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  • Tim Loughton – 2011 Speech to Fostering Network

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    Below is the text of the speech made by Tim Loughton, the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families, on 22 November 2011.

    I must start by paying my thanks to the Fostering Network. I admire it hugely and I am grateful to Robert, his team and all your members for their support over the last year.

    In particular, let me thank you for your involvement on the Foster Carers’ Charter and for the excellent guide you have developed on putting it into practice. Finally, let me pay special thanks to the Fostering Network for its support to local services in their recruitment of foster carers.

    The unique skills and dedication of carers are absolutely essential to improving the lives of looked after children. And the Government is very clear that we must attract more skilled people into fostering as a top priority.

    I saw a quote in the Guardian earlier this year in which a carer described her six years of fostering as “a very humbling job”.

    I meet foster carers up and down the country all the time in my work – and I can assure you this modest, unassuming assessment of their role is characteristic of most.

    So, I am delighted we are now working with the Fostering Network to help local services recruit more of their calibre through programmes like Foster Carer Fortnight.

    In the last month, we have stepped through the gears once again.

    And there has been a lot of positive media around adoption with the launch of Give a Child a Home. Unfairly I think, fostering missed out on some of the headlines.

    Let me start therefore, by saying that this Government is as committed to fostering as ever.

    We did not publish Give a Child a Home to promote one service over another.

    We published it to get to grips with improving outcomes for kids in care. Whether it be in fostering; residential homes; special guardianship orders; or – for a small proportion – adoption.

    The Fostering Network’s role in reducing that gap between young people in care – and those living outside of care – has been particularly pronounced over the last year.

    Together, we launched the Foster Carers’ Charter in March. We published the revised regulations, guidance and national minimum standards in April.

    We rolled out the Fostering Changes parenting programme. And we have secured very nearly £2.5m in funding between 2011 and 2013 for multi-dimensional treatment foster care and KEEP, which help foster carers respond positively to the needs of the children in their care and address the treatment needs of foster children – particularly those with more challenging problems.

    But of course we always need to do more, not least at a time of growing numbers of children coming into care.

    And I thought the importance of your work was very effectively underlined at the launch of the report from the Safeguarding Children Research Initiative yesterday.

    Once again, we saw that the majority of vulnerable children who are abused and maltreated at home, go on to do better in terms of their well-being and stability when they are placed in the care of councils.

    For many of these children, this is thanks to the sensitive and expert care provided by their foster carers. In fact, we know that the vast majority of looked after young people – 74 per cent – are living with foster carers.

    But as I say, we understand that there is more to do. In particular, there is the need that the report correctly identifies for more specialist provision – to help children overcome the difficulties they experience.

    So, I can assure you now that next year will be just as busy as the last.

    Amongst other things, we will be rolling out extra support to the most vulnerable children. We will be looking for better ways to support foster carers. And we will be working hard to support both fostering agencies and local authorities.

    Let me take each of those areas in turn. Starting with vulnerable children.

    We know looked after children need three things in place to achieve their potential. First, they must receive good parenting from every person involved in their lives. Not least foster carers.

    Second, they need to be listened to and be given a real voice: a real say in the decisions that affect their future.

    And third, there must be stability in their lives.

    We are now tackling each of these areas and making good progress.

    For example, we are working to improve young people’s health; placement stability; the successful transition to adulthood; and the daily experience of being in care.

    I am also holding quarterly, face-to-face meetings with four groups of young people: those in care, those who have been adopted, children in residential homes and care leavers.

    And I have set up the Tell Tim website where looked after children and foster carers can write in and let me know their concerns direct.

    Finally of course, we are making huge strides to improve standards in education for our most vulnerable children.

    Almost every time I meet young people in care, they tell me they need to enjoy the same opportunities in the classroom as their peers.

    I am clear that this should mean providing extra support at every step of their education journey.

    So, in the early years we are providing a weekly entitlement to 15 hours of free early education to all two year olds in care. Giving them the opportunity to learn, play and gain the necessary skills to do well when they start school.

    We are allocating extra funding to schools to support the most disadvantaged pupils through the Pupil Premium. This will be allocated to all children who have been looked after for more than six months, as well as pupils on free school meals.

    We are ensuring looked after children have an entitlement to the new 16 to 19 bursary, worth £1,200 per year – £400 more than they would have received under the Education Maintenance Allowance.

    And we are funding local authorities to provide a minimum £2,000 higher education bursary to any care leaver starting a course of higher education – up until their 25th birthday.

    Why is this activity so important? It is important because a decent education is absolutely core to giving looked after children a level playing field in opportunities.

    My chief concern however – as minister for safeguarding – is to make sure children reach the school gates in the first place, and are ready to learn when they do.

    We launched Professor Munro’s review of child protection just a month after taking Government. And from the start, we wanted it to be different.

    Unlike other reviews of child protection, it was not commissioned as a knee-jerk response to a crisis.

    We gave Professor Munro all the time she needed to conduct a considered review, consulting the frontline, as well as children and young people.

    We are currently working our way through her recommendations. But I’m pleased to say I have already put in place three key principles for our work:

    First, reducing bureaucracy and prescription.

    Second, being child-centred.

    And third, trusting skilled frontline professionals to use their judgment.

    On this last point, I am unequivocal that the issue of trust is as relevant to fostering as it is to social care.

    Foster carers are consummate professionals and we need to treat them as such. For too long, this simply hasn’t happened.

    In the same Guardian article I mentioned at the start, Helen Clarke from the Fostering Network makes the point that ‘no-one becomes a foster carer for the money.’

    I don’t dispute this. But I am very clear we must support families who open their doors to vulnerable children better than we have done in the past.

    We want this to happen in three ways: First, through trust. Second, by ensuring they are not let down financially. And third, by providing proper training.

    We introduced the new statutory framework and Foster Carers’ Charter to underline the importance of valuing foster carers, trusting them to take everyday decisions about their foster child, and involving them in care planning decisions.

    I have a map on my office wall reminding me exactly which areas have signed up – and which haven’t. In the new year, I will be doing a full audit of sign up to the charter and the Government will be gathering and disseminating good practice.

    I want all fostering services to be able to show that they have used the charter to engage with their foster carers, foster children and other partners on how to improve fostering services in their area.

    The anecdotal evidence I have so far is positive. I know Foster Care Associations around the country have been doing excellent work with local authorities to develop the charter and support local improvements.

    But I’m deeply concerned that foster carers are still telling me the revised fostering guidance is being followed well in some areas, poorly in others.

    My main bugbear is the lack of movement in some communities on the delegation of authority to foster carers.

    I was quite explicit about the importance of effective delegation of authority in my letter to directors of children’s services in August last year. Asking them to ‘give the maximum appropriate flexibility in making decisions relating to children in their care’.

    The Fostering Network has produced an excellent toolkit to help councils improve their practice in this area. And the Foster Carers’ Charter also refers to proper delegation to foster carers.

    I appreciate the difficulties for authorities who have to keep one eye on the legal framework governing parental responsibility.

    But we know proper delegation is vital to foster carers’ providing excellent parenting. And children in care have told me it is vital to giving them the same opportunities as their peers.

    There is no reason why a child should miss out on a school trip. It simply accentuates the feeling of difference between one child and another.

    In my book, this is a simple matter of trust. And I am of the belief that if someone has taken the decision to look after another person’s child, the very least we can do is treat them as adults.

    Quite clearly, this includes Government and that is why we are taking action in three significant areas.

    First, we are calling on councils to end the sclerotic red tape that prevents people stepping forward to become foster carers.

    Personally, I am particularly pleased that my colleague Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister, is issuing guidance shortly to councils, making it crystal clear they should consider how their actions will help people looking to adopt or foster a child.

    Currently there is a Catch-22 situation that is blighting prospective parents’ and carers’ efforts to do either: legislation rightly requires adopted and fostered children to have their own bedroom.

    But currently it is often difficult for prospective foster carers to obtain a larger council house before their application to adopt or foster is approved.

    The new guidance on allocating council homes will break down the barriers between different council departments, and ensure the needs of children will be considered. Along with the needs of those waiting to adopt or foster.

    The second area of Government support is a financial one. And I am delighted that our plans for the Universal Credit recognise the uniquely valuable role they play.

    Like now, we will be disregarding fostering payments when we work out carers’ entitlement to benefits, so families don’t lose out because of their goodwill.

    Single foster carers, or nominated members of a fostering couple, will not be expected to search or be available for work until their youngest foster child reaches 16. And if needed by the foster child, this may be extended to both members of a couple or until the child leaves care.

    Importantly, we also plan to introduce new provisions so that where a carer intends to continue fostering, they will be allowed up to eight weeks between placements before being expected to look for work.

    The third and final area is training.

    We understand that fostering is a 24/7 job that requires great skill. And I am pleased the Government is promoting the use of evidence-based interventions that help carers deal positively with the complex needs of looked after children.

    Among the interventions that we know work best are Multi-dimensional Treatment Foster Care and KEEP. The feedback I have looked at over the last few months from both MTFC and KEEP has been strong. Amongst other quotes, I have seen the following from a foster carer: “KEEP has taught me how to see behind the behaviour and anticipate possible problems.”

    And on MTFC, a quote from West Sussex Council saying: “We feel passionately that the MTFC model could be of much wider value to children”.

    I am very clear that we must continue to support foster carers to do the best possible job. To make them feel valued. And to recognise the life changing role they play.

    The final area I want to look at today, is support to fostering service providers and local authorities.

    I am deeply concerned that there is still a great deal of local variation at the moment in outcomes for looked after children.

    I can name one part of London where only 49 per cent of looked after children were in education, employment or training at 19. Equally, I can show you areas in the capital where 83 per cent are in education, employment and training .

    This is my great frustration. There are some local authorities doing outstanding work on fostering. But we are terrible at spreading best practice in this country.

    I took the decision to publish local authority performance tables to shine a light on this variability. One of the indicators will be on placement moves. And we will be taking tough action to deal with councils who are failing.

    I opened a centre in London four-and-a-half years ago called the Ealing Horizons Centre. It provides fabulous ‘one stop shop’ support to children in care in the borough for things like school, counselling and career advice.

    Some of the results it has achieved for their 400 plus children are quite extraordinary. Particularly in areas like the rates of children going on into higher education ,18 per cent as compared to a national average of six per cent of looked after children.

    If outcomes and stability for vulnerable children are to improve, local authorities need to look at the way they strategically plan and commission services for looked after children.

    And they need to look at best practice and spread it more widely. Can Ealing be replicated in Leeds, Manchester or Birmingham? Or perhaps there are elements that can simply be cherry picked.

    On foster care specifically, I honestly don’t care whether a council uses in-house fostering services, agency services, or a combination of the two – just as long as they use the best services.

    I will say this though, many independent fostering providers I have seen are at the cutting edge of innovation and I can promise you they are worth looking at.

    The Fostering Network and its members are leading this innovation through the work they are doing with KPMG to trial social pedagogy in foster care. We piloted social pedagogy in children’s homes and I am a firm admirer of the child-centred, holistic approach it takes to service delivery.

    My one piece of advice today is that local authorities should not turn a blind eye to this. As strategic commissioners, they need to make sure markets are effectively developed and managed (including both in-house and external placements) to ensure the very best outcomes are achieved.

    At the very least, I want a level playing field between local authorities, and independent fostering agencies.

    There are more than 65,000 looked after children in this country. 48,500 of them are in foster care. If we don’t spread best practice more widely and encourage innovation, the gap in outcomes between the top 10,000 and bottom 10,000 will continue to remain unacceptably large.

    Over the next 18 months, I will do everything in my power to support councils, foster carers and fostering service providers to narrow those gaps. But in return, please do let us know where changes need to be made. And please do work to flatten out the huge gap in outcomes between local areas.

    Let me finish by again stressing this Government’s commitment to foster care. This is a long journey. But we have taken important first steps in the last 18 months. I want those steps to become a sprint in the years ahead. And I want outcomes for looked after children to be transformed in the process.

    Thank you.

  • Nick Clegg – 2012 Speech on Working Families

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    Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Clegg, the then Deputy Prime Minister, at the Institute for Government in London on 26 January 2012.

    Yesterday’s GDP figures remind us that the road to the UK’s economic recovery will be long. And progress will be uneven. Those GDP figures remind us that we cannot simply ride out these troubles, waiting for the good times to roll around again. Nor can we return to business as usual. The financial crash and the recession that followed were unprecedented, and they were global. But the UK’s weakness in the face of those events was a damning indictment of the way our economy had been run. An economy that became closed, elitist, driven by vested interests, where we prized recklessness and short-term gains and undervalued stability and hard work.

    So picking ourselves up for good means fundamental reform. Hitting the reset button to ensure that, not only does prosperity return, but this time it’s properly shared and really lasts. The first part of that is clearly deficit reduction. Filling the black hole; wiping the slate clean; preventing years of higher interest rates and fewer jobs; ensuring that the next generation does not pay for this generation’s mistakes; creating the sound public finances – the macroeconomic stability – that we know is a prerequisite for lasting growth.

    But, beyond that, we must also rebalance our economy: ending our overreliance on financial services and the South East; shifting from consumption to investment; from debt-driven bubbles to sustainable growth. And there is another element of rebalancing – rebalancing our tax and benefits system. Because both need to be rebuilt with work at their heart, restoring some sense to the assistance and rewards the state provides.

    We cannot pin all our hopes on the traders or the bankers. It will be the millions of hardworking Britons who deliver the nation from these difficult times. So we must now make the most of all of our human capital. And we must help struggling families stand on their own two feet. That means a benefits system that gets more people into work and a tax system that ensures work pays. Today I want to say a word on each.

    First, benefits. I have always believed in a welfare system that helps those in need, those who cannot work must be protected and those who have jobs must be confident that, should they lose them there is a safety net in place. That is precisely why, in the Autumn Statement last year. The Coalition committed to the full uprating for pensions and out-of-work benefits from April – 5.2%, in line with inflation. Not everyone agreed that “the unemployed” should receive the full uplift, certainly not in the current climate. And, if you believed everything you read, you would think that these benefits are, essentially, unlimited handouts for the ‘idle poor’. But that just shows what is so often wrong with this debate.

    For one thing, for decades now benefits have been uprated in line with prices, while earnings have generally increased at a faster rate. So the value of benefits such as Jobseekers Allowance have actually shrunk over the years, compared with the incomes of those in work. But, even more importantly, abuse of the benefits system by a minority has obscured the needs of a deserving majority. The older people who have contributed to our society for their whole lives, those who cannot work due to disability or serious illness. And – the group most often forgotten – working people who have been laid off, through no fault of their own and, most often, for short periods of time. Yes, sometimes the system is exploited – and that cannot be accepted. But the majority of people who claim JSA are off benefits within three months, people who pay their taxes, support their families, but are temporarily down on their luck. So we need a benefits system that helps those who can work into work.

