Speeches by Milne.

“Do you foresee removing the fit note process altogether?”

“It has been commented that there is a relative lack of detail about this third structural problem and how to solve it. What would your response be to that?”

“I used to work in advertising. I believe in incentives, not sanctions, but what about the employers’ perspective?”

“Ian, briefly.”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the hon. Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) for bringing attention to this important issue. Pressure has been building on postal services for decades. In my former career in advertising, I worked on behalf of the Irish post office, An Po…”

“One of the new intelligence unit’s key jobs will be to design incentives. James, you predicted this question last time around. It is about incentives for employers and for employees. What incentives do you think they could create, and what is the balance between employers and employees?”

“The third recommendation in the report is about the workplace health intelligence unit, which we referred to earlier. The idea is to set up a positive feedback loop that informs and improves the other two recommendations. I have a simple question: do we think we really need another body to drive reform on top of all th…”

“I visited my local court just a few days ago. In Horsham, we are lucky enough to have a sufficient number of magistrates, but we still cannot maximise throughput because of a lack of support staff. In July last year, the Justice Committee reported that shortages of support staff were having significant impacts on delay…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Sir John. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) for securing this debate. I can vouch for everything she said about the ring road around Chichester, which I have spent more hours on than I would rather. I agree that it has an impact…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. Last week, I met 30 or so members of the Hong Kong community in Horsham. These people are professionals: they are teachers, students, engineers, doctors, business owners and directors. They are in work, paying tax, buying homes, raising families and contrib…”

“The pension age is going up and will continue to go up. Where do you see the most important mitigations? Is it in helping people early enough to build up a proper pension pot, or is it in the recommendations in the Mayfield review—vanguard employers and so on? How do you see the balance? Who wants to go on that? We hav…”

“Thank you. That is a powerful point.”

“I think you have answered the question I was about to ask you about care, but that is great. Sir Steven Webb, the former Pensions Minister, in talking specifically about the phasing down of DB and the cavalry of automatic enrolment not yet having come over the hill, described UK pensions policy as a “slow-motion car cr…”

“Very succinct. Very good.”

“Moving on to the financial circumstances of today’s pre-pensioners, to what extent do you feel that the pensions system has enabled people in this group, so in their 60s, shall we say, to build up an adequate income for retirement?”

“Thank you very much.”

“This last question is to you, Morgan. As far as we know, the Department has no plans to change the mixed-age couple rule. We do not know how many people are actually affected by it. Do you think the Department needs to take more steps to improve its understanding, and what could it do?”

“Phil, you alluded to this earlier, but the impact assessment of the rise to 67 was done a very long time ago. Do you think this needs updating?”

“Thank you. That is great. For DWP to improve its policymaking, what should it concentrate on? Should it try to work harder at understanding the views of affected parties? Is it about looking at the cumulative impacts of its policies? Where do you think it is lacking? I will throw that out.”

“I would agree that Governments have been very bad at estimating the benefits of prevention and costing them. Are there any further comments?”