Speeches by Reed.

“If I wanted to do that, I would go to speak to the incoming Prime Minister rather than the august members of this Committee. He is a busy man, but I would like to think he is watching proceedings.”

“I have just come back from the LGA, where I must have spoken to dozens of council leaders of all parties.”

“Some of this will be for the incoming Government, but this is clearly a rolling programme of devolution, and we are making huge headway with it. At the LGA conference last week, there was some pushback on the pace at which this Government are going through local government reorganisation and devolution, but we cannot s…”

“It is more important to get it right than to rush it through when we do not think it is right at this stage. Richard Blakeway has done a very important job overseeing the release of a nationwide complaint-handling code. As I said, he has long been a very powerful advocate for social housing. We will make appropriate in…”

“There is a whole swathe of things that I think are really important. As the Chair said, MHCLG has the biggest legislative programme of any Department, and it has a very broad remit. I feel that we have made progress in the 10 months that I have been in the role in a lot of those areas. The Government’s priority has bee…”

“We are currently taking advice on it. The idea is: how do you try to smooth out the peaks and troughs in the sector? When you get a deep trough, as we have had recently because of events overseas that I will not repeat again, it is then very difficult to come out of it, because we lack the skills, for instance, and the…”

“We do need to look at how we both deepen devolution in the areas that have it and extend it to areas that do not have it.”

“This is a rolling programme, and we should anticipate that it will continue to roll.”

“We are always looking at how we can do things within the resources available. As well as mayoral strategic authorities, we have foundation strategic authorities, which are going at a slightly different pace. But the approach we have taken is to be very pragmatic and work with areas that are ready and equipped to take o…”

“We have established something called the network for neighbourhoods, which is designed to ensure that the chairs and other leaders involved in these boards can network with each other and share best practice. The Department, with No. 10, has been facilitating that work, because it became clear quite quickly that they f…”

“I am Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.”

“Because you invited me, didn’t you?”

“I haven’t got it in my head. Unless Will has it, we will just have to write to you.”

“The approaches that will drive it will be contained in that. We have been having conversations with Homes England about those bids and we want to confirm those as quickly as possible.”

“Many of those areas were the focus of work already under way in the Department.”

“Not as far as I am aware.”

“We have been working with the sector and we published proposals in our local outcomes framework in February. In a recent speech, I said that we will incorporate elements of that into a new neighbourhood guarantee so that quite a jargonistic and technical process can become much more meaningful to residents and they can…”

“You will recognise—as I do, having been a local government leader myself—that councils went through over 15 years of underfunding. Not only that, but funding was never adjusted to meet the changing nature of our population. Populations move around. Poverty does not just remain in one place constantly; areas change, and…”

“The administration in Woking that was responsible for that was absolutely catastrophic. Because of the scale and severity of that, the Government had to step in; there was no option other than to do that. What underlies all our local government funding reforms and all of local government reorganisation is this: to esta…”

“It is not just about my Department; this is a whole-Government operation. It is one of the reasons why devolution is right, because Whitehall is too silo-driven. You have whole Departments with Ministers and lots of officials who see the world through the prism of the services they are delivering, but if you are at the…”