    And it is that simple principle that drives the Coalition’s welfare reforms. From the Universal Credit, to the benefits cap, to the Work Programme and the Youth Contract. While the economy was booming we saw four and a half million people stuck on out-of-work benefits, the number of young and unemployed hardly changed.

    There are now 2.6 million people on incapacity benefits, 900,000 of them have been parked there for 10 years or more. And where children grow up in homes where no one works, they are twice as likely to experience long spells of unemployment themselves. It isn’t right; the country can’t afford it, the Coalition is determined to see it change.

    Nearly 70 years ago, when William Beveridge designed the welfare state, he imagined a system that would give people protection from cradle to grave. Not one that would act as a crutch every day in between. The state must offer security in hard times. But it should not, he warned, ‘stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility’. In the words of another great liberal, John Stuart Mill, ‘assistance should be a tonic – not a sedative’. I couldn’t agree more. And it is those same values, that same belief in the potential of ordinary men and women to flourish, that needs to be instilled in our tax system too.

    My philosophy on tax is simple: the system should reward effort, enterprise and innovation and bear down on those things which are bad for our society. That sounds like a proposition with which most people would agree, but attitudes to tax are a good proxy for our deepest political instincts. And the three major political traditions in the UK – conservatism, socialism and liberalism – have very distinct approaches.

    For those on the philosophical right, taxes are necessary. But there is an understandable fear that tax-done-badly can threaten entrepreneurialism and business, strengthening the hand of an intrusive state. That wariness means the right can be less inclined to promote tax as a way of redistributing wealth and opportunity, putting less of an emphasis on using the tax system to tackle inequality, for example, between those who earn their income and those who are asset rich.

    For the traditional left, on the other hand, taxes are the principal means of redistribution. Socialists will support a penal rate of tax on the highest earners simply because it makes them poorer. For them, tax is a badge of socialist success: the more, the better. They would rather draw money in through the state and then hand it back to people, rather than letting them keep more of their earnings in the first place.

    The liberal approach, put most simply, is based on a profound commitment to the value of paid work. Citizens are empowered when they can keep the fruits of their own labour. As Gladstone said, it is better for money to ‘fructify in the pockets’ of the people who earn it, rather than in the Treasury. And fiscal liberalism supports taxes on unearned wealth, precisely to lighten taxes on the wages of the hardworking.

    Those principles could not be more important today. Because, in developed economies around the world, in every country now seeking to get back on the right path. Where money is scarce, where, every day, families are tightening their belts, the biggest question we face is this: how is that burden shared?

    That’s why, this week, we heard President Obama devote his State of the Union Address to greater fairness in the American tax system. It’s why tales of tax avoidance are filling our newspapers everyday. And every politician now has a simple choice: do you support a tax system that rewards the hard-working many? Or do you back taxes that favour the wealthy few?

    I know which side of the line I stand on: the UK’s tax system cannot go on like this. With those at the top claiming the reliefs, enjoying the allowances, hiring other people to find the loopholes, while everyone else pays through the nose.

    So the Coalition is calling time on our unfair and out-of-whack tax system. We’ve put up Capital Gains Tax, ending the scandal of a hedge fund manager paying less on their shares than their cleaner paid on their wages. We’ve reduced tax breaks on pension funds for the very rich. We’ve clamped down on avoidance and taken steps to raise an extra £7bn through closing the tax gap.

    And my priority in Government is freeing the lowest-paid from income tax altogether and cutting income tax for millions of ordinary workers. Over recent weeks you will have heard a great deal about fairness at the top, through Vince Cables’ reforms to curb excessive executive pay. You will have heard a great deal about fairness at the bottom, through reform of our welfare system to ensure benefits are fair and reasonable and to get more claimants into work. This is about fairness in the middle, more money in the pockets of the people who need it.

    Whether you call them the ‘squeezed middle’, ‘hard-working families’, or, as I have, ‘alarm clock Britain’, cutting income tax is one of the most direct tools we have to ease the burden on low and middle earners – the people whose incomes are too high to qualify for welfare benefits but too low to provide any real financial security; the group whose plight the Resolution Foundation has done so much to highlight; the working mum whose bills keep rising but whose wages do not; the father kept awake in the dead of the night, worried tomorrow the company will be laying people off; the young couple who used to look forward to the holiday they would book or the car they would buy but who now know that if the boiler breaks or the washing machine packs up, the money just isn’t there.

    Go back 50 years or so and many more working people were exempt from income tax thanks to a more generous tax-free threshold. But over the last few decades, wage rises have outpaced the increase in the allowance sucking more and more people into the income tax net. And, while in the early 70s, the Personal Allowance was worth around 28% of average earnings, by 2010 that had dropped to around 20%.

    I am extremely proud that the Coalition is on track to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 for ordinary taxpayers over the course of this Parliament. We’ll make sure that anyone earning £10,000 or less will pay no income tax at all and, for those on middle incomes, the first £10,000 they earn will be tax free.

    For millions of basic rate taxpayers – ordinary, hardworking people – that means paying £700 less in income tax each year – around £60 a month. In the 2010 Budget we increased the tax allowance from £6,475 to £7,475. This year we have already announced a planned rise of an additional £630, meaning that a total of 1.1 million more people will no longer pay income tax at all.

    But today I want to make clear that I want the Coalition to go further and faster in delivering the full £10,000. Because, bluntly, the pressure on family finances is reaching boiling point. Compared to those at the top, these families have seen their earnings in decline for a decade and that’s got worse since 2008 with lower real wages and fewer hours at work.

    Ongoing consolidation in the UK public finances has meant necessary increases in taxation, reductions in spending, restrictions on public sector pay, and higher contributions on pensions. Last year brought much higher world inflation – some food prices have doubled, some energy prices have gone up by 50%. And, yes, we are now seeing some moderation in inflation. But, in just three years, real household disposable incomes have fallen by some 5 per cent – one of the biggest squeezes since the 1950s, since the records began.

    These families cannot be made to wait. Household budgets are approaching a state of emergency and the Government needs a rapid response.

    Delivering the £10,000 personal allowance more quickly will need to be fully funded. We cannot just cut taxes by raising borrowing – that is just extra taxation deferred. And it would undermine our success in restoring stability and credibility to the public finances. So we need to find the money – and that will not be easy, of course.

    But to those who say: we cannot afford to do this, I say we cannot afford not to do this. And it is because of the pressure our economy is under that there is now an urgent need to give families more help; an urgent need to rebalance our tax system so it rewards work and encourages ordinary people to drive growth. And that means those who are better off paying their fair share.

    In its recent excellent report ‘Divided We Stand’ the OECD noted how the incomes of the richest 1 per cent have soared away from everyone else over the last 20 years and showed that these people could be making a bigger tax contribution. They also made clear that the right way to do this is not to increase marginal tax rates on work any further. This would simply drive many of the rich away to other countries or encourage them to use tax avoidance mechanisms more aggressively. Instead, they suggest, governments need to look at tackling industrial-scale tax avoidance as well as at the allowances and reliefs which favour those on very high incomes.

    That is how we can raise the average taxes paid by the very rich without any further rise in marginal rates. To that end the Coalition set up the Aaronson Review to look at a General Anti-Avoidance Rule on tax so that the tax industry cannot spend all its time creating ever more contrived schemes undermining the principles and intentions of the system.

    There are a range of other, specific areas where we need to be tough too, not least stamp duty avoidance, particularly on higher end property sales and the transferring of assets and income abroad to avoid UK tax.

    We need to look at what more can be done to “green” the tax system. Not just because we care about the planet we leave our children, although that would be reason enough, but because, when the decision is between taxing pollution or taxing hard-graft, the right impulse is obvious.

    And, there is another big part of the tax system where I believe we need to be much more ambitious: serious, unearned wealth. The eyewateringly lucrative assets so often hoarded at the top. We still live in a society where, for so many people how much you earn can never compete with how much others own. Our tax system entrenches that divide and we need to be bold enough to shift the burden right up to the top.

    I know the Mansion Tax is controversial but who honestly believes it is right that an oligarch pays just double the Council Tax of an average homeowner even if their house is worth one hundred times as much? And who seriously thinks we would kill aspiration through a levy on the 0.1% of the population who own £2 million pound homes? The Mansion Tax is right, it makes sense and I will continue to make the case for it. I’m going to stick to my guns.

    So, to finish as I began: we are living in tough times. And many families are feeling the pinch. We need more of those who can work to be in work, and real rewards and incentives for those who are.

    It is often said that to govern is to choose and, in particular, to choose whose side you are on. That is especially true when there is no money around. My choice is clear: I want to help the hard-pressed and the hardworking. If that means asking more from those at the top – so be it.

    We are committed to eliminating the deficit and eliminate it we will. But I am determined that we do so in a way that is fair, that rebalances our economy that gives the right people their dues.
    People want economic competence, but they want compassion too.

    It is my job to make sure this Government delivers both.

    Thank you.

  • David Cameron – 2012 Speech in Davos

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    Below is the text of the speech made by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, in Davos, Switzerland on 26 January 2012.

    We meet today at a perilous moment for economies right across Europe.

    Growth has stalled. Unemployment is rising. The prospect of Europe getting left behind is all too apparent.

    While China grows at 8%, India at 7% and Africa at 5.5%, the European Commission forecasts the EU will grow by just 0.6 per cent in the whole of 2012 – and even that is assuming the problems in the Eurozone get better not worse.

    Yesterday in Britain we had the official figures for the final quarter of last year – and they were negative.

    Other large economies of Europe are forecast to have a similar outcome.

    In just four years Government debt per EU citizen has risen by 4,500 euros. Foreign direct investment has fallen by around two-thirds.

    And in more than half of EU Member States, a fifth of all young people are now out of work. So this is not a moment to try and pretend there isn’t a problem.

    Nor is it a moment to allow the fear of failure to hold us back. This is a time to show the leadership our people are demanding.

    Tinkering here and there and hoping we’ll drift to a solution simply won’t cut it any more. This is a time for boldness not caution.

    Boldness in what we do nationally – and together as a continent.

    In Britain we’ve had to be bold.

    We were faced with the biggest budget deficit in our peacetime history more than 10 per cent of our GDP.

    We had the most leveraged banks, the most indebted households and the biggest housing boom. To be cautious would have been catastrophic.

    Instead we were bold and decisive. We formed the first Coalition government for 70 years.

    We legislated for a fixed-term, five year, Parliament which has helped to give people the confidence of stability and credibility.

    We put forward an aggressive set of plans to get to our economy back on an even keel. £5.5 billion saved in the first financial year.

    Welfare bills – cut.

    The cost of government – cut.

    Public sector pay – frozen.

    The state pension age – increased.

    Let me give you one example – reform of public sector pensions. This is a difficult issue for any government.

    We want public servants to have good pensions. We’ve ensured that’s the case but at the same time cut the long term cost in half.

    By taking bold decisions to get to grips with the debt, Britain has shown it’s possible to earn credibility and get ahead of the markets.

    Our borrowing costs have fallen to the lowest for a generation.

    We will be equally bold in meeting our key ambition: supporting enterprise and making Britain the best place in the world in which to start or grow a business.

    So we’re pursuing an unashamedly, pro-business agenda.

    Scrapping needless red tape, simplifying planning and reviewing all regulation. Creating the most competitive business tax regime in the developed world. Making bold investments in new infrastructure, including high speed rail.

    And while we may be fiscal conservatives, we are monetary radicals injecting cash into the banking system and introducing credit easing measures to make it easier for small businesses to access finance.

    So my message to you – in this special Olympic year for Britain – is that we are a country that is absolutely committed to enterprise and openness.

    Come to Britain. Invest in Britain.

    Be part of this special year in a truly great country.

    So yes, in Britain we are taking the bold steps necessary to get our economy back on track.

    But my argument today is that the need for bold action at European level is equally great.

    Europe’s lack of competitiveness remains its Achilles Heel.

    For all the talk, the Lisbon Strategy has failed to deliver the structural reforms we need.

    The statistics are staggering. As measured by the World Economic Forum, more than half of EU Member States are now less competitive than they were this time last year while five EU Member States are now less competitive than even sclerotic Iran.

    For every euro invested in venture capital in the EU, five times as much is being invested in the US.

    The single market remains incomplete. And there are still a colossal 4,700 professions across the EU to which access is regulated by government.

    And that’s not all. In spite of the economic challenge, we are still doing things to make life even harder.

    In the name of social protection, the EU has promoted unnecessary measures that impose burdens on businesses and governments, and can destroy jobs.

    The Agency Workers Directive, the Pregnant Workers Directive, the Working Time Directive.

    The list goes on and on. And then there’s the proposal for a Financial Transactions Tax.

    Of course it’s right that the financial sector should pay their share. In the UK we are doing exactly that through our bank levies and stamp duty on shares. And these are options which other countries can adopt.

    But look at the European Commission’s own original analysis.

    That showed a Financial Transactions Tax could reduce the GDP of the EU by 200 billion euros cost nearly 500 thousand jobs and force as much as 90 per cent of some markets away from the EU.

    Even to be considering this at a time when we are struggling to get our economies growing is quite simply madness.

    We can’t go on like this. That is why Britain has been arguing for a pro-business agenda in Europe.

    And this is not just a British agenda. Over the last year we have spearheaded work with 15 other member states across the EU – both in and outside of the Eurozone.

    This weekend Chancellor Merkel joined me in calling for a package of deregulation and liberalisation policies.

    And our ideas now lie at the heart of what the European Commission is promoting too.

    Together we’re pushing for the completion of the single market in services and digital which could alone add €800 billion to EU GDP and leading the drive to exempt micro-businesses from excessive regulation – both new and existing.

    But we need to be bolder still. Here’s the checklist.

    All proposed EU measures tested for their impact on growth. A target to reduce the overall burden of EU regulation.

    And a new proportionality test to prevent needless barriers to trade in services and slash the number of regulated professions in Europe.

    Together with our international partners, we also need to take decisive action to get trade moving.

    Now I’m not going to give you the standard speech on Doha.

    Last year, at this very forum, world leaders called for an all out effort to conclude the Doha round in 2011. We said it was the make or break year. It was. And we have to be frank about it. It didn’t work.

    But let’s not give up on free trade. Let’s step forward with a new and ambitious set of ideas to take trade forwards.

    First, rather than trying to involve everyone at once, let’s get some bi-lateral deals done.

    Let’s get EU Free Trade Agreements with India, Canada and Singapore finalised by the end of the year.

    Completing all the deals now on the table could add 90 billion euros to Europe’s GDP.

    And let’s also look at all the options on the table for agreement between the EU and the US, where a deal could have a bigger impact than all of the other agreements put together.

    Next, let’s be more creative in the way we use the multilateral system.

    Far from turning our back on multilateralism, we need the continued work of the WTO to prevent any collapse back to protectionism to ensure we take account of the interests of the poorest countries and to ensure the WTO framework is fit for 21st century trade.

    And it means going forwards, perhaps with a coalition of the willing so countries who want to, can forge ahead with more ambitious deals of their own, consistent with the WTO framework.

