Speeches by Hall.

“Sorry to interrupt—it is great that the information is going to be disseminated, but lots of information is disseminated. Where is the accountability? How do we know that people are actively listening and acting on this?”

“Again, it comes down to support of the Departments. You have mentioned the work going on with the legacy systems, but will there be a hands-on level of support for all the Departments going through these processes? Will you ask them, “Have you considered this area or this area?” and provide that support?”

“A lot of the transformation work and efficiencies are around AI. We will not be able to do any of that while we have legacy systems in place that are not giving us the good data we need to move forwards.”

“I guess it comes down to ownership—to who is responsible for driving this forwards—and monitoring. You mentioned best practice and benchmarking on an annual basis, but would it not be better to do it at an active management level, working alongside and supporting Departments as much as possible? A lot of Departments do…”

“On a more granular level, the NAO Report gives examples of techniques like job costing, process costing and activity-based costing. These are things that are happening in the private sector. Are they things that could be passported over?”

“Given that not everyone has experience in this area, do you think that people understand where there are issues and where there could be wastage? For instance, we talk about legacy systems at a lot of our hearings. To me, it feels a bit of a mire—a bit of a jungle. There seems to be a lack of ownership, and people do n…”

“Thank you, Chair. I want to focus a bit more on the benefits of understanding the costs of services. We know that identifying the drivers of the costs gives us the basis for understanding the full cost of the services. With that in mind, and looking at how we realise those benefits, what are the quick wins to give a se…”

“You must be working towards something, though. You must have an ambition as to when this needs to fit together.”

“It is not just sharing; it is capture and collection. It is the whole thing.”

“I suppose the faster you can do it, the more you can benefit from and utilise a lot of the AI. A lot of the legacy systems, as we said before, and data are not usable at the moment. You said that there is a road map, and that is great, but we really need to focus on having those milestones to work towards rather than a…”

“Realistically, how long will those improvements take?”

“Where is “elsewhere”?”

“It would not go on in terms of fee increases. The service users who are paying and doing what they should be doing—rightly so—are not going to be seeing the fees that they are facing rising.”

“How often is that? Is that a year or two years in advance?”

“Tim and Farhad, how likely is it to affect you?”

“You are confident that that sharing will happen. I know that sometimes there are issues with sharing best practice.”

“We are not talking small figures here. The figure I just quoted was £223 million.”

“I suppose this is where improved monitoring come in.”

“James, how will the Treasury help Government bodies manage the persistent deficits and surpluses more proactively in the future? You said you are aware of these things.”

“The good intentions are there and, if they are actively managed, that is fine, but good intentions can go awry, can they not? If things look like they are not going the way they should be and costs are not being recouped, for instance, is that where the active management comes in?”