Tag: Liz Truss

Below is the text of the speech made by Liz Truss, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to the Spectator Housing Summit on 17 May 2018.

For me, it’s personal.

As Virginia Woolf said: A woman must have money and a room of her own.

What she was talking about was having the power to shape her own life.

So, as a 21-year-old graduate from Leeds, I followed that advice.

I headed for the bright lights, big city for my first job as an accountant.

We want the next generation to have the chance to better themselves, to be able to move where there are the best jobs and the best opportunities.

Young people are at the forefront of a huge shake up of the economy.

They are the freest generation ever: the Uber-riding, Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters.

They’re not just hungry for pizza, they’re hungry for success.

They have the desire to shape their own future.

But at the moment they’re spending too much time as frustrated flat hunters.

According to the CPS, the cost of living and housing are the most important issues.

Renters face high housing costs, with nearly half of income going on rents in London on average.

The average London house price is 12 times higher than the average London wage – when you can only get a mortgage at four or five times your salary.
To paraphrase Norman Tebbit, the new generation want to get on their bikes, hit the road, and find the best jobs in the best cities.

But even though this generation are keen cyclists, they’re not getting in the saddle.

Because it’s no use getting on your bike to find a job, if you end up with nowhere to lock it up.

It doesn’t matter where you want to go – Norwich, York or London, if you want to go there and get the best job, you should be able to.

I want everyone to be able to move house to get a better job, so they can get on in life.

And accepting the status quo is bitterly unfair.

We also need to make sure that the record number of new businesses we have in the UK get access to the best talent.

For the sake of society, we need to make sure our villages are viable – that they have the houses, schools and shops to thrive.

And for the sake of our economy, we need to let our most successful, towns and cities expand.

In Medieval times, Norwich was the second-largest city in England, agriculture’s answer to Silicon Valley.

Then, during the industrial revolution, the country marched to the beat of the North, and workers flocked upcountry.

It was not so much a gold-rush as a cold-rush.

The point is that when towns have their moment, people move to the places where the wages are highest. That’s resulted in Britain’s economy growing faster.

Today, London is as productive as Germany, while cities like Oxford, Cambridge and York are bursting with potential.

These are towns calling out to workers everywhere, desperate for more hands to the pump.

But according to the Resolution Foundation, the share of working age people moving for jobs has gone down by 25 per cent since 2001, with the most significant decline among young graduates.

What’s more, the typical person would have been £2000 better off getting on their bike.

So we need to need to let these towns off the leash, because we all stand to benefit, in our wages and in our quality of life.

A recent study in America by Hsieh and Moretti showed that freeing up housing regulations in New York, San Jose and San Francisco to median levels could increase the US’s GDP by 3.7 per cent, which would mean an extra $3,500 in wages for all workers.

But the most productive cities are being held back by zoning requirements.

And it’s much the same story in the UK – restrictions on building are holding cities up.

Analysis shows that opening up planning is one of the fastest things we could do to boost our country’s productivity.

This is why reform is so urgent.

It’s restrictions that are causing problems, but there are some out there who say that the solution is more restrictions, more control, more state interference.

This is the opposite of what we need.

Others are calling for a £10,000 bung to 25-year-olds – which they’ll all end up paying back in higher taxes.

I think it’s a myth that young people want free things. The fact is they want free-dom – to work and live where they choose, and that will take radical action.

Because all of these are attempts to cure symptoms.

None aim to tackle the underlying issue, which is supply.

The answer is not top-down meddling, but encouraging disruption.

We need to open up more land to build on.That means challenging the vested interests.

We need to challenge the NIMBYs, comfortable in their big houses in suburbia.

The fact is that flats and houses need to be built where they are needed.

We all want somewhere for our children to live – not least because that means they don’t have to live with us until they are 30!

We need to make better use of the land that we have.

We are introducing minimum densities for housing development in city centres, and have extended freedoms to convert certain types of property into housing.

We also need to encourage more creative tools that give more power and freedom to the individual.