    There are some proposals out there already – like the Trans-Pacific Partnership – but why not also an ambitious deal between Europe and Africa? Or even a Pan-African Free Trade Area?

    This is a bold agenda on trade which can deliver tangible results this year. And I am proposing that we start work on it immediately.

    Of course, the most urgent question of all facing Europe right now is how to deal with Eurozone crisis. And this is where I believe Europe needs to be boldest of all.

    Vital progress has been made. The European Central Bank has provided extensive additional support to Europe’s banks.

    Many Eurozone countries are taking painfully difficult steps to address their deficits and to give up a degree of sovereignty over the governance of their economies in the future.

    And of course there was the agreement to set up the firewall. These are welcome and necessary steps.

    And I don’t under-estimate the leadership and courage that has got us this far. But we need to be honest about the overall situation.

    The crisis is still weighing down on business confidence and investment.

    A year ago bond rates were 5% in Spain, nearly 5% in Italy, and more than 7% in Portugal.

    Today they are still 5% in Spain, up to 6 % in Italy and 14% in Portugal.

    So we still need some urgent short term measures.

    The October agreement needs to be fully implemented. The uncertainty in Greece must be brought to an end. Europe’s banks recapitalised.

    As the IMF has said, the European firewall needs to be big enough to deal with the full scale of the crisis.

    And Chancellor Merkel is absolutely right to insist that Eurozone countries must do everything possible to get to grips with their own debts.

    But we also need to be honest about the long-term consequences of a single currency.

    Now, I’m not one of those people who think that single currencies can never work.

    Look at America. Or the United Kingdom. But there a number of features common to all successful currency unions.

    A central bank that can comprehensively stand behind the currency and financial system.

    The deepest possible economic integration with the flexibility to deal with economic shocks.

    And a system of fiscal transfers and collective debt issuance that can deal with the tensions and imbalances between different countries and regions within the union.

    Currently it’s not that the Eurozone doesn’t have all of these it’s that it doesn’t really have any of these.

    Now clearly if countries are close enough in their economic structure, then tensions are less likely to arise.

    But when imbalances are sustained and some countries do better than others year after year, you can face real problems.

    That’s what the current crisis is demonstrating. Of course private capital flows can hide these problems for a while.

    In the Eurozone that’s what happened. But once markets lose confidence and dry up you are left in an unsustainable position.

    Yes, tough fiscal discipline is essential. But this is a problem of trade deficits not just budget deficits.

    And it means countries with those deficits making painful decisions to raise productivity and drive down costs year after year to regain their competitiveness.

    But that does not happen overnight. And it can have painful economic and even political consequences. Nor is it sufficient.

    You need the support of single currency partners – and as Christine Lagarde has set out, a system of fiscal integration and risk sharing, perhaps through the creation of Euro area bonds to make that support work.

    As Mario Monti has suggested, the flip side of austerity in the deficit countries must be action to put the weight of the surplus countries behind the euro.

    I’m not pretending any of this is easy. These are radical, difficult steps for any country to take.

    Knowing how necessary but also how hard they are is why Britain didn’t join the Eurozone.

    But they are what is needed if the single currency, as currently constituted, is to work.

    Of course some people will say, it’s all very well Britain making these points, but you’re not in the euro and last month you even vetoed adding a new treaty to the EU.

    Let me answer that very directly.

    I understand why the Eurozone members want a treaty inside the EU but if they do, there have to be safeguards for those countries in the EU but who have no intention of joining the single currency.

    I didn’t get those safeguards so the treaty isn’t going ahead inside the EU.

    But let me be clear. To those who think that not signing the treaty means Britain is somehow walking away from Europe let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth.

    Britain is part of the European Union. Not by default but by choice.

    It fundamentally reflects our national interest to be part of the single market on our doorstep and we have no intention of walking away.

    So let me be clear: we want Europe to be a success.

    And all the measures we’ll be proposing for next week’s European Council can help achieve that success.

    But we want Europe to succeed not just as an economic force. But also as a political force: as an association of countries with the political will, the values and the voice to make a difference in the world.

    When that political will is there, we can make a decisive difference.

    Together with President Sarkozy, Britain led the new European sanctions on Iran’s oil exports so the world does not have to confront a nuclear armed Iran or a wider military conflict.

    In Syria, we have taken a lead against Assad’s repressive violence and we will not let up until he steps aside.

    And of course in Libya we secured a UN Resolution and put together a multinational national coalition faster than at any time in history.

    British and French pilots led the way in the early hours when the fate of Benghazi was at stake and together we saw it through, helping the Libyan people overcome tyranny and secure their own future.

    So I’m proud to work with my European partners.

    And I’m proud of what we can achieve. I stood on this platform only a year ago and said that Europe could recover its dynamism.

    I still believe we can. But only if we are bold. Only if we fight for our prosperity. Get to grips with the debt.

    Take bold decisions on deregulation, on opening up the single market, on innovation and trade and address the fundamental issues at the heart of Eurozone crisis.

    All these decisions lie in our own hands.

    They are the test of Europe’s leaders in the months ahead.

    Yes, the stakes are high, incredibly high.

    But there is nothing about the current crisis that we don’t understand.

    The problems we face are man-made and with bold action and real political will we can fix them.

  • Nick Herbert – 2012 Speech on Police Transformation

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    Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Herbert, the then Minister for Policing, Fire and Criminal Justice and Victims, on 26 January 2012.

    Thank you for inviting me to speak once again at a CityForum event.

    A year ago at CityForum, I set out why the challenge of maintaining and improving policing as budgets fall was manageable – provided that we did not treat this as ‘business as usual’. I argued that with transformational change in the way police forces work, savings of over £2 billion a year were possible – exceeding the reductions in police funding. I said that we could make the police service stronger even at it becomes leaner.

    The strategy I set out was threefold: to improve frontline services, spend the minimum on other functions, and from the start think about re-shaping service through long-term change rather than tactical salami-slicing.

    Today I want to to set out the ways in which the service is responding to that challenge: how we, at a national level, are working hard to support the service in delivering that transformation, through an ambitious and long overdue package of reforms that we need a continued and concerted drive to deliver further transformation in policing, focusing not simply on doing the same for less, but working towards improved outcomes, reducing crime and keeping the public safe

    Dealing with the deficit

    The context remains the same. We need to deal with the deficit and that means reducing public spending. I am not going to rehearse the arguments why. But I will observe that there is a cross-party consensus that police spending must be reduced. The only argument is by how much – but even the official opposition accepts that there need to be savings of over £1 billion a year. In any case, police forces will be smaller, with fewer officers and staff.

    In asking police forces to accept their share of the burden, we are driven by a determination to deal with the deficit and maintain market confidence in our economy. We are not taking tough decisions because we want to cut police budgets, but because we believe we have to.

    Pay reform and restraint

    Our aim has been to do everything that we can to support forces to drive out cost. Since pay accounts for the large majority of police spending, the pay bill is a key issue.

    We have always said that pay reform and restraint must form part of the package. We are not, as some have suggested, singling the police out – we are having to make difficult decisions about pay right across the public sector.

    We recognise that police officers carry out difficult and sometimes dangerous work, and that they should be rewarded fairly for what they do. We also believe it is necessary to ensure modern pay and conditions that reflect the demands of policing today.

    Police officers and staff are, understandably, concerned about the proposed changes, but let me say here that we absolutely want to ensure that any changes are fair. That is why we are giving very careful consideration to the recommendations made by the police arbitration tribunal earlier this month.

    Non-pay savings

    Government also has a role in helping forces to reduce their non-pay bill, which still amounts to some £3.5 billion, or around one quarter of total revenue and capital spend. So we have also been focusing on how the police can secure better IT and procurement. I will outline significant changes in these areas later in my speech.

    But the bulk of the work is for forces themselves to do – changing how they operate to become as efficient and effective across the board as the best of their peers, in frontline services, and in the back and middle office services that support them.

    HMIC’s adapting to austerity report last summer showed that forces had begun work on seriously and carefully making or exceeding the required savings. But the report also showed that there was more to do. The budget gap of unidentified savings in each force is closing, but as it does so and changes are implemented, the focus must be on ensuring that levels of public services are maintained.

    The role of government

    So if forces themselves are in the lead in driving the necessary savings, what is the role of government?

    Well, first of all, we need to get the structures right to ensure that policing is organised to meet the challenges. Our agenda across government is to return power to people and communities, driving up standards in the public sector through greater accountability and a focus on outcomes rather than central direction and bureaucratic micromanagement.

    So in November, we will see the election of the first police and crime commissioners. A strong link from the police organisation as a whole to the public is essential if transformational change in policing is to be seen through. And I believe that, far from being parochial or opposed to radical change in how services are delivered, police and crime commissioners will be strongly motivated to drive better value for money because they will want to protect frontline services.

    We also want to see greater focus and accountability in the national bodies that support policing, where possible with ownership being taken by the profession. So this year the National Policing Improvement Agency will give way to a new IT company and a new police professional body. These will each play key, though very different, roles in supporting forces to improve value for money.

    HMIC is becoming more independent, with a sharp focus on value for money as it shines a light on performance, acting in the public interest and telling the truth about what forces are doing – as it did in its crime report yesterday.

    What of the Home Office?

    The days of performance management and Whitehall intervention are gone. But that doesn’t mean that we are standing idly by.

    Last year we had a healthy discussion with service leaders about the role of the centre – by which I mean the Home Office, government more widely, and the national policing bodies – in supporting forces to meet this challenge.

    As a result we put in place a policing value for money unit in the Home Office to work with the service in taking forward a national strategy.

    We agreed that the priorities should be: * First, to help enable forces to put in place better, more cost effective, IT arrangements * Second, on procurement, to use the national buying power of the police service – indeed the whole public sector – to do things cheaper and better * Third, to explore with the service – and enable – changes to how support services are delivered * Fourth, to support forces develop and implement transformational change in their businesses

    Fundamentally, this is about defining a relationship between the national and local levels where the right balance is struck between convergence, interoperability and maximising economies of scale – on the one hand – and enabling local innovation, local decision-making and local flexibility, on the other.

    The paradox of policing policy under the last government was that it interfered far too much in how local policing should be conducted, but didn’t focus on the national issues where a stronger grip or collaboration was required. To use the business expression, we need ‘tight-loose’ leadership – allowing new discretion and freedom for professional and local decision-making, and focusing the role of the centre on the proper issues.

    So, while we are sweeping away central targets, returning discretion to police professionals, and giving newly elected police and crime commissioners the power to set local strategic priorities, we have also introduced new powers under the police reform & social responsibility act to ensure that forces work effectively together.

    Next year the new national crime agency will strengthen the fight against serious and organised crime, and we have introduced, initially in shadow form, a new strategic policing requirement to ensure that forces work together to meet national threats.

    We are working with suppliers and across the police service to ensure that policing is treated as a single client – with the clear benefits of better service at reduced cost.

    And we have put new duties on forces to collaborate – duties which we will back up with mandatory arrangements if we have to.

    National Police Air Service

    Last year at CityForum I pointed out that the proposed national police air service was a good example of collaboration, saving £15 million a year and resulting in a better co-ordinated and more consistently available service.

    Led by chief constable Alex Marshall, the plan has the full support of ACPO and will give all forces access to helicopter support 24 hours a day, 365 days year – in contrast to the current system which sees some force helicopters grounded for days a time while they are being repaired.

    I said that if the police service’s operational leaders had concluded that this was the way forward, I hoped and expected that police authorities would rapidly endorse the proposals.

    Chief officers of all forces in England and Wales have given their support to the proposal, as have the overwhelming majority of police authorities in principle.

    But to get the full benefits, the commitment of the whole of the police service in England and Wales is needed.

    As I said to the CityForum, the time for talking about collaboration, and the era of police fiefdoms, is over.

    I am, in exceptional cases of last resort, prepared to mandate where a small minority of authorities or forces create a barrier to significant savings.

    I am therefore announcing today that I intend to make an order requiring the police service to collaborate in the provision of air support. This order will be made using the new powers brought in by the police reform & social responsibility act. It will require all authorities and forces to collaborate in the provision of air support through a single collaboration agreement for England and Wales.

    Improving police IT

    The national police air service hasn’t been a top-down, directed government project. It’s been led by chief constables with support from the centre. We are helping to secure the end, but we aren’t directing the means.

    The same should apply to police IT.

    It is critical to the success of the service in meeting the spending challenge that we take the right approach.

    Forces need to get better and more seamless services for their officers and staff, for example avoiding time-wasting re-keying of the same data into different systems.

    And police IT should also enable closer and more effective working with other criminal justice agencies. At present, the progression of cases relies too heavily on paper and physical media being passed between agencies, building unnecessary cost, duplication and delay into the system.

    Progress has been made

    Criminal justice agencies have been working in close partnership at a national level to deliver digital working across the CJS by April 2012, and real change is being delivered at pace, but there is more to do.

    Forces have already made substantial savings in IT. We’ve seen police spend fall by some £73 million last year compared with 2009/10, but there are opportunities for further savings to be made.

    We are seeing a deepening of voluntary collaboration on IT – through wide partnerships of forces as exemplified by the athena project, and through bilateral collaboration, for example in South Yorkshire and Humberside.

    But we have to ask ourselves why, despite the grand plans and record levels of spending, police IT has, in the main, remained so stubbornly disjointed, with 2,000 systems across the 43 forces.

    We need a new approach, driven by forces themselves, with greater accountability. The best and quickest approach to improving police IT does not involve us specifying exactly the IT systems all forces should buy. We can take that approach successfully for some IT commodities, but not for complex systems and services, where dealing with the spider web of legacy systems in one fell swoop simply is not feasible.

    This is why the government last year announced the intention to help the police create a new company which would provide forces with support relating to procurement, implementation and contract management for ICT, related business change and outsourcing services.

    While it is not envisaged that the company should direct force IT spend, it would have the capability to assist forces by negotiating better prices for IT services, providing technical knowledge and insight and, over time, reducing the number of procurement specialists and IT professionals employed by forces.

    The objective of the new company would be to enable a more commercial and efficient approach to police IT provision, using economies of scale and market forces to ensure more efficient management of IT expenditure and to save the public money.

    This will be mirrored by a re-calibration of the police service’s information systems improvement strategy, which will remain as an enabler of voluntary collaboration between forces, and which will be owned directly by the service rather than by the IT company.

    Procurement

    By contrast, when it comes to non-IT procurement and the procurement of IT commodities, the service needs to use its buying power together – and government leadership can assist in this.

    The work started by the NPIA in creating national purchasing frameworks has been of vital importance in leveraging better purchasing power by the police service acting collectively.

    Last year, we put in place the first mandatory frameworks, covering some key services – police cars, body armour and a wider range of commodity IT hardware and software. This will ensure that all forces use the specified frameworks and so the full potential for savings in these categories – £27m – can be achieved by 2014/15.

