticism. I think it is true, and I have said it myself in the past.”

“I hope that it will be better, at least.”

“The criteria for that drove that behaviour. We told Departments that the money had been put aside, and that it would be considered separately from normal budget considerations, but investments had to be match-funded, have cashable savings in the scorecard period and be genuinely transformational. That drove Departments…”

“I do not think there are institutional obstacles. We have talked about this internally before, and I wanted us to do more on it. In response to my requesting it, the Department built this algorithmic system, working with universities to trial it. It happened because I asked for it—there was no friction or obstacle arou…”

“In terms of the multi-year settlement, we did get Departments together to talk about reform priorities, which they welcomed because it meant that Departments were accountable—in a room like this—to each other. When we needed to commission work or data to support one another, we did that formally through the spending re…”

“I would want to keep the mission-led approach, and to go to the Chair’s question at the start—it always seemed mad to me that, in the past, you did not get the Ministry of Justice, the Law Officers’ Departments and the Home Office together to talk about a system-level view of delivery, when they were so intrinsically l…”

“Adversarial, yes—thank you. That kind of arrangement, where the Secretary of State and their team walk in, and you are on the other side of the table, and you have a bit of a robust conversation about whose data is right. It just did not feel very productive to me, to be honest. We made a number of changes in this spen…”

“Based on the evidence, that is a perfectly legitimate criticism. I suspect that Governments of all colours have, over the years, said, “We are going to be x% more efficient,” and then costs go up. During the spending review period, we used the Office for Value for Money to go into Departments and scrutinise their plans…”

“You would have to call them to give evidence, Chair. I had to do a small spending review for a year when we came in, because we inherited no spending plans from the last Government. Since then we have done a multi-year spending review. I was quite clear in the first spending review that things needed to change. It was …”

“I quite enjoyed the process, to be honest.”

“Treasury officials work on our internal view around the growth impact of our spending decisions. Breakfast clubs, school-based nurseries—these are good examples of where we believe policies could increase participation in the labour market and allow people to work longer hours if they want to, which will evidently have…”

“We obviously make the case to the OBR about what we think of our policy decisions. The OBR, as an independent forecaster, has the right to agree or disagree, and to publish its forecasts in the normal way. I am not going to make a judgment on the OBR; I will leave that for this Committee, which holds it to account. But…”

“As the OBR is an independent body, you will know that I am not going to comment on the OBR’s forecast; I will allow the Committee to take a view on that. The one thing I will point out to you, though, is that in recent OBR forecasts, the OBR has scored the growth potential of policy decisions that we have taken, which …”