We modernised outdated estate agent legislation in 2013, making it easier for excellent websites such as Zoopla to provide the information that renters and house buyers need when deciding where they want to move – including whether their garden is south facing.

Meanwhile Airbnb and Spareroom have helped people find – like Harry Potter and his friends – a room of requirement.

We need to liberate business planning in high-growth, free enterprise areas.

I would like to see more of the development model used to build Canary Wharf – A Canary North!

And we also need to look at those councils around the country who are not delivering.

Last November, we singled out 15 other councils that are holding back people who want to develop land and create new opportunities, and the government has started intervening in 3 of these cases.

I’m pleased to say, though, that this government allowed local people to make their own neighbourhood plans, so that they can do what’s best for their villages.

That’s why our reforms, put forward by Sajid Javid, and taken forward by James Brokenshire, are so important.

We’ve removed stamp duty for first-time buyers purchasing a house under £300,000 – that’s 4 out of 5 cases. This will save people £1,700 on average, and help over a million first time buyers getting onto the housing ladder over the next five years

And we’re streamlining the Byzantine planning system, to make it easier for the small firms to compete, to disrupt the market and, through fierce competition, build the houses and offices and factories that will make Britain successful.

In the 1930s, before planning system was introduced, there were ~265k houses built by the private sector a year – which goes to show we can do this!

We’re cutting through bureaucracy and, since overhaul of planning act in 2012, we’ve gone from 200k to 350k planning permissions per year.

And last year, there were 217,000 net additional new homes in Britain, which shows massive progress.

We are also making plans for the future, including the corridor between the bright lights of Oxford and Cambridge – we have concluded a deal targeting 100,000 new homes by 2031.

This goes alongside our investment in infrastructure – a 40-year-high – which will connect all these new homes with the modern roads and railways people need to get around.

Britain should be an opportunity nation where you can get on your bike and find a job where you want.

This is what I mean by freedom of movement.

It’s part and parcel of a free enterprise economy, which is what drives growth and prosperity.

Our job in government is to help achieve that.

With better and more affordable housing, we can improve social mobility, address wealth inequality, and make sure our country’s opportunities are open to everyone – big or small, north or south, man or woman.

Below is the text of the speech made by Liz Truss, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, on 26 October 2017.

When I arrived in the Chief Secretary’s office in June, I was expecting to find a note telling me how much cash there was.

Instead all I got was a few pieces of cricket memorabilia and a rather sweet cat.

But what I did inherit were public finances in much better shape than in 2010. The deficit is down and the economy has enjoyed years of sustained growth.

On every street corner, I can see untapped potential. I see the ambition to succeed from the founders of firms to the leaders of social enterprises. In every business, school and hospital, we have huge talent.

I know that the best days of Britain are ahead of us.

In order to turbocharge our success, we need to unleash this potential within our economy.

And for that we must look to public services.

Why?

Because around a fifth of the economy is in the public domain.

And because:

Education

Infrastructure

Health care

Planning

Regulation

…are all under the control of the government.

Unlocking our potential is not about increasing the size of the state.

It’s not about what you spend – it’s about how you spend it.

We’ve made good progress over the last seven years, reducing the deficit while improving front-line services. Some say we can’t go any further, but I don’t accept that defeatism.

I know we can: it’s about unleashing a new era in technology, creativity and ideas.

In Britain we have some of the best public servants in the world.

But we need to give our public sector leaders new freedom…

Robustly measure our output…and make sure we spend every penny well.

Achievements to date

We’ve made huge progress since 2010:

– 4 years of uninterrupted economic growth

– a record number of start-ups created: we rank 3rd, with over 650,000 founded in 2016 alone

– we now have 22 billion-dollar tech companies based in the UK, from St Ives to Inverness

– the unemployment rate at its lowest since 1975

– millions more children in good or outstanding schools, and more student choosing to pursue maths at A-level

– historically high cancer survival rates

We didn’t achieve all this by losing control of the public finances.