    We will now consult on further regulations to specify frameworks to be used by the service when buying further equipment – vehicle light bars and digital interviewing equipment. The consultation will also cover regulations on frameworks for some services, particularly translation and interpretation – where there is the opportunity to join up with the procurement of these services for the courts – mobile telephony, some consultancy, e-learning and a police procurement hub to support more effective procurement.

    We are already seeing tangible success, with savings of £34m so far, reported through the Collaborative Police Procurement Programme – a total projected to rise to £70m by the end of this financial year. These savings include spending volume reductions as well as price savings and we are on track to see this figure rise to savings of at least £200m per year by 2014/15.

    I also said that we would encourage the service to behave as a single client, and we’ve brought together industry and the service in March last year to reinforce this message and to understand what the service needs in order to be a more intelligent customer. Since then, there has been work with a range of suppliers, gathering management information about activity across the service.

    This has been useful work and as one example, helped us to identify a supplier who holds over 1,500 individual contracts with the 43 forces, and where prices charged are significantly higher than those received in other areas of the public sector. We’ve since worked with this supplier to rationalise the service and pricing across the police service and where possible, give money back to forces.

    Support services

    The fourth area we identified for savings was in support services.

    Forces shouldn’t be constrained by the way things have been done in the past. In seeking better service at reduced cost, they should look across the range of possibilities, including collaboration with other forces or public services, partnering with private sector providers and establishing mutuals, and work out what best fits their local circumstances.

    I made clear last year that, from the government’s point of view, there is no ideological barrier to the engagement of the private sector in delivering improved policing services.

    New thinking and design should not be limited to the back and middle office functions. It should also focus on how frontline services could be reconfigured.

    Greater Manchester police, for example, have carried out a thorough review of their support functions and been able to deliver £62m in year-on-year savings, and importantly, release 348 police officer posts from these roles.

    This review has additionally seen the introduction of significant innovations that have led to improvements in service delivery in areas such as the investigation of fraud and the policing of major events.

    In many areas public services are jointly looking at the public asset base as a way of making significant savings. Savings of around a fifth are possible by public sector partners working across an area and treating all the buildings as if they have a single owner.

    In Worcestershire, for example, the blue light services are coming together in a single centre. Sussex police are leading the partnership approach in East Sussex, chairing the joint management board of partners and identifying significant savings for the whole public sector in the County.

    Business partnering

    The government has been supporting Surrey and West Midlands forces and authorities in a joint programme to explore the value of business partnering. The procurement notice was published on the official journal of the European Union on Tuesday this week which should lead to a contract in Spring next year.

    The areas of service which could be included is wide, including a range of activities in or supporting frontline policing, including dealing with incidents, supporting victims, protecting individuals at risk and providing specialist services.

    This is not about traditional outsourcing, but about building a new strategic relationship between forces and the private sector. By harnessing private sector innovation, specialist skills and economies of scale, forces can transform the way they deliver services and improve outcomes for the public. Every police authority in England and Wales bar one is named on the procurement notice, allowing other forces to join in should they choose to do so.

    And, under their own steam, Lincolnshire are about to sign a £200m contract over ten years with G4S. This contract for support services is available to those other forces named on the procurement notice.

    These are highly significant developments, opening up the possibility of new savings across policing. The published potential value of the Surrey/West Midlands contract is between £300m and £3.5bn. Other forces need not be unnecessary pioneers of support service delivery models. Creating scale and volume within arrangements with the private sector will mean better prices. And that means better value for the taxpayer.

    Protecting the frontline

    Collaboration, shared services, improved IT, collective procurement and business partnering are not ends in themselves. They are the means by which police forces can reconfigure their organisations to drive savings, improve service delivery and protect the frontline.

    The forces making these transformational changes are showing that budget reductions, while challenging, are also a spur to new thinking and innovation.

    And they are disproving the weary claim that reductions in spending will inevitably harm public services.

    The latest official statistics on police numbers are published today. We already know that the police workforce has been reducing from its peak.

    But as HMIC revealed, a third of the police workforce – including some 25,000 police officers, or just under a fifth of the total – were employed in back or middle offices. There is plenty of scope to make savings while protecting the frontline.

    And this is what is happening. HMIC’s most recent data is showing that the proportion of the policing workforce in the frontline is expected to rise significantly over the spending review period.

    But, as I constantly repeat, the strength and quality of frontline policing cannot, and should not, be measured simply in terms of officer numbers.

    What matters is not the total number of officers employed, but how officers are deployed.

    HMIC found that, on average, police forces had more officers visible and available on a Monday morning than on a Friday night.

    The best forces had twice the visibility and availability of those at the bottom of the table.

    So spending isn’t the sole issue. By changing shift patterns, targeting resources better, reducing time-wasting bureaucracy, and using initiatives such as hotspots or problem-oriented policing, forces can not only continue to deliver within reduced budgets – they can continue to cut crime.

    And this isn’t conjecture.

    The latest official crime figures showed no statistical correlation between force strengths and local crime rates. Some forces had larger than average falls in officer numbers and larger than average falls in crime.

    Claims that crime is bound to rise because overall police numbers are falling are simplistic and unfounded.

    The home affairs select committee said last February: ‘We accept that there is no simple relationship between numbers of police officers and levels of crime.’

    The idea that only higher spending and more inputs will deliver better policing is discredited.

    Examples of transformation

    Hampshire, for example, has delivered significant reductions in crime in recent years, whilst also achieving considerable savings – reaching £20m in 2011 alone, while having a public commitment to retain May 2010 levels of local visible policing. Their work in rooting out unnecessary bureaucracy has made much use of mobile data terminals, liberating officers from their desks.

    In Thames Valley, the force’s productivity strategy has reduced business support costs such as HR by amalgamating all the small units into one shared service and encouraging self-service. They have removed a layer of management and worked hard at collaboration with other forces. Together this has meant that in the current financial year, not only have they made over £15m of savings, they have also been able to redeploy 35 officers to frontline roles in neighbourhoods or patrol. And I know they have ambitions to redeploy a further 100 officers to the frontline over the next two years.

    The force and authority work closely together and have applied a considered, thoughtful and evidence-based approach to the development of a new operational policing model, which is designed to prioritise neighbourhood policing.

    The Metropolitan Police’s commitment to single patrolling where possible has meant that, in the past year, they have carried out, on average, more than 350 extra patrols every day across the Capital.

    Kent police have led a comprehensive review of the public’s demand for policing services, with a view to matching staffing levels with that demand and increasing police officer availability at key times.

    They have re-structured the way in which they provide policing services and, together with savings from collaboration with Essex Police, streamlining and rationalising support services and re-aligning some of their specialist policing functions, they have been able to deploy more officers onto uniformed street patrols.

    This has increased police visibility with the public, the headcount of neighbourhood officers and staff has increased by 50 per cent since last November, and public satisfaction levels have increased.

    Leadership and culture in a time of transformation

    The same story is being repeated across the country. Police leaders at all ranks are displaying the ‘can-do’ attitude which marks the service, and is such a credit to it.

    No-one is saying that the challenge is straightforward, or that change is easy.

    We must remember that police staff have been losing their jobs and some officers with more than 30 years’ service have been retired.

    When budgets are tight, hard working officers and staff are being asked to make big changes and sometimes to do more. But whenever I visit a force or talk to officers, I am constantly impressed by their determination to deliver.

    For all the focus on structures and processes, people are at the heart of our public services, and people will effect the successful transformation of policing. And how the service leads its people to work in new ways will be critical to success in the years ahead.

    That is why I believe the new professional body for policing will be so important. It will help to identify and equip the police leaders of the future. But it will also foster the professionalism which will underpin an important cultural change, enabling time-wasting bureaucracy to be replaced by the exercise of discretion and judgment by officers.

    Conclusion

    A year ago, I concluded my speech by saying that I didn’t underestimate the challenge facing forces to deliver savings and a better service through transformational change, but I was absolutely confident that forces could rise to it.

    I believe they can, and they have. The service is well on its way to delivering the savings of over £2 billion which are required. But, equally importantly, it has also begun the process of transformation that will ensure that forces can improve services while lowering cost.

    The government is playing its part with support through pay reform, collective procurement, collaboration and business partnering. We are backing the drive against bureaucracy and leading a new approach to delivering better IT.

    But, in the end, the necessary change will come from forces.

    I commend the chief constables and teams who are showing leadership and rising to this challenge.

    There is more to do and further to go.

    But I am confident that with transformational change, we are beginning to build a modern, flexible and responsive police service, delivering value for money for the taxpayer, and fighting crime.

  • David Cameron – 2016 Press Conference with Enda Kenny

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    Below is the text of the press conference between David Cameron, the Prime Minister, and Enda Kenny, the Irish Taoiseach held in Ireland on 25 January 2016.

    Well, good afternoon everyone. I’m pleased to welcome the Taoiseach Enda Kenny, my good friend, here today. But before I talk about the importance of our bilateral relationship I’d like to take a moment to express my deep sadness on learning of the death of Cecil Parkinson. He was the first big political figure that I ever worked for and got to know. He was a man of huge ability. He was passionate that what he was doing, and the team of ministers that he worked with was about transforming Britain in the 1980s by improving industrial relations, by reforming the trade unions, by making sure the business was in the private sector, by encouraging entrepreneurship. He was passionate about those issues and a very effective minister.

    And he was someone I really enjoyed working with and he taught me a great deal. He was part of a great political generation that did really extraordinary things for our country. He’ll be hugely missed by many on all sides of the political divide and my thoughts are with Cecil’s wife, Ann, and their family at this very sad time.

    Turning to today’s meeting our bilateral relationship with Ireland has never been stronger. We’ve spoken about the good progress we continue to make in reforming the UK’s relationship with the EU to address the concern the British people have about our membership. And we’ve also spoken about the migration crisis, and the importance of using our strong bilateral relationship to work together to address it, including through the Syria Donors Conference that I’ll be hosting here in London next month. And I want to say a word about each of these.

    Firstly, our bilateral relationship. UK–Irish relations have never been stronger or more productive than they are today. This year we’ll reach the halfway mark in our decade of joint cooperation which we first announced together in 2012. Our trade relationship is growing with trade between our countries now worth more than €1 billion every week. Ireland is now our fifth biggest market for goods and our sixth biggest for services. And the strength of the Irish economy, in particular its growth in recent years, underlies why Ireland is such an important partner for the United Kingdom.

    Over 3 million Brits visit Ireland each year. In Northern Ireland, the Executive has now delivered its first budget since the Fresh Start agreement, a result that is in no small part down to the hard work of the parties in Northern Ireland, but of course supported by both the British and Irish governments. The UK government remains fully committed to working alongside the Irish government to build a brighter, more secure future for the people of Northern Ireland. We want to help them to deliver the peaceful and prosperous society that they deserve.

    Now we’ve spoken today about the importance of strengthening the external border of the Common Travel Area, something I consider to be vital. And of course 2016 also marks the centenaries of important events in our shared history. We’ll mark them as we should in a spirit of mutual respect, inclusiveness and friendship.

    On EU reform, as I’ve said before, we need to fix the aspects of our EU membership that cause so much frustration in Britain, so we get a better deal for our country and secure our future, but also a good deal for all in Europe too. Throughout we’re driven by one consideration: what is best for Britain’s economic and national security. In the end, the British people will decide whether we’re stronger and better off with our European neighbours as part of the European Union or on our own. That’s because we made a promise – and we kept it – to deliver an in/out referendum.

    Today we’ve discussed the areas I set out where we need to see reform, on economic governance, on sovereignty, on competitiveness and of course on welfare. The UK and Ireland share a strong desire to make the EU more competitive, and to prioritise free trade agreements with the fastest growing markets across the world. We’re making progress in our negotiations and I’m confident that, with the right political will, we can secure the reforms that will address the concerns of the British people.

    We’ve also discussed the terrible humanitarian situation caused by the Syria crisis and what more we can do as an international community to help. Next month I will bring together world leaders in London to talk about just how we do that. We need to agree concrete action that will give hope to so many: jobs, so people can provide for their families; and education for their children. We need to act now to help refugees in the region as well as enabling them to play a leading role in Syria’s reconstruction in the future. This is not just in the interests of Syria and her neighbours; it’s in the interests of the refugees and Europe too. The more we do to enable people to stay in the region, the less likely we are to see them making the perilous journey to Europe.

    So thank you very much, Enda, for the discussions today. Thank you for your support and help, and I very much look forward to working with you in the months and, I hope, years ahead.

    Enda Kenny

    Thanks David. First of all, I want to say that it’s a privilege to be back here again at Downing Street. I really wanted to come over to talk about the issue of Europe and the referendum with the Prime Minister. I have to say that I do that following on the very positive approach and the encouragement that there was at the European Council meeting in December.

    People are aware that President Tusk will table a paper, probably next week in regards to the four issues that the Prime Minister put on the table. I actually believe that all of these are solvable in a really positive sense because you know our position in Ireland, Europe will be much stronger with Britain as a central and fundamental member.

    So it’s a vital issue for Europe, it’s a vital issue for Britain, but it’s also a critical issue for Ireland. And that’s why earlier today I spoke down at McCann FitzGerald, one of the leading legal firms here in London, to make the important point that British business needs to make this point very positively, that we can be a stronger union, a stronger Britain, a stronger Ireland, by making changes that reform Europe in a way that helps everybody.

    So I want Britain to remain a central member of the European Union because from our – Ireland’s point of view, this is a really critical issue. And I say that in the spirit of real positiveness, because I do believe that the four baskets that were put on the table by you at December are all issues that can be concluded successfully and strongly in the interests of everybody throughout the Union.

    We also discussed the question of the – which David referred to – the 1916 centenary commemorations, and we have a very comprehensive, inclusive, sensitive whole series of things this year. I’ve invited the Prime Minister to come over himself at some time during the course of the year if that’s appropriate, and obviously he will consider that in due course.

    We discussed the Fresh Start in Northern Ireland. We agree now that the issues that were decided upon and agreed upon by the parties of Northern Ireland, that we can give impetus to that ourselves to see that these things will happen.

    So, from that point of view, clearly the question of migration is another one on the table. We discussed that, the implications and the difficulties of the challenge that Europe faces here in dealing with unprecedented numbers coming in.

    So I’m much better informed in respects of Europe, and obviously we’ll meet up again before the European Council meeting so that we give a really positive presentation to this, and in so far as we can help the Prime Minister and Britain here to have our European colleagues understand the importance of this, we will.

    Question

    A question for both of you if I can. Taoiseach, you said that you’re confident that negotiations can be concluded successfully and strongly. Do you think they can be concluded in February, and do you see a need for a hurry on this deal and for the referendum to happen as quickly as possible?

    And Prime Minister, the business community has come out today and expressed concerns and fears about the impact of Brexit on trade. It seems on the inside it’s about fears over trade, on the outside fears over migration. Could this whole Brexit referendum discussion descend into a kind of competitive project fear?

    Enda Kenny

    I’ve made the point on many occasion that, in the teeth of the recession, Ireland was the only country that had to vote on a referendum – by referendum on the Fiscal Stability Treaty, and actually it was the voice of Irish business that really convinced people not to take the risk of putting those jobs at risk.

