Member

I strongly urge the Government to take this away and look at how the authority can be set up under the Minister for the Cabinet Office and accountable to Parliament for what it does so that there can be real-time, serious horizontal visibility and leadership of these functions right across central government. Then we might at last get back to what we started to do in the coalition Government, which was to get a proper grip on this issue. We did that by having a cross- government taskforce—a very good model, actually—jointly chaired by me and by the late, greatly lamented Lord Heywood, then the head of the Civil Service. That meant that it got taken seriously across government and we started to see results coming through.