Speeches by Lowe.

“I would like to go back to the beginning, please. I read the NAO Report entitled “Environmental regulation”, which concluded that DEFRA’s largest environmental regulators, the Environment Agency and Natural England, face several challenges to regulating efficiently and effectively. These include the constraints of the …”

“I should declare that I am, among other things, an active farmer and therefore come into regular contact with the bodies that these fine people run.”

“I will not challenge you to a corridor race today, Mr Speaker, but good luck with your leg. I wrote to the Chancellor on 8 January, with the support of 7,000 small businesses from across the spectrum—not just pubs. They are concerned about not only rate re-evaluations, and the vicious tax rises that they have had to su…”

“Good.”

“Will they still be in business next year?”

“In your example, Indrani, which package did you select? Was it Sage or Xero?”

“So you are on different ones?”

“I have never heard of them.”

“From other parts of Government?”

“So captive recovery?”

“Are you collectively comfortable that enough is being done to take full advantage of shared services, or is there more you can do?”

“Who is driving that? Who is responsible for that? In my experience, unless someone is responsible, nothing ever happens.”

“Not for the main session—there’s one a bit later, isn’t there?”

“Can we drill down a bit more on shared services? It strikes me that we are almost going full circle. We have gone independent and now we are looking at how we share services, which begs the question of why we hived ourselves out in the first place. I guess the definition of “needing to be transparent” is subjective rat…”

“Okay, thank you. Thank you, Chairman. I have no other questions.”

“Yes. On your shared services, you said that you have an audit and presumably you use different auditors. When you talk about turnover, I am assuming that a lot of what is going through your various bodies is spend rather than turnover?”

“But what do you think? Do you think it is better as it is, or do you think it could be improved?”

“How would you improve it?”

“So it is funded by the taxpayer who is giving you money that you are then spending. Let us get the term right: it is not turnover; it is spend. On payroll, auditing, office and communications—loads of things that, if you run a business, you try and ensure that you spend as little as possible on—what are you all doing t…”

“That does not entirely tally with the pre-meeting we had with the Departments, but we can—”