    So, in the same way, British business here will have the opportunity to speak about the importance and the power of 500 million European Union being reformed to work more effectively in the interests of greater trade, of trade agreements, of the opportunity to cut unemployment, the opportunity to create employment, and so on.

    So whether it be finished on – at the European Council meeting on February, I just can’t say. I haven’t see President Tusk’s paper yet, and obviously the Prime Minter has pointed out himself his view on whether it’s absolutely necessary to do it in February or not. My belief is that, of the four issues that were tabled there, there are some complications clearly with one or two of those, but I think these are issues that can be sorted and that can be agreed. And I would hope, personally, that it might be possible to do it in February but then I can’t speak about all of the other countries around the table. But it’s an issue that needs to be dealt with. It’s a critical issue. We regard it as being very important for the relationship between Ireland and Britain but also between their continuing strength and functioning of the European Union with Britain continuing as a central member.

    Prime Minister

    My whole approach to this issue is one that is very positive. I mean, I think we should be focusing on the positive opportunity for Britain. Imagine the scale of the prize if we can remain a member of the single market with 500 million consumers, a quarter of the global economy, with a seat at the table and a say over the rules, and making sure that we do right by our business for jobs and investment and growth in the UK, combined with action to make sure we deal with the things that frustrate people about the EU.

    So that’s what I’m going to focus on in the run up to try to get this agreement and then, hopefully once we have this agreement, to win the argument about why Britain should stay in a reformed Europe. But we need to get that agreement. It is possible for it to happen in February. As I’ve said, if there’s a good deal on the table, I’ll take that deal, I’ll take it to the British people and explain why it’s the best of both worlds.

    But it’s got to be the right deal. If it’s not there, we’ve got plenty of time. We don’t need a referendum until the end of 2017. But I’m always keen to deal with these issues, and I’ve tried to approach this in a very sensible way throughout the last few months, travelling around Europe, explaining what needs to be done, putting very concrete and sensible proposals on the table, and if all of those get a proper and sensible response, we can do this in February. But if it’s not right, I’d rather get it right than do it in a rush.

    Question

    Could I start by asking the Prime Minister, how much of a help do you think that the Irish government will be to you ahead of next month’s summit?

    And also, to the Taoiseach, what contingency plans, if any, is the Irish government looking at, given that there could be a Brexit and potentially a referendum within the coming months?

    Prime Minister

    Well, let me answer the question first. I mean, Enda and the Irish government have been and I believe will continue to be hugely helpful, because Enda is very respected in the European Council. He’s someone with great experience, with great knowledge about how the organisation works. I think he knows that Europe would be better off if Britain stayed in, because of the contribution that we bring. Obviously the very close trading and economic relationships between Britain and Ireland play a part.

    So in terms of trying to get across why the issues that Britain’s put on the table matter so much, I think that we’ve had very strong support from the Irish government, and I think that has helped to get the message across about why these things need to change, and, as I’ve said, the size of the prize if they do change. So we worked very closely together, and the speech you made at the European Council in December when I made my presentation was extremely powerful, and I think a lot of people were very impressed by what he said.

    Enda Kenny

    Thanks. Obviously we’re focused on the positive end of this, as I’ve said, being a member and continuing to be a member of 500 million people. That’s where we need to be, so our focus is on helping Britain, but helping our colleagues in Europe to understand that everybody can benefit from more effective reforms. Prime Minister Cameron wrote many – a few years ago now, in respect of the single market and the digital market and opening up the trade agreements that we could follow through and cutting out red tape and useless administrative conditions, and that’s where we need to be, with a really effective, streamlined, competent and lean Europe. And I think out of this situation comes a brilliant opportunity to actually prove that the European Union can do what it’s supposed to do, and that it’s become a real powerhouse globally in terms of trade and economics and opportunities and jobs and employment, and all of these, being a world leader in setting down conditions and all of these things. So that’s what we’re focused on.

    To be fair about it, the Department of Finance did commission a report from the Economic, Social and Research Institute, which pointed out the possibilities that might happen were Britain to decide to exit. I don’t contemplate that, to be honest with you, but it did point out the impact on trade and on wages and salaries, and for people it should be really serious and not without a risk. So for us, it’s a critical issue, that’s why we’re here to have the best information from the Prime Minister to, in so far as I can, explain to our European colleagues the importance of all working together here at a time of great uncertainty internationally for a variety of reasons. Here is an opportunity, and the European Union founded on the principles arising out of war from peace and opportunity and all of these things, we can make this happen, and every one of the 28 have got to understand, where there’s a problem in any country, help that country to make it better for everybody.

    Question

    Prime Minister, a British court last week ruled that migrants in Calais are entitled to come to this country if they’ve got a family connection, under human rights laws. Have they got that right?

    And to the Taoiseach, are you concerned that a British vote to leave the European Union could jeopardise the peace process in Northern Ireland?

    Prime Minister

    On the issue of migration and Calais, I think it would be a very bad move to make Calais a magnet for even more people to come by saying there was some sort of direct access from Calais into the UK. That is the wrong approach.

    But factually, it is important to understand that, under the existing Dublin rules, if someone claims asylum in another European country – in France or in Italy or in Germany – and they can prove a direct family connection – a mother, or a father, or a sister, or a brother – then they are able, under the Dublin regulations, to come to Britain, which – I think that’s a different matter, and that’s when we talk about children who might be alone in Europe or elsewhere able to make that claim under the Dublin regulations so they can be reunited with their family. That’s a different matter, and something that is in the Dublin regulations that of course we support.

    Enda Kenny

    In respect of the point you made about the peace process in Northern Ireland: well, the guns are silent, and this has taken a great deal of work from so many people over so many years, and we’ve complimented the politicians who lived up to their responsibility in respect of the Fresh Start, which took ten weeks before Christmas to finalise, but I’m glad that that’s now moving and they’re getting on with implementing the mandate and the responsibility that they have.

    I think it’s important to say that the road out of inequality and the path out of that unfairness is employment and opportunity, and that’s why we have shared trade missions to a number of locations. There’s a great deal of cooperation both in respect of issues of economics and Europe and the agri-sector or trade or whatever else, so these are all shared, which means that the prosperity opportunities for Northern Ireland rise and increase. Chancellor gave the opportunity for the Executive, if they wish, to reduce the level of corporate tax rate in Northern Ireland, to that approaching the Republic. We share that view. Obviously it’s a matter for the Executive to implement in 2018, but that’s going to harmonise the economic opportunity for the island of Ireland.

    We should not put anything like that at risk. And from our perspective, it would create serious difficulties for Northern Ireland were that to happen. So I don’t want to see that happen, and, in so far as we can work, we work on the positive end of this future benefits and potential to come from a strong Britain being part of a strong Europe, and Ireland associated with that, north and south.

    Question

    Taoiseach, over the weekend, you repeatedly refused to rule out doing a deal with Michael Lowry post-selection. Are we going to return to the kind of parish pump deals that Fianna Fáil did with independent TDs if the numbers don’t stack up for Labour and Fine Gael?

    Enda Kenny

    Well, that’s why you want a strong and stable government that has a coherence about it in terms of the progress we have made over the last five years and where we want to be over the next five years. So I would say to people, when they reflect, when the election is actually called and when they start to deal with the issues here, we know where we can be, and obviously our plan is to set out opportunities for further employment, to make work pay, and to keep the recovery moving now, because it’s heading in the right direction. And the first opportunity for people to reflect on that will be when they go to the ballot boxes, and if they want a strong, stable and coherent government, they can vote for the candidates of the Fine Gael party and the Labour party.

    Question

    One follow-up, there, for yourself. Do you have any advice for Mr Kenny on getting a surprise overall majority?

    Prime Minister

    I wouldn’t give advice, but that last answer sounded to me like a long-term economic plan that was working for the people in the Republic. But we work very closely together. The Irish elections are a matter for the Irish electorate. All I know is that we work closely together and we’re looking forward to doing that in the, as I say, months and years to come.

  • Justine Greening – 2012 Speech on HS2

    justinegreening

    Below is the text of the speech made by Justine Greening, the then Secretary of State for Transport, at the Transport Times Conference on 26 January 2012.

    Opening remarks

    Thank you for that kind introduction David… it’s a pleasure to be here today.

    And many thanks to you… and to everybody at Transport Times and the Railway Industry Association… for organising this event.

    I can’t think of too many people or organisations that could have got a conference like this up and running… or brought together an audience as expert and distinguished as this… at such a short notice.

    My congratulations for delivering it on time, presumably on budget.

    Consultation

    The announcement I made a fortnight ago was the culmination of a vast programme of work over the past year.

    The HS2 consultation was one of the largest in the Department for Transport’s history.

    We had five months of intensive engagement. 41 days of roadshow attended by almost 33,000 people. And almost 55,000 consultation responses.

    And systematically going through the evidence and the alternatives, it was clear to me that the argument in favour of HS2 was compelling.

    A modern,fast reliable, railway that will:

    – transform connections between our cities, regions and the Continent

    – truly rebalance our economic geography, with a legacy of jobs, growth and opportunity for generations to come

    – and change the way we travel, just as the first railway did in the 19th century

    But behind the headline statistics, HS2 is also about believing in better.

    Do we believe in just making do. Is that all we have to offer our future generations?

    This government passionately believes they deserve so much more. In the same way that we are not prepared to leave them with a fiscal deficit, neither should we leave them with an infrastructure deficit.

    And the children and students I meet at my local primary and secondary school – what kind of a Britain do we want to create for them? And, how can we make sure our country will be able to match their ambition?

    For too long in this country, we have failed to grasp the nettle on the decisions that will help us achieve our long term aspirations.

    We can’t simply hope for a better, more prosperous future – we will have to build it. We won’t suddenly wake up to a successful Britain, we have to create it.

    If we want to live in a country that can compete and thrive in the global economy, and where our children can realise their full potential, then we have to tackle the problems that are holding us back.

    And that’s what HS2 is all about…

    It’s about understanding that we have a responsibility to make choices today that will improve our economy and people’s quality of life, not just in the next four or five years, but in the next four or five decades.

    Restating the case

    Now there are some people who question the size of our ambitions. Who say that Britain cannot support such a scheme in such austere times.

    Well today I’d like to reassure them that this is the right scheme at the right time.

    But to do that, I think I need to clear up some of the claims about HS2 that I’ve read in recent weeks.

    Some commentators have said we are spending £32 billion building a new line between London and Birmingham.

    Well I have good news for them. £32 billion will buy us a national high speed network, linking London and Birmingham with Leeds, Manchester, South Yorkshire and the East Midlands – and forming the base of what we hope is an even bigger network extending to Scotland in the future.

    Some people have focused purely on HS2’s time savings – claiming the investment is poor value just to shave a few minutes off today’s journeys.

    Well HS2 will certainly reduce journey times. In fact it will slash the trip from Birmingham to Leeds in half, and cut the Manchester to London time from 2hrs 8mins today to just 1hr 8mins.

    These are dramatic time savings that will offer a step change in services.

    Valuable as faster journeys are – and passengers tell us that the time factor is very important to them – more crucial is the substantial capacity boost that HS2 will deliver, reducing the increasingly overwhelming pressure on existing road and rail networks…

    A rail network that will simply end up full in many places. If we don’t take action, people say put more trains on the track, have more carriages on the trains on the track, well that’s what we’ve been doing! There’s no other way we would have lasted on a Victorian railway network otherwise. But common sense tells you that can’t go on forever. And after 110 years we’ve nearly got to the end of forever. On some of our tracks there is simply isn’t going to be any more space.

    … so we need MORE track.

    But high speed rail will provide up to 18 high speed trains per hour, each with up to 1000 seats… more room on the current railway as well… greater reliability; better performance; and more comfortable long distance travel.

    Without investment in new capacity, our main rail arteries will grind to a halt during the 2020s, with disruption, overcrowding, and damage to our economy.

    With demand for long-distance rail doubling over the past 15 years, inter-city trains are already becoming overcrowded, and commuters who may have no practical alternative to train travel are forced to stand on long journeys.

    Unreliable, congested, transport would send out a message to investors that Britain doesn’t really care about its infrastructure… or that we are incapable of delivering major projects.

    For a modern, developed economy, that’s not good enough.

    And to continue to ignore the problem is no more an option that pretending our A-road system would have managed without the motorways.

    Of course, we are doing what we can to modernise our current railway with £18 billion of investment committed in the Spending Review, and pressing ahead with our plans to max out the capacity on the current track.

    But even with that investment, the scope for squeezing out ever-more out of our ageing rail infrastructure is diminishing.

    So it is simply not good enough to criticise schemes like HS2 unless there is a practical alternative.

    And those alternatives that have been proposed have fallen short.

    Upgrading existing major north-south lines would only provide a short term fix, and would consign passengers to years of disruption, delays and misery.

    And high speed offers much better value than a new conventional north-south rail line – delivering £6.2 billion more in benefits for an extra investment of just £1.4 billion.

    So high speed will give an additional return on the investment of more than four to one.

    All the evidence has been considered. And we are clear that the only long term solution to the capacity crunch we face on our railways is high speed rail.

    Some people think the capacity crunch will somehow naturally melt away.

    One commentator claimed that high speed rail would soon be obsolete, because the advance in computers will mean that more people work from home. And rather than speed up, he actually suggested we ought to find ways to slow down.

    Well I don’t share his analysis.

    We’ve seen mobile and Internet connectivity through technology transform in the past 15 years – and people have never travelled by train more.

    And we will not get people back to work and secure economic recovery by putting a brake on progress, and telling passengers they have got to put up with slower journeys.

    We all know that the world is moving ever faster. Technology is always developing. And we have to prepare for a faster future if we want Britain to prosper.

    Who wants slower broadband? Who would choose to have a slow train journey rather than a fast one? And how can businesses hope to compete if they cannot transport goods around the country quickly and efficiently?

    Modern manufacturers and retailers rely on just-in-time distribution to maintain profitability. Slowing down transport would merely act as a further barrier to investment, and as a drain on growth.

    HS2 is about the nuts and bolts of Britain, and making our infrastructure work for us.

    In country after country around the world, high speed rail has proved to be hugely popular with a wide market. Countries that have it invariably build more.

    Today, high speed rail is a success around the world because it has a mass market.

    HS2 will benefit every type of traveller – not just on the new network, but on existing lines too. More space and capacity freed up will help drive competition on the railway, changing the way rail travel is marketed and sold.

    I do though, of course, accept that there is no easy way to build a train line through our country.

    I understand and respect the concerns of people living or working near the line and we have gone to very great lengths to mitigate its impact – including a package of extra alterations announced on January 10th.

    Of the 13 miles through the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, less than 2 miles will be at or above the surface… the rest will be in deep cutting or tunnel.

    These changes will bring significant benefits to communities and the environment; and, in fact, compared to the consultation route there will be a more than 50 per cent increase in tunnel or green tunnel.

