Speeches by Lowe.

“If I could just ask you a top-down question, I am a great lover of Victorian Britain, and Victorian Britain believed that water and power—clean water and cheap power—should be in public ownership, even though it was far more capitalist than we are today. Listening to the debate and reading these papers, do you think th…”

“I know the structure. But intellectually, do you think that water companies would often be better? I listen to this conversation and I have concerns that the skill and knowledge base both within the civil service and within the ministerial pool—which I look at with horror—is not capable of actually holding the public’s…”

“Hear, hear.”

“In my experience of running businesses, they do not work when they are in silos. It strikes me that government is operating in silos. Furthermore, it strikes me that this is now a national emergency. I would like to know, as part of the Committee, what exactly you will do to ensure that all Departments work together, t…”

“It’s very important. We have got to have transparency on this if we are to get to the bottom of it, and I don’t think we have transparency. We haven’t got transparency because very often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.”

“I think that must be a priority. What concerns me is that when I use my parliamentary office to ask questions of the Home Office on these issues, on virtually every occasion I get: “The Home Office does not hold the information sought in these questions at the level of granularity requested.” That is for questions abou…”

“It is in the “Summary” of the NAO Report, paragraph 5.”

“I have not found it to be transparent myself as an MP, and it has been difficult. We live in a high-trust society, and a lot of the people coming here are not from high-trust societies. I do not think that your short-term, reactive fixes are going to work, so we need absolute clarity on what you are doing, and we need …”

“This has been a very interesting discussion today. I have a very simple question to all of you collectively. Given the damage to Britain’s local communities of the hotel policy, and given the fact that those people who have been damaged are paying for it, will you collectively, across all Departments, commit today to p…”

“So you have a plan for the justice system to work with the Home Office and local authorities? You are telling me that all that is under way and that there is a blueprint for that, and it is going to be delivered on behalf of the British people?”

“I think my question is for Simon Ridley. From your CV, Simon, I see you have been involved in other national challenges such as covid-19 and the Brexit situation. You have been doing this since ’23, so you obviously have a great deal of knowledge about it. I read the Report—I am not quite sure I understood fully your r…”

“I think this is a very interesting piece of work, and I came along today to learn as much as anything. People talk about the digital revolution, and it is making a huge difference everywhere. I was really intrigued as to whether you have been to talk to some private sector businesses that face the same challenges that …”

“It is a vast amount of money. We are seeing the private sector being taxed—we are seeing taxes on farms, we are seeing taxes on small businesses and we are seeing business rates going through the roof—but that almost pales into insignificance when you look at the numbers we are talking about here, so it is absolutely c…”

“Maybe you should go and have a chat with Elon Musk at X. He managed to cut 80% of his staff, and it seems to me that his platform works better now than it ever has, but there we go.”

“Okay.”

“I would have thought so, but—”

“Complex systems mean opaque data.”

“That is not money that you have to go and earn; it is money that comes in. I accept that they have not agreed it yet—it is remiss of me not to have done that—but I am struggling to understand why your finance system is so complicated. A complicated and opaque finance system means that it is very difficult to make good …”

“Thank you for that. I have a question on the complexity of your finance system. I am finding it difficult to understand why it is so complex. I would like to know why. After all, your actual business model is not that complicated. You send out 72 million letters a year to collect the licence fee from those people who h…”

“The question for Jonathan is “What are you now doing to change as a result of this Report, if you accept this Report as valid and having veracity?””