We did it by harnessing the creative, innovative spirit that has driven Britain’s success for centuries…

By shifting money to the front line in health, policing and education…And by giving those on the front line the power to transform what they do.

Moving from inputs to outputs

So why is so much of the public spending debate just about how much money there is?

No company would measure its performance by its cost base.

You don’t see Sainsbury’s saying we’re doing better this year because we’re spending more money on products we’re buying to sell to our customers. Deliveroo didn’t come up with their new operating model by deciding what the budget was first and then buying up bikes.

The reason we’ve got such a high number of start-ups and our businesses are so successful is because they are constantly finding new and better ways to deliver their services.

Why do we only ask:

How big is her Budget?

How much are we spending?

Is it more this year or last year?

Is it more in Manchester or Bristol?

What number is attached to that announcement? And to be clear, there aren’t any spending announcement here today.

Of course, public services do require money. So let me set out the facts:

– public spending is currently 38.9% of GDP

– this year, it will hit £800 billion for the first time – that’s around £29,000 per household, and in line with what other major economies are spending

– on education, we spend more as a percentage of GDP than countries like Germany or Japan, and our health spending is 9.7% of our GDP, more than the EU average

– our public services are important. We value them highly. And that is exactly why they have been, and will continue to be, well invested in

How do we make public services better?

Hard working taxpayers want to know that every penny that they pay is going to good use.

Lower productivity means less value achieved for every pound spent: fewer operations conducted, fewer children educated well, fewer bins collected.

And the result? A substantial budget deficit on the eve of the UK’s biggest financial crisis in 80 years.

Let me be clear – there are some things only government can do.

But allowing the state to grow squeezes out the freedom and enterprise of the private sector.

It raises the tax burden on both individuals and businesses, slowing and stifling the innovation which drives our economy and our success.

If we want to make sure our public services continue to lead the world, we shouldn’t be losing control of the public finances or wrecking the economy.

We need a balanced approach – investing while driving productivity and value for money.

Productivity doesn’t mean we’re expecting people to work harder – people already work hard.

It’s about giving people the means and the freedom to maximise the impact of what they do. And making sure public services are having the greatest impact on people’s lives.

We have commissioned Sir Michael Barber to look at how we do exactly this.

For me there are three key areas:

Firstly, we need to continue to move towards a system that rewards the impact money has, rather than the amount of money spent.

Secondly, we must cultivate leadership in public services. We know what we want to see, but we should give those on the front line freedom to deliver.

And, finally, we must open up more of our public services to new ideas and disruptive innovation. We need to think big.

1. Impact

Firstly: we must rigorously measure the impact each pound spent has. If we can’t measure results, people will talk about what they always talk about: money.

We’re now much better at investing in economic infrastructure. With more sophisticated analysis we’re making better decisions than ever about where we invest taxpayers’ money. This means families and businesses see maximum gain when we spend money on roads or railways.

For example, in 2015, we were able to prioritise the dualling of the A11 to Norfolk, because it had a very high cost-benefit ratio compared to other projects.

Now we need to go beyond concrete and steel and use this approach to look at how government spending affects people.

We’re already doing this in higher education. We’ve recently published data measuring the impact of a university course on students’ prospects. It’s a new tool for comparing the return on investment at different institutions and courses.

It shows, for example, that students taking engineering at the OU can earn well over £50,000 five years after graduating.

And our Teaching Excellence Framework is incorporating earnings data, and providing a measure of the overall value-add that universities and courses provide.

However, effective measurement is not just about holding ourselves to our own standards, it is also about benchmarking our performance against other countries – noting where we are better and when we are not, so we can improve. We know how to benchmark. We simply need to do it more.

Prioritisation

This measurement can help us prioritise.

We are already doing this by rebalancing public spending. For example, by helping people into work, we’ve reduced the Jobseekers Allowance bill by £2.1 billion since 2010. And we are increasing public investment to around £1 in every £8, as opposed to £1 in every £14 in recent decades. And we are reprioritising within out Budgets.