    And I welcome the comments of Shaun Spiers, Chief Executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, who said the government had been sensitive to the impact that HS2 would have on communities and the countryside; and that their legitimate concerns about the effects of high speed on the landscape had been heard.

    I will do my level best to work closely with communities as the High Speed project progresses.

    Industry opportunities

    But of course there is another very key benefit of high speed that has not been reflected in much of the coverage over the past two weeks: the opportunities and jobs it will it provide for the rail industry in Britain; the jobs it will create for your companies and organisations.

    For engineering and technology companies; rail operators; suppliers and component manufacturers; for infrastructure specialists; and many, many others.

    All stand to gain as we write a new chapter in the story of rail innovation in Britain.

    It will present this industry with a massive challenge.

    Delivering a major national programme on time and on budget.

    I believe we can meet that challenge and I believe we can develop expertise so British companies can compete successfully for key contracts.

    The government’s National Infrastructure Plan sets out the importance of a predictable and transparent long-term pipeline of infrastructure projects that will help the private sector plan ahead and invest in technology and skills.

    HS2 will form a key element of that long-term pipeline, providing certainty about future contracting opportunities following the completion of Crossrail in 2017.

    To ensure that the UK-based supply chain is in a position to benefit as far as possible from this project, this government will open a dialogue with potential UK-based suppliers to ensure they are well-placed to bid competitively.

    You are already helping us deliver Crossrail, Thameslink, upgrades to major rail hubs like Reading and Birmingham New Street, and a major programme of electrification.

    But I also want to put our best minds to work on high speed rail. To find uniquely British solutions to the challenges we face.

    I want Britain to become a centre of excellence for high speed rail technologies and services, with a world-class R&D capability.

    Sometimes we may collaborate with companies from other countries.

    But from the very start our priority must be to develop the home-grown skills and capabilities that will not only help deliver HS2 – but that can then be used in other markets as high speed rail is increasingly adopted by countries around the world.

    Looking ahead

    Now is the time to reject the short termism of the past, and get our long term future back on track.

    The evidence from around the world is clear: as a fast, sustainable and viable way of long-distance, mass transport, high speed rail has no modern equal.

    It’s the right transport programme for passengers; for freight; and for rebalancing our economy.

    I’ve seen the incredible enthusiasm for HS2 across our great cities. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, these cities know the transformational value high speed rail will have.

    They rightly believe that the future success of their regions and their communities depends on schemes like this – which will create opportunities on their doorstep. I will work hand-in-hand with them to make sure the jobs and the growth that we all hope for, actually happen.

    I know most of us here today are convinced of the case for high speed.

    But there are many who perfectly understandably will want to continue the debate. I welcome the opportunity to set out our case. Because it is strong and compelling.

    But it is also important those who understand the benefits of HS2 continue to make their voices heard, and continue to highlight the transformational impact it will have on our railway and on our economy. Now more than ever our case needs to be made positively, clearly and fully informed by the facts.

    We will prepare for a hybrid bill by the end of 2013, including a detailed Environmental Impact Assessment to provide the necessary powers to construct and operate the line from London to Birmingham.

    This spring we will consult on the draft directions for safeguarding the proposed route from London to the West Midlands, as well as separately consulting on detailed compensation proposals.

    In March HS2 Ltd will advise me on route and station options to Manchester, Leeds and Heathrow, and later in 2012 we will start informal consultation on a preferred route.

    Conclusion

    To conclude, these plans will set in motion the most important transport project in this country since the coming of the motorways.

    I warmly welcome the political consensus on HS2, on the basis that it will help ensure that the planning and construction of this transformational scheme is carried through to completion.

    This is an incredibly exciting time for everyone who cares about Britain’s railway and preserving its critical role supporting our economy.

    But the benefits of HS2 will be felt well beyond the network and the passengers who use it.

    This is a national scheme in the national interest.

    It’s about raising our sights. Future-proofing Britain’s railway so we don’t wake up in 20 years’ time with a gridlocked railway regretting that we hadn’t been bolder today.

    And remembering that Britain can no more turn its back on the positive potential of high-speed rail than it could have opted out of the steam age.

    We will build high speed two. We will make sure our country and our cities are connected for success.

    And we will have in place the railway capacity that our future generations need for their success.

    They need our plans put into action more than any of us here today and this government will not let them down.

  • George Osborne – 2012 Speech to CBI Leaders at Davos

    gosborne

    Below is the text of the speech made by George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the CBI Leaders Meeting at Davos on 27 January 2012.

    It’s good to see such a strong British presence in Davos.

    Someone said to me yesterday that they’d never seen such a sombre mood here.

    That reflects the very difficult economic outlook, as shown in the UK by the negative fourth quarter GDP data earlier this week.

    But my argument today is that policy makers are not powerless in the face of these economic forces.

    Let me explain that with three propositions.

    First, it is possible to resolve the eurozone crisis, and that would provide the biggest possible boost to the British economy.

    Second, we in Britain can deal with our own problems – including the colossal debts and imbalances that built up during the long boom.

    And third, we can win the argument for open markets and free enterprise as not the source of the problem but the solution.

    Let me begin with the eurozone, the main topic of debate here in Davos.

    And let me start by saying something that is not acknowledged enough in our national debate.

    Eurozone countries have achieved a lot over the last eighteen months.

    Pooling their resources into a central fund, giving up sovereignty in a fiscal compact, fiscal consolidation and structural reforms in many countries.

    These are all difficult and courageous decisions, and they are having an impact.

    But while we should acknowledge these achievements, it would be a disservice to our own citizens to pretend that they are enough.

    As David Cameron argued yesterday, more still needs to be done to reach a convincing and lasting solution.

    The evidence for this can be seen in the continuing scepticism of investors around the world, in volatile financial flows, in continued stress in bank funding markets and in the still elevated interest rates on periphery sovereign debt.

    The problem is simple: how will some countries in Southern Europe be able to make the adjustments required of them and retain the competitiveness they have lost in a way that is politically sustainable in a democracy?

    The argument is not that fiscal consolidation and structural reform are the wrong prescription when budget deficits are unsustainable and economies are uncompetitive – they are absolutely crucial.

    But in the absence of the flexible exchange rate and independent monetary policy that are helping to smooth the process of adjustment and rebalancing in the UK, the resulting cost may be simply too high to be credible.

    That’s why I agree with Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, when she said earlier this week that the eurozone “needs some form of fiscal risk-sharing” to complement the fiscal compact and provide more support for countries making painful adjustments.

    That risk sharing could take many forms.

    One solution suggested by the IMF is the creation of Eurobonds to finance at least some proportion of national budgets – something that I first argued last summer was part of the inexorable logic of monetary union.

    Political agreement to the principle of Eurobonds would go a long way to convince financial markets of the euro’s long term future.

    We in the UK should not be anxious about eurozone countries embarking upon deeper fiscal integration without us – we should welcome it as a way of resolving the current crisis on our doorstep.

    Nor should we be paranoid about our influence as a member of the EU.

    In the last week Britain has supported EU action to take sanctions against Iran, and we are very close to agreeing a complex directive on the regulation of derivatives.

    We will remain active members of the EU, pushing for an expansion and deepening of the single market on which so many British jobs depend.

    A large number of EU countries see us as vital allies in than task, which should be the main focus of the EU Council meeting on Monday.

    If fiscal risk sharing is the way to make the euro work in the future, the most urgent requirement to address the current crisis is an increase in the resources of the eurozone’s financial firewall.

    Eurozone countries need to convince financial markets that they can respond to any eventuality.

    The eurozone economy as a whole has sufficient resources to put the credibility of the firewall beyond doubt.

    All that is required is the political agreement to make those resources available on a credible timescale.

    At the same time the global community – through the IMF – should always be ready to support individual countries that get into trouble and need temporary financing while they adjust.

    As I have said many times, the UK is a longstanding supporter of the IMF – indeed we were instrumental in its creation – and we stand ready to play our part in that global effort if certain conditions are met.

    No new vehicles or funds specific to the eurozone.

    Full IMF conditionality.

    The participation of other G20 countries.

    And crucially, IMF resources to support individual countries cannot be a substitute for further credible steps by the eurozone to support their currency.

    In other words, the world needs to see the colour of their money before it contributes any more.

    A resolution of the eurozone crisis would provide the biggest single boost to the British economy in the short term.

    But we will not put our economy back on the path to prosperity unless we confront our domestic problems.

    And the biggest of those is captured by a single word: debt.

    Over the last decade Britain experienced the biggest increase in debt of any major economy.

    The total of household, corporate, financial and public sector debt in the UK reached 500% of GDP.

    As a country we went on a debt-fuelled binge.

    We are now experiencing the reality of deleveraging.

    History tells us that this process is painful, and as Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have shown recoveries after debt-fuelled financial crises tend to be slower than other recoveries.

    We cannot change what happened in the past, but we can ensure that we manage the process of deleveraging as best we can.

    And that means that we must never lose sight of this crucial point – when the underlying problem is debt, deliberately adding to the stock of debt is exactly the wrong thing to do.

    The initial crisis of banking and private sector debt has now evolved into a sovereign debt crisis.

    When this Coalition Government came to power, the UK was forecast to have the largest budget deficit in the G20.

    Since then, the argument we have made, supported by the CBI, about the absolute necessity of a credible deficit reduction plan has been vindicated by events.

    Growth has been weaker than originally expected due largely to a commodity price shock and the eurozone crisis.

    But the arguments for deficit reduction have become stronger, not weaker, over the last year.

    You only have to look around us to see how a loss of fiscal credibility can lead to higher interest rates.

    In an economy as indebted as the UK, that would make recovery all but impossible.

    And once credibility has been lost, it is a long, hard road to get it back.

    We have taken difficult decisions that others have ducked.

    By confronting our country’s problems we have secured the same low interest rates as Germany and the US, and we have won credibility where once it was being lost.

    None of this is easy for elected politicians to achieve.

    So I welcome the continuing support of British business in making this argument.

    We are winning it for now, but we can never afford to let our guard down against the vested interests that will defend every line item of government spending.

    The other aspect of deleveraging that must be carefully managed is the deleveraging of the financial sector.

    More capital and lower leverage is a crucial part of making our financial system safe for the future.

    Again the process can be painful, and pace of change must not be excessive, but the destination cannot be in doubt.

    The Basel III agreement and the Vickers reforms in the UK provide the right framework, and the transition timetable will give banks enough time to make the necessary changes.

    In the meantime, the Government is doing what it can to ensure small businesses aren’t the innocent victims of a squeeze on credit – so we will be passing on the hard-won low interest rates that the Government can borrow at through our £20bn National Loan Guarantee Scheme.

    I am today publishing the Financial Services Bill that will overhaul the failed system of financial regulation which allowed such dangerous levels of leverage to emerge.

    The failings of that system are now well understood.

    The tripartite structure was incoherent, without clear lines of accountability.

    The tripartite committee didn’t meet for almost a decade.

    Everyone was so focused on ticking off a regulatory check-list that nobody felt it was their responsibility to use their judgement.

    The astonishing result was that RBS was allowed to take over ABN Amro when the credit markets had already frozen up.

    And crucially it was unclear who was in charge in a crisis when taxpayers’ money was at stake.

    We are putting in place clear lines of accountability, and restoring that crucial element of judgment.

    One body will be put back in charge of prudential regulation and systemic stability – the Bank of England.

    A new Financial Policy Committee with independent external members will monitor the evolution of leverage and risk in the economy as a whole.

    And when taxpayers’ money is at risk in a crisis this legislation gives the Chancellor the power to direct the Bank of England to act.

    This power will be a more credible tool than the 1946 power of direction, which has always been regarded as a nuclear option and therefore never used.

    For the first time it will allow the Chancellor to direct specific liquidity interventions to assist individual entities, the Special Resolution Regime for banks, and general interventions to preserve stability as long as the Government is willing to take responsibility for the action and take the resulting risk on its balance sheet.

    Independent central banks should not be put under pressure to do what governments do not have the courage to do on their own account.

    There will be no ambiguity about who is in charge.

    During normal times the independent Bank of England will be responsible for prudential regulation and systemic stability, accountable to Parliament.

    But in a crisis, when taxpayers’ money is at risk, both the responsibility and crucially the power to act will rest with the Chancellor of the day.

    I hope that we will never again see the paralysis and confusion that did so much damage when the latest crisis hit.

    Resolving the eurozone crisis.

    Tackling our problems at home.

    These are necessary requirements to get our economy back on its feet.

    But I believe that we need to do much more if the British economy is to fulfill its potential.

    We need to redouble our commitment to open markets and free enterprise.

    Last year at this lunch I said I needed the support of British business against the forces of stagnation.

    I would argue that we are an unabashedly pro-enterprise Government that is doing almost all of what you have asked of us.

    We are reforming employment law, doubling the period before employees can claim unfair dismissal and introducing fees to deter vexatious tribunal claims.

    We are changing the planning system to include a presumption in favour of sustainable development.

    We are cutting corporation tax from 28% to 23% and reforming the controlled foreign companies rules so that multinationals are coming back to Britain instead of leaving it.

    We have introduced one of the most generous tax regimes for investors in new businesses with improvements to the Enterprise Investment Scheme.

    We are unblocking the barriers to infrastructure investment and taking a more activist approach to coordinating the necessary finance.

    We will continue to push forward on all these fronts and many more.

    In each case we will continue to need your support to confront the vested interests that oppose reform.

    But there is one more thing that we need to fight for.

    The unique British advantage – more I would argue than any country in the world – of open markets and free enterprise.

    We still understand the British insight of 150 years ago that when you open your markets you benefit even if others don’t do the same.

    We welcome foreign investment for the jobs and prosperity it brings.

    This is a source of huge strength for the British economy.

    When I was in Asia earlier this month I was hugely encouraged by the enthusiasm I found for Britain.

    We are in the EU single market without being in the euro.

    We are a liberal Anglo-Saxon economy and even more open to trade and investment than the US.

    The recent investment by the China Investment Corporation in Thames Water and the progress we are making in establishing London as an offshore RMB centre are hugely positive signals.

    With your help we must continue to preserve this openness against those who seek to undermine open markets and free enterprise.

    We must ensure that Britain remains connected to future source of growth.

    And continue to send the signal around the world that Britain is open for business.

  • Caroline Spelman – 2012 Speech at Climate Change Risk Assessment Launch

    carolinespelman

    Below is the text of the speech made by Caroline Spelman, the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, at the Climate Change Risk Assessment Launch on 30 January 2012.

    Yesterday the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum began in Davos.

    The theme this year is transformation; and the need for new conceptual models to understand and respond to the great changes we are witnessing.

    Reshaping our global economy is a vital task. Leaders from government, business and civil society must work together to create – and realise – a vision for a strong, green global economy for the 21st century.

    Action on climate change is integral to a robust and resilient economy.

    And the climate change challenge is two-fold.

    We must decouple economic growth from carbon, reducing our own emissions, and lobbying for international cooperation on this most urgent of issues.

