Speeches by Glen.

“Can I turn to efficiency savings? The previous Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, talked about the real-time cross-departmental spending tracker. He said it would take two to three years. A recent NAO report found that Departments lacked the granular data to track basic service costs. There is a projected £…”

“I had a constituent who wrote to the local paper saying that, in the years to come, most of the Treasury will be hollowed out by AI. Can you tell us how you see AI working to create efficiencies?”

“I think we would all recognise that what happened in the run-up to the Budget was, to put it charitably, a very unusual process. There has been a lack of clarity over who was responsible for that, and the consequences of the outputs of the reports that have come out of this review clearly inevitably mean that there is …”

“You think that what happened with the FT before the Budget has happened previously?”

“Can I turn to staffing in the Treasury? Mr Bowler, I am conscious that you have been talking for most of the last 50 minutes; please feel free to pass this question to one of your colleagues.”

“Can I come in on this point? Essentially, what happened is that the FCA relied on the work being done in this Treasury review before they made a judgment on whether they would do anything. If the essence of the outcome of this endeavour over the last few months is, “We’ve got near to it, but we haven’t really identifie…”

“If I may say, I am not asserting that when I was in government, everything was done correctly. What I am saying is that the circumstances leading up to the last Budget, where it was widely expected that there was going to be a significant change in tax policy, which was then reversed, involved some information leaving …”

“After five and a half years as a Treasury Minister, I have deep respect and gratitude for your work and the work of your colleagues, but I am a little anxious when I look at some of the reports around staffing in the Treasury. There has always been a higher turnover of staff—I think about three times the civil service …”

“I think that people watching this will probably think, “Gosh”, because in a business, even in a quite sophisticated global corporation, managing the flow of money between departments and so on should be quite achievable. How would you reassure us that you are doing this at the best speed you can, and that it could not …”

“As a former Chief Secretary, I seem to remember talking to individual Cabinet Ministers where the senior officials in their respective Departments would condition the numbers with lots of qualifications, in ways that made it very difficult for the Treasury team to penetrate, so it is not just about systems. How would y…”

“More immediately, and back to the question I put about the year ’25-26 and the £3.5 billion efficiency savings across all Departments, would you like to comment on the progress towards that goal and what is happening with that money?”

“Which Departments are finding it most difficult, do you think?”

“It wasn’t mine, though, was it? It was pre-me. I just want to make that clear.”

“Economic Secretaries through the ages have repeatedly seen credit unions go under. Often those are very small institutions. It has never really been possible to drive consolidation from the centre. How do you reconcile anxiety over performance and security with the desire for expansion? Secondly, we have brilliant init…”

“Thank you very much.”

“Thank you very much for your answers.”

“What assessment did you do of that? Did you make an assessment of what impact that will have?”

“I have a quick question to Minister Pennycook about those people who invested expecting ground rent income that is not capped. Can you clarify what assessment you made of the impact of that? You recognise, and I think you said to me in the House, that you had to make a balanced decision. Could you just say a little bit…”

“I am not laughing.”

“But the self-employed will not be able to get auto-enrolment, will they? If they do not currently have a LISA, and your successor product stops the self-employed using it in that way, what will be the appropriate mechanism, without auto-enrolment, for them to gain that advantage of that aspect of the savings element?”