On Education, our prioritisation of funding to the front line has meant that we’ve been able to put £1.3 billion extra into core schools funding. The evidence shows that high quality teaching that is the key factor of educational performance.

But we need to go further.

We need to back brave leaders, like Simon Bailey of Norfolk Constabulary, who is reshaping his force to deal with the changing nature of crime: making difficult decisions so he can invest in the IT required to deal with increasingly complex crimes such as adult and child abuse, sexual offences and cyber-crime.

2. Leadership freedom

As Charlie Mayfield identified in his report industry productivity, leadership is an area where the UK has much to learn.

To use his exact words: While we have world class, high performing businesses, in far too many UK firms of all sizes, management performance falls behind the best international standards.

Our public services are no different.

We need to move away from the idea that great leadership and management is something that you are born with. That someone is either Winston Churchill or David Brent.

Some of our most successful innovations like academies, foundation trusts and reform prisons have been about enabling and empowering leaders: giving them the freedom to lead and the accountability that comes with that.

Take the Michaela School, run by Katharine Birbalsingh, that I visited in Wembley.

Katherine has reorganised the school day to eliminate the time normally lost moving from classroom to classroom.

Over time, it means hours – days – of time spent in the classroom instead of wasted in the corridor.

Taken together, seemingly insignificant changes can have a huge impact on children’s lives.

The Michaela School was recently rated ‘outstanding’ in every category by Ofsted.

Or take Worthing Hospital, where trust leader, Marianne Griffiths, has embraced the Japanese concept of Kaizen – continuous improvement.

This has been adopted by the brilliant team on Beckett Ward, led by deputy Sister Sue Grace.

Instead of lodging a complaint to senior management and waiting six weeks for a response, the team gather each day for an “improvement huddle”.

One such improvement was a nurse’s suggestion to move admin desks onto the patient bays. This would mean nurses could supervise patients while doing paperwork. Otherwise known as “BayWatch”.

Once put into practice, falls by frail patients dropped by 80%. We know our nurses are working their socks off.

The problem is, there are often too many barriers to making the small changes that have a big impact.

As a government, we must do more to empower our public servants, remove these barriers and provide them with the means and support to unlock their potential.

In the way we design frameworks and spending controls, the Treasury – whilst protecting public money – must make sure we are allowing leaders to lead and giving them freedom over how to achieve results.

3. Disruption is good

Finally, I want to take on this notion that the public sector should resist outside influence.

The public sector does not exist in a bubble and business should not be treated as the enemy.

Don’t critics realise that the cheap flights they take – the lattes they sip – and the smartphones they post their dubious comments from are all results of free enterprise.

Rather than ignoring or denying the virtues of enterprise we should be harnessing it for the public good.

Both of my parents worked in the public sector in Leeds, my dad as a university lecturer and my mum as a nurse and then teacher. In fact, my father is still working as a mathematics lecturer today.

The institutions that they worked in – Leeds University and the Infirmary – emerged in the city’s days as a wool town, and were paid for and heavily influenced by the industrialists of the day.

Fast forward to today, and we can easily see the huge contribution made by entrepreneurs and business people – like Lord Harris and Paul Marshall – to our public service. Both have brought their energy and drive to the academies and free schools movement, where performance is outstripping other schools in the state sector.

Public private partnerships, like the Docklands Light Railway, are some of the most effective and popular public services in the UK.

From Ask the Midwife, an app which is helping expectant mothers to access NHS services quicker and more effectively…

…to the brilliant IT company Reveal Media that supply bodyworn cameras to police, saving time and speeding up prosecutions

…to the transformative effect that digital flood information is having on coastal towns and villages vulnerable to flooding – technology only available because of the innovations of world leading software companies.

We must champion a rich, vibrant, creative, enterprising public sphere where all ideas are welcome.

Looking forward

We want to see new ideas challenging the status quo of our public services.

Government doesn’t always have the answers, but we can create structures to empower people – liberating our public servants and making the most of those opportunities.