    But, because carbon stays in the atmosphere for decades, we are already locked in to some climate change. So we must also prepare our economy for big changes to our weather patterns.

    We are already experiencing an increase in extreme weather events: and the knock-on economic effects.

    – The 2007 floods cost the UK economy billions.

    – The 2010 drought led to the doubling of global wheat prices. Meanwhile floods in Australia sent the price of coal and steel soaring.

    – Last winter’s freeze-up cost London alone £600 million a day.

    – This year, floods in Thailand led to a worldwide shortage of IT and car components.

    The UK leads the world in climate science, and Government will ensure it continues to do so. Defra is protecting its funding of the Met Office Hadley Centre, because we know exactly how vital this work is.

    No amount of science can predict the future. But what it does allow us to do is map the possibilities, assess the risks and take the actions needed, to ensure our future resilience and well-being.

    Thanks to science, we know about rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea levels rise and so on – but so far we haven’t worked out what these changes mean for the economy, for society and for nature.

    The Climate Change Risk Assessment takes this next step.

    This analysis is the first of its kind. Its methods are groundbreaking. Again the UK is leading the way with this risk-based approach. I want to congratulate the consortium led by HR Wallingford on this monumental achievement. I also want to thank Lord Krebs and the Adaptation Sub-Committee, Professor Martin Parry and his international review panel, and Professor Sir John Beddington and his Chief Scientific Advisers across Government, and the many peer reviewers who gave their expert advice along the way.

    Sir John and his Foresight team have been working on a parallel international project that is helping us understand how changing weather patterns across the world will affect us here in the UK. Published last July, their report identifies the key threats, from impacts on trade routes and infrastructure to global diseases and international migration. It provides a useful accompaniment to today’s Risk Assessment.

    Annually we invest £30 to £50 billion on infrastructure: road, rail, energy, and water hardware, much of which will be here for many decades. To get the best return from this investment – to minimise the costs of maintenance, refurbishment, and replacement – we need to factor the need for long-term climate resilience into the decisions we’re making now. We’re particularly grateful to the Royal Academy of Engineering for helping us think through the infrastructure issues.

    The CCRA shows us the range of challenges we face.

    – Threats to infrastructure, and to supply chains.

    – Threats to wildlife. Although some species could benefit, many more would struggle.

    – The risk of flooding is likely to become greater.

    – At the same time water could become scarce.

    – The UK’s farmers could be tackling water scarcity while managing the higher risk of animal diseases, as well as new weeds and pests.

    – Warmer winters may reduce cold-related deaths – but hotter summers would increase health risks.

    – Hotter weather would also increase the risk of wildfires.The report also analyses the opportunities presented by climate change itself, and by the need to adapt. Taking up these opportunities is part of the challenge.

    The Risk Assessment sets out the challenges – but not the solutions. It also doesn’t factor in changes in policy, plans, and behaviour – our ability to adapt.

    This is important to remember. The analysis provides a baseline against which to assess the climate resilience of our plans and actions; so we can judge what more needs to be done.

    Work to build climate change resilience is happening across government. My department’s activities include our Natural Environment White Paper and our National Ecosystems Assessment, both published last summer, which look at how climate change will affect species, habitats and eco-systems.

    Our Water White Paper, published in December, sets out our vision for a climate-resilient water industry, for secure water supplies and healthy lakes and rivers throughout the century.

    As the department for food and agriculture we are working to help farmers adapt to climate change. We have also published guidelines on forests and climate change. And we are lobbying internationally for climate change agriculture to be part of the climate change treaty.

    This work is not for government alone. All sectors will be affected. All sectors need to act.

    The Risk Assessment is the start of a conversation: a nationwide, sector-wide conversation about ensuring our climate resilience, our economic stability and our health and well-being, in the short and the long term.

    This conversation is vital to the co-creation of the National Adaptation Programme for 2013. I want you be part of it. Please visit our National Adaptation Programme web pages to collaborate in this crucial work.

    Because, with cross-sector engagement, with foresight, with planning, and with commitment, we can mitigate climate threats, as well as taking advantage of the opportunities – and ensure that our economy is resilient.

    It’s inspiring to see what is already happening.

    Climate resilient infrastructure is vital. We are keeping abreast of what infrastructure companies are doing, through the reports they are providing under the Adaptation Reporting Power.

    But it’s not just about infrastructure. All businesses, from local retailers to big corporations, need to be climate resilient.

    The Climate Resilience Toolkit we have developed with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants is an excellent tool for quickly and simply assessing how your business could be affected by climate change. We’re now working with the Environment Agency to create further ways of helping businesses, local authorities and other organisations adapt in practical ways.

    Businesses should seize the opportunities: how to provide climate resilience to their customers, and how climate change might spark the need for new products and services.

    Forward-thinking companies are already coming up with the solutions both innovative and simple, from Swiss Re’s weather hedge for drought-prone areas in India, to Hallmark Blinds’ design for a window cover that deflects heat while letting the light in.

    Different areas in the UK face different risks. So most adaptation actions need to happen locally. Local government has a vital role to play.

    Many local authorities are meeting this challenge, in partnership with public and private sector organisations.

    Big cities are especially vulnerable to heat waves. The City of London has mapped places across the metropolis where residents and workers could escape the heat.

    In east London, Barking and Dagenham council have reduced flood risk by creating a wetland – at the same time providing habitats for people to enjoy and wildlife to thrive.

    Dorset County Council has worked with the Met Office to assess climate change impacts on the county’s roads and pathways over the next 40 years. The council will now use the assessment to make sure the county’s highways are resilient.

    There are many other initiatives; and we need to spread best practice, helping more local adaptation action.

    The most deprived and vulnerable individuals and communities face the highest risks of hardship from climate change.

    We are currently working with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations to help charities and voluntary groups understand how climate change could affect the people they work with. We also have strong links with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which is researching the social justice implications of climate change.

    Wildlife conservation organisations are working on how to help species adapt to climate change, through land management and conservation work. The National Trust’s work to manage rising sea levels and other climate impacts on its properties is another example of civil society’s role.

    It was Benjamin Franklin who said nothing in this world is certain, but death and taxes. We are used to dealing with uncertainty: and we’re good at it. We are constantly making risk-based decisions, from how we invest money to whether to carry an umbrella.

    The more information we have, the easier and the better our decisions are.

    We are a Government that understands the vital role of science. Science that gives a clear picture of the evidence where it exists, and science that describes the extent of the uncertainty where it doesn’t. This is why we protected the science budget in the spending review, and why we made more science investments in the autumn statement.

    Today’s document is part of that science, and part of that mission. Please use the science, and work with us, to ensure prosperity and well-being, for ourselves and for future generations.

  • Francis Maude – 2012 Speech to the World Bank

    Francis Maude
    Francis Maude

    Below is the text of the speech made by Francis Maude, the then Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, at the World Bank on 30 January 2012.

    Introduction

    Transparency is tricky.

    Governments across the world have long been very reluctant to do it – perhaps with the conviction it was washing dirty linen in public.

    It’s a law of nature that Oppositions are very much in favour of open, transparent governments. And once in office this carries on for at least the first 12 months when new governments are all for exposing their predecessors’ failings.

    After that enthusiasm drains.

    Governments of every time and place have always collected and hoarded vast quantities of information about their land and their people – from weather patterns to the marriage certificates.

    After he had conquered England in 1066, William the First sent men all over the country to find out how much each landholder had in land and livestock and what it was worth. The ‘Domesday Book’ – as this survey became known – was designed to find out what taxes were owed and where money could be raised.

    Information, as they say, is power. Which rulers have never been very keen on sharing with the ruled – even in the most Liberal democracies.

    But in the last twenty years something momentous has occurred; the world has opened up. Today citizens across the globe are demanding their data. And they are getting it.

    For the first time the technology exists to make the demand for greater openness uncontainable, irresistible.

    And in the UK transparency and open government is a defining passion for our government.

    We believe that opening up will expose what is inadequate and drive improvement. We believe opening up will give people choices over public services that they’ve never had before.

    And we believe opening up will drive economic and social growth by putting vast tracts of valuable raw data in the public domain.

    Open Government Partnership

    We are at the beginning of global movement towards transparency. And it’s forcing governments out of their comfort zone. By enabling citizens to hold them to account on a day to day basis not just at election time.

    There is nothing soft or fluffy or cosy about transparency.

    I was in New York last September when the Open Government Partnership was launched by Presidents Obama and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil.

    History may come to see this as a turning point. We now have over 50 members signed up to making a reality of transparency and participation for their citizens.

    And we are seeing transformational examples of what open government can achieve.

    In Mongolia they now publish all their mining contracts that were previously siphoned into the offshore bank accounts of a mafia clique. The result has been increasing investment in education and health.

    Latvia is one of many countries developing new modes of citizen engagement by encouraging citizens to participate online in drafting new legislation.

    Transparency can also transform the effectiveness of overseas aid. In Britain we want our development budget, which has been expanded to meet the UN target of 0.7% to be spent to maximum effect.

    So we have brought the principles of the Open Government Partnership into our aid programme to ensure when deciding whether governments will receive UK budget support, progress against Open Government Partnership will be an important factor.

    Exposing data to the harsh sunlight of transparency isn’t easy. Herbert Agar the American writer once wrote that “the truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which other men prefer not to hear”.

    In Liberia the struggle to publish government contracts with the forestry industry prompted mafia reprisals.

    In some parts of India where internet access is not available officials paint spreadsheets of welfare payments on village walls so local people can judge if the claimants are real or fraudulent.

    Brazil now requires officials to post expenses within 24 hours to reduce corruption and improving public confidence in government. And as a result President Dilma dismissed six ministers in 2011 linked to corruption scandals.

    Governments are finding transparency risky, difficult and uncomfortable. But transparency sticks – it’s irreversible once you start. And I believe transparency will become the defining characteristic of future public policy.

    Transparency in the UK

    The UK takes over the co-chairmanship of the OGP this April and this is an exciting moment for us. I believe we have a lot to offer. And that we can export transparency best practice to all corners of the globe.

    The theme of our leadership will be transparency driving prosperity and combating poverty.

    On one side of the transparency coin there is holding government to account; exposing waste, rooting out corruption and driving efficiency.

    On the other side there is putting out raw data in the public domain for entrepreneurs and businesses to work with. Creating an information marketplace. And this is where I believe the UK is leading the way today.

    Data sharing is underpinning everything we do to improve public services and to drive new waves of growth.

    Firstly by making public sector data increasingly available we are giving citizens choices over services that simply haven’t existed before. Indeed how can you make a choice when you don’t know what the options are?

    A few years ago the heart surgeon Sir Bruce Keogh made history when he persuaded his colleagues to publish comparable data on their individual clinical outcomes – a global first.

    Seven years later dramatic improvements in survival rates are reported – with more than a third of patients living when they might have previously expected to have died in some procedures.

    This bold act of professional transparency simply transformed the results of heart surgery in this country.

    Secondly we are giving a new generation of innovative data entrepreneurs an opportunity to exploit large tracts of valuable data that governments would previously have left under-analysed and under-used.

    And the potential prize here is considerable. A recent report estimated the current total direct and indirect economic value of public sector information at €140 billion per year for the EU27 (Vickery/ EU Commission, 2011). This suggests that similar information in the UK is already worth in the region of £16 billion a year.

    Our open data commitments cover health, education, transport, criminal justice – as well as central government spending. We’ve already publicised 7,800 data sets on data.gov.uk – the largest resource of its kind in the world.

    Last autumn we made world-leading commitments to open up more public sector data that will make travel easier and healthcare better, and create significant growth for industry and jobs in the UK.

    At the heart of what we are doing is building is a two way data relationship between the state and individuals.

    We are releasing public data – where the state is a source of information to citizens. This is generally large routine datasets from real-time transport data to routine hospital activity data.

    And releasing this has the twin effect of driving more efficient public services and boosting the new mass market for smart consumer technology.

    For example there are parts of the UK where the National Health Service has published data on local medical practices – this is stimulating discussion and enhancing choice for thousands of patients.

    Companies large and small are also using the data to create innovative, products and applications.

    Already we’re aware of 47 independent app developers working in the UK giving information to rail passengers through their smartphones – in a market that has for the most part open up in only a few major cities.

    London commuters can now use their phone apps to decide whether to rush for the train or get a cup of coffee thanks to greater transport data.

    To give another example a small UK-based firm started using live data from local councils to help drivers identify free car parking spaces. The firm called Parkopedia have grown to become the world’s leading source of parking information covering more than 20 million spaces in 25 countries.

    The second part of the data relationship is user data – we are releasing information that enables the citizen to be a source of information for the state.

    For example we are set to improve medical knowledge and practice with world-first linked-data services which will enable healthcare impacts to be tracked across the entire Health Service and improve medical practice.

    And we believe this service will put the UK in a prime position for research investment

    There is also a third core public data asset being release – ‘My data’, personal information that will empower each individual.

    Our ambition is to transform high tech consumer information markets through provision of online citizen access to personal data including medical records online.

    In short, open data is not just a grand sounding theory that is, in practise, academic. It is making a difference in all kinds of ways – from saving lives, to improving public services to simply making life more convenient.

    Of course there are challenges. As we open data up we are finding some of it has been in the dark so long it’s not fit the light of day. But again exposing these inadequacies is stimulating improvement.

    Our priority is to design a safe, high quality culture of data sharing which poses no risk to individual confidentiality.

    We are keen to share what we consider to be the building blocks of transparency and open government with the world. I believe a lot of what the UK is doing is exportable.

    And I hope to hear from you about how we might work with the World Bank to take this to other nations and offer our support.

    The Future

    These are the first formative years of this new age of open data. And there are risks and challenges ahead. But the prize is effective personalised 21st century democracy.

    Transparency will create empowered citizens that can expose corruption, get the best value out of their governments and have equal access to valuable raw data.

    So what are our ambitions going forward?

    We need a much better international source book that supports Open Government Partnership members engaging with transparency.

    We should be importing and exporting our transparency techniques, our open data challenges and the lessons we have learnt from our mistakes.

    And finally we are moving from open government to an open society.

    There is increasing pressure on businesses and voluntary groups and charities to be open and transparent. At home we are currently debating whether businesses should publish executive pay.

    But businesses and other organisations have much to gain from releasing their data. Many are already finding that outsourcing data to academics and developers for free will gain them cutting edge techniques and new perspectives.

    I am sure this is true of the World Bank where I know you have made your data and knowledge available to the world online.

    The age of data silo is passing. As McKinsey in their big data study made clear, there is a big advantage to integrating a range of data sources and gaining new knowledge you might not have expected.

    One of the co-directors of London’s new Open Data Institute for supporting businesses to use public data is Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

    Sir Tim has pointed out that: “One of the reasons the Web worked was because people re-used each other’s content in ways never imagined by those who created it. The same will be true of open data.”

    In the future as we face challenges including climate change, energy use, security, aging populations and migration we need our critical infrastructure and services to be more aware, more interactive and more efficient. Open data will be crucial in making this happen.

