Chamber and committees

Do you think that the Government needs to state outcomes? If so, what should they be? It has been suggested, for example, that staff numbers in certain areas would return to pre-Covid levels.

By “opportunities for collaboration”, do you mean time or being allowed to do it?

Thank you.

Professor Connolly, do you think that there should be more central direction or more local autonomy?

Thank you. Those are all my questions for now. I should have said at the beginning that you do not need to touch your microphone, your buttons or any of those things. That will all be done for you.

If we have time at the end, we will give people a chance to come back in.

When I was reading the committee papers for the meeting, there was a number of terms that I was not familiar with. I hope that you can explain some of them to us. There is the “civil service commission”, the “civil service board” and a “civil service shadow board”. Could you explain what they all do?

I could pursue that, but I will not, as I think I would get out of my depth quite quickly.

Some of this touches on decision-making issues that we discussed earlier this morning, so forgive me if it overlaps a bit with that. One issue that came up was with bill teams in the civil service. As I understand it, they are generally kept together through the progress of a bill, but might be disbanded afterwards, which can impact on the putting into practice of the new policies or legislation. Can you explain how that works?

I saw that she had not said anything so far.

My first question is quite general. Why are some bodies included in the consolidated accounts, while others are not included?

Is that related to the suggestion that the HR system is now going to categorise all civil servants into professions?

Okay. This is quite a complex area. We might need a meeting on that alone, but I will ask one other thing. If I am reading it correctly, there is resource borrowing of £319 million, but there is also an underspend. Why do we need to borrow if there is an underspend?