This idea that some monolithic planned state will solve Britain’s problems in our rapidly changing and incredibly diverse world is ludicrous.

The best ideas often come from those on the front line. We need a public sector open enough to harness new ideas for the public good.

Conclusion

We’ve come a long way in understanding how to get the most from public services.

It’s not about spending money we don’t have.

It’s about championing the ambitious and the enterprising.

It’s about rigorous measurement of what we do and being willing to reprioritise.

It’s about opening up more of the public sector to new ideas and innovation, unleashing creativity in the way we approach our day to day delivery of public services.

In this way, we can harness the untapped potential of the public sector and its people to help drive our economy and put us in a strong position to thrive.

Below is the text of the speech made by Liz Truss, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, on 21 July 2016.

Mr Attorney, let me begin by thanking the Lord Chief Justice for his kind words – and the warm welcome he has given me over the past week.

I am delighted to have been appointed to this role.

It’s a privilege and an honour for me to have been sworn in today as the first woman Lord Chancellor.

Although, as the Lord Chief Justice has mentioned, I may not be the first woman to hold the Great Seal.

The duties that go with this role today – to respect and defend the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary – must be upheld now as ever.

In my time as Lord Chancellor, I will uphold them with dedication.

Because the rule of law is the cornerstone of the British way of life.

It is the “safest shield”, as Sir Edward Coke – a great son of Norfolk – put it.

And as Lord Bingham wrote:

“the hallmarks of a regime which flouts the rule of law are, alas, all too familiar – the midnight knock on the door, the sudden disappearance, the show trial”.

The fundamentals of civilisation and liberty depend on the rule of law.

It is our safeguard against extremism, oppression and dictatorship – the separation of powers keeps the executive in check.

It is the basis of our prosperity, which is sustained by secure contracts and free trade.

And it shapes the fabric of our free society – the order, the stability, the equality and the individual freedom that we all love and respect.

We have inherited the finest legal tradition in the world.

And it is our duty to protect it.

We know that all successful societies have the rule of law at their core.

And it is a source of pride that the common law has played a key role in so many of them.

Our law, English common law, has shaped the world for the better.

It is at the heart of everything I believe in.

As a Parliamentarian, the rule of law has been at the centre of my work.

When I was in commerce – negotiating anything from shipping charters to telecoms supply agreements – every single transaction was underpinned by contract law.

And wherever I did business around the world, the preferred contract law was English law.

That’s because we have the most open and trusted legal system in the world.

That is why we are so often the first choice of legal venue for international litigators looking to be treated fairly.

They know that we have the greatest judiciary in the world, with a reputation for excellence, incorruptibility, objectivity and independence.

I would like to see that reputation acknowledged more widely at home.

Without judges – from the supreme court to the local magistrates’ court – the rule of law would be nothing more than an empty slogan.

You are the human face of the administration of justice, and there can be no higher calling.

As a career, it should be seen as attractive – and prestigious – by every possible person, from every possible background.

In time, this will help the judiciary to be drawn from a pool of the widest available talent.

As a young woman, I remember going to Leeds Crown Court to see a female barrister defending cases, and saw for myself how the profession was changing.

I saw how justice was done, the importance of trial by jury, how everyone participates in the legal process – it was an inspiring experience.

I want as many people as possible to have that same experience, to understand the process of law, to want to join the legal profession and to become judges.

There has already been fantastic work carried out by the Lord Chief Justice on this front – and I will help with that, widening and opening up the profession.

After all, the law is our common law, our shared law.

I am a great supporter of reform and modernisation throughout the courts and tribunals system; and that urgent task will be high on my agenda in the months ahead, as I know it is for senior members of the judiciary.

As the first woman Lord Chancellor, I am proud to be part of our constantly evolving justice system.

It is a system that evolves, from precedent to precedent, in step with society.

But all the while, the fundamental principles of justice in this country remain the same.

The thread running through it all is the rule of law – it shaped society in the past, does so now, and will do so in the future.