    And I have no doubt as we become increasingly data rich we will all look back and wonder how we ever tolerated such collective ignorance in the past. There is no turning back on transparency – the future is open.

  • Theresa May – 2012 Speech on Police Reform

    theresamay

    Below is the text of the speech made by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, on 30 January 2012.

    The police do one of the most important jobs in this country.

    They do their work with great courage, great skill and great commitment.

    In fact, I believe Britain has the finest police officers in the world.

    But we can help them do their job even more effectively.

    Today I want to talk about the government’s radical programme of police reform, about how those reforms are starting to take shape, how the police are already responding and about how they will leave us with a police force that is answerable to the public and transformed in its ability to fight crime.

    When people talk about public service reform it’s often through the prism of cuts. With the deficit we have, that’s understandable, but it’s just not what our police reforms are about.

    Of course, the need to make savings makes reform more urgent than ever. But the aim of our police reforms is not just to save money, it’s to equip the police to face the future and make them more effective at fighting crime.

    The Winsor Report

    Last year, I said at another reform event that we would need to take difficult decisions to save police jobs and fight crime. We would need to reform police pay and conditions, not just to make savings, but also to reinvest some of those savings in the frontline, and reward skills, performance and crime-fighting.

    When the police spend around £11 billion per year on pay – three quarters of total police spending – we have to get it right. That’s why I commissioned Tom Winsor to carry out a full independent review of police pay and conditions.

    The existing police pay system was designed over 30 years ago. Since then, the way the police work has changed a great deal. But the way they are paid has not. In the late 1970s, for example, the vast majority of officers regularly worked unsocial hours. Now only around 60 per cent do.

    Since the 1970s, pay systems in the private and the wider public sector have changed to recognise and reward specialist skills. The most productive employees are paid more. Incentives are used to improve performance.

    But in the police that doesn’t happen enough. Skills, performance and successful crime fighting aren’t rewarded. Time served still determines how well most police officers are paid. And I don’t think that’s right.

    So I asked Tom Winsor to design a system that is fair to the taxpayer and fair to police officers and staff. I asked him to help maximise deployment to frontline roles. And I asked him to allow chief constables to deploy modern management practices that give them the flexibility they need to cut crime.

    After a thorough and considered review, Winsor provided us with the outline of what a modern police pay structure could look like. He produced a package that is fair to the police and that is fair to the taxpaying public. A package that can produce savings and improve incentives, that recognises and rewards specialist skills and frontline service, not just time served.

    The Winsor Report has been considered by the independent police arbitration tribunal, and I can announce today that I am accepting all of the tribunal’s recommendations in full.

    I know that some police officers will be disappointed by this outcome. But I want to stress that there will be no reduction in basic pay. Extra payments will be targeted at frontline staff and those doing the most demanding work. And the total savings will represent less than two per cent of the total police pay bill. Policing will remain a well-paid job.

    And the fact remains that if we hadn’t taken this tough decision, we would have had to cut police budgets more deeply and there would have had to be more police job cuts. That is something that neither the police nor the public wants.

    Once the PAT’s recommendations have been fully implemented they will save around £150 million per year.

    Already police forces like Surrey and Cambridgeshire have begun recruiting again. ACPO believe more will start in the next financial year.

    The Second Winsor Report

    In response to the first Winsor report, there were a few areas on which the police arbitration tribunal explicitly made no decision.

    The most important was Winsor’s proposed expertise and professional accreditation allowance.

    This payment was intended to link the pay that officers receive to the skills they have acquired and use. The link between pay and skills is a vitally important principle. In every walk of life, people are paid according to their skills. The same should be true for the police. That is why this principle will be considered again when we look at the second part of Tom Winsor’s review.

    This second report will look into police pay and conditions in the longer-term, including basic pay, career length and pension age and the pay negotiating machinery. In particular, it will consider the introduction of direct entry into the police. I have been clear that I want to see a widening of the pool of talent from which police leaders are drawn.

    So I look forward to Tom Winsor’s Part 2 recommendations.

    Helping the Police to Make Savings

    We’re leaving no stone unturned in our work to make the police more efficient.

    Police forces spend over £1 billion per year on information and communications technology. There are 5000 police ICT staff, working on 2000 separate systems, across 100 different data centres. The scope for savings is clear.

    That’s why last year I announced the creation of a police information and communications technology company to help police forces improve their systems and save money.

    ICT is crucial to policing, but the company will allow IT professionals to do the IT and the crime fighters to do the crime fighting. And by harnessing the combined purchasing power of police forces, the company will be able to drive down costs, drive up value and save the public money.

    We’re also helping police forces to come together and use their collective buying power to procure goods and services from uniforms to patrol cars. It makes no sense for the police to buy things in 43 different ways, but this is what happens. One supplier has over 1,500 individual contracts with the 43 forces. No wonder prices are so high.

    By putting in place framework contracts for standard things like body armour we can cut out this needless waste.

    Our police procurement programme has already realised savings of £34 million – a total projected to rise to around £70 million by the end of this financial year and to approximately £200 million per year by the end of the spending review period.

    Most forces recognise the huge financial benefits that this standardised and collective purchasing can bring. But in exceptional cases, where a small minority are creating a barrier to the rest making savings, then we’re prepared to mandate joint action. That’s why Nick Herbert, the policing minister, announced last week that we intend to require all forces to collaborate in the creation of the national police air service.

    This will ultimately save £15 million per year and result in a better co-ordinated and more consistently available air service for forces across the country.

    These are all savings that are being made because of action we’re taking, from the home office, to help the police.

    But police forces are also doing a great deal to help themselves to rise to the challenge – and I want to praise them for the way they have responded to both the need to reform and the need to save money.

    Greater Manchester police have saved £62 million per year from their support functions and have released 348 police officers from these roles so they can get back to frontline roles.

    Surrey Police have carried out a significant restructuring which has allowed them to commit to increasing constable numbers by up to 200 over the next four years.

    In my own constituency force, Thames Valley, they have slashed support costs, such as HR, saving over £15 million this year and allowing them to redeploy 35 officers to frontline roles in neighbourhoods or on patrol. And they have ambitions to redeploy a further 100 officers to the frontline over the next two years.

    Reducing Bureaucracy

    But good policing is not just about numbers and our police reforms are about more than just money. We are also freeing the police to get on with fighting crime.

    Police officers join the force because they want to catch criminals and keep their communities safe. And yet for too long those officers have been hamstrung by red tape and form filling. Well we’re changing all that.

    That’s why I’ve announced a package of measures that will cut police bureaucracy and save up to 3.3 million police hours per year. That’s the equivalent of putting over 1,500 police officers back on the streets.

    I know that senior officers and chief constables don’t want their officers stuck in the station – they want them on the frontline.

    And the evidence is already mounting that they’re succeeding in protecting that frontline.

    Last week’s figures show we will have a smaller police workforce overall. But Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary have found that police forces across England and Wales were planning to increase the proportion of police officers working on the frontline from 68% in 2010 to 70% by March of this year and with that trend predicted to continue.

    I want to see that proportion continue to go up because it’s what’s effective in fighting crime and it’s what the public want.

    So our reforms are protecting thousands of police officer jobs, saving millions of police man hours, and making the police more visible and available to the public than ever before.

    Empowering the Public

    Empowering the public is the theme than runs through our whole police reform programme. The police are a public service: they should serve and respond to local people. That is why we are introducing directly elected police and crime commissioners.

    From November this year, they will bring democratic accountability to the police. They will have the local knowledge and understanding to set their force’s policing priorities. They will have the democratic mandate to set the police budget and the council tax precept. And they will have the power to hold chief constables to account for the performance of their force.

    Earlier this month, the mayor of London became the police and crime commissioner for the metropolitan police force area. This important milestone means that London can now benefit from direct local accountability over its police force, with the elected mayor, not the metropolitan police authority, setting policing priorities for London.

    But police and crime commissioners are only one way in which we are strengthening the link between the police and the public.

    Earlier this month we launched a single non-emergency number to contact the police – 101 – to replace the various 0845 numbers used by forces around the country.

    101 gives an easy-to-remember number for the public to use when they need to contact the police when it’s not an emergency, for example to report a crime that has already happened, to get advice or to raise local policing issues.

    And there have already been nearly 3 million calls to the 101 number.

    If people want to speak to the police in person, rather than over the phone, we’ve made that much easier too, by mandating the police to hold neighbourhood beat meetings.

    And as well as making it easier to contact the police, we’re also giving the public more information than ever before about crime and policing in their area through street-level crime maps.

    Last year, our crime mapping website – police.uk – received more hits than any other government website.

    Since October the public have been able to use the police.uk website to see how their force performs in a range of areas like crime rates, quality of service and victim satisfaction.

    Tomorrow we’ll launch the next stage of crime mapping, in which we’ll start to map crimes to or near a range of public places like railway stations, nightclubs, parks and shopping areas.

    By May, crime maps will show the public what happens after a crime has occurred – what action the police took and what the criminal justice outcome was. You’ll be able to see if the criminal was arrested, charged and sent to prison.

    Armed with the information from those crime maps, people can attend their local neighbourhood beat meeting and hold their local police to account for their performance.

    That will help drive up local policing standards and help drive down local crime.

    Local crime includes, of course, anti-social behaviour.

    But we know in the past the authorities have not always heard cries for help from vulnerable victims.

    So we have been working with eight police forces and their local partners to test new ways of handling calls from the public about anti-social behaviour. The aim was to quickly identify the vulnerable and those who reported incidents repeatedly, and to prioritise their cases.

    The eight forces have reported encouraging initial results from the trials – including better working relationships with other agencies, an improved service to the victim and the start of a shift in culture, with call handlers responding to the needs of the victim, rather than just ticking boxes.

    Most importantly, forces have been able to identify high-risk individuals – often people experiencing the most horrendous abuse – who might otherwise have slipped through the net. And they have taken action to make that abuse stop.

    So we will now work with police forces nationwide to share the lessons of the trials so that every community can benefit.

    It’s too easy to overlook the harm that persistent anti-social behaviour causes. Many police forces, councils and housing providers are working hard, but I still hear horror stories of victims reporting the same problem over and over again, and getting no response.

    Just last week I met a woman who had been telling the police about anti-social behaviour in her area for over two years – and it’s still going on.

    These long-running problems – and the sense of helplessness that goes with them – can destroy a victim’s quality of life and shatter a community’s trust in the police.

    That’s why we proposed a ‘community trigger’ as part of our reforms to anti-social behaviour laws. The trigger will give victims and communities the right to demand that agencies who had ignored a problem must take action.

    So we are now working with a number of local authorities to test the community trigger on the ground and pilots will begin by the summer.

    NCA

    But I don’t just want crime to be better tackled locally. I also want us to get a much better grip on crime nationally.

    The growth of international travel and the revolution in communications technology, that has benefited us all, has also been exploited by criminals.

    Their networks and activities have changed and evolved, but our response has not kept pace. Law enforcement officers currently believe organised crime costs the UK between £20 and £40 billion per year and involves over 39,000 individuals, operating as part of over 7,000 gangs – though the true numbers may be even higher.

    The drug dealing on street corners; the muggings by addicts; the gang violence that is used to protect a drugs market. All these crimes happening in local communities are fundamentally driven by organised crime.

    And as well as growing, the threat from organised crime is also changing.

    Increasingly, the biggest criminal losses do not come from the burglar who breaks into houses to steal TVs or DVD players, but from the cyber criminal who raids bank accounts directly.

    A child can now be at greater risk sat in their bedroom on their computer than they are outside the school gates.

    And given the nature of the criminal threat, it is now no longer possible to keep communities safe through good local policing alone. Highly visible neighbourhood policing is vital, but it won’t deal with cyber crime. Arresting drug dealers is important, but it won’t stop the flow of drugs from overseas.

    That’s why we need a powerful new crime fighting force that works across different police forces and agencies, defending our borders, coordinating action on economic crime, protecting children and vulnerable people, and active in cyber space.

    That body will be the national crime agency

    With Keith Bristow – who is here today – at its head, the NCA will have the remit to work across geographical and organisational boundaries.

    I see the NCA as having three important characteristics:

    It must have a positive effect on the safety of local communities by joining up the law enforcement response from the local to the national and the international. People will be safer and feel safer.
    It must act as the controlling hand, by owning the coordinated intelligence picture; working with law enforcement to decide on the highest priority criminal targets; agreeing the action necessary to tackle them; and having the power to ensure that action is taken.
    It must bring its own contribution to the fight against serious, organised and complex crime – that means having its own intelligence gathering and investigative capacity; sophisticated technical skills; and a presence internationally, at the border and in cyber space.

    So the NCA will make all neighbourhoods safer, it will be at the heart of a joined up law enforcement response, and it will lead the fight against the most dangerous criminals and their gangs.

    That is how the NCA will help cut crime and help lock up serious criminals – and that is a real prize.

    Becoming fully operational from 2013, the benefits of the NCA are already being felt. The economic crime coordination board, which brings together agencies to build the economic crime command in the NCA, is already up and running. Last week saw a multi agency operation targeting money mule accounts – front bank accounts used for money laundering. It involved 9 agencies and saw 13 arrests, with prevention and disruption activity now underway.

    As it ramps up the NCA will continue to help cut crime.

    And that will help every local community in the country.

    Developing Police Professionalism

    As well as developing police structures we also need to develop police professionals.

    That means helping the police at all levels – from the constables who form the bedrock of British policing through to their senior leaders – helping them to be the best they can be.

    Over the past 30 years, police officers and staff have increasingly come to see themselves as part of a profession – a specialist and expert group of crime fighters. And so it’s only right that they should have their own professional body to help further increase that professionalism.

    So we are working with the police service to establish a police professional body, which will be up and running by the end of the year.

    The professional body will represent all ranks, staff and officers.

    It will set standards; safeguard police ethics and integrity; design, accredit and deliver police training; develop police leadership; and advise on recruitment, career progression and professional development.

    Crucially, the police professional body must not be an organisation that serves only senior officers and it must not only listen to the top brass.

    I want to see the professional body drawing on the views, skills and expertise of all officers and staff, and in particular those working on the frontline.

    By acting in the interests of the entire police service, by setting standards, improving training and talking for the service, the police professional body can help equip the police with the skills they need to tackle the future.

    Conclusion

    From the graffiti and litter that blights a local area; to the binge drinking and drug dealing that makes people frightened to step outside; right up to the criminal gangs who flaunt their illegal wealth and cheat the exchequer out of millions – our police reforms will help fight them all.

    We’ll ensure the police tackle local priorities, by giving power to elected police and crime commissioners.

    We’ll help lock up the drug lords by creating a national crime agency.

    We’ll let police officers get back on the frontline by freeing them from paperwork.

    We’ll give officers incentives to acquire specialist skills and serve the public.

    And we’ll improve the way they’re led.

    Our reforms are ambitious, comprehensive and they are happening right now.

    They will transform the police service so it is fit to face the future and fit to fight crime.

    Thank you.