Departmental Business Plans

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Letwin]

My hon. Friend is completely right, and that is the plan that is set out here. It applies not just to schools, but to hospitals and many of our other public services. The only way in which we can improve such services is to give the professionals the ability to get on with the job without micro-managing them through bureaucracies, and to hold them to account for the actions that they take and the successes that they achieve.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

Will the Minister explain how he squares taking power away from Whitehall and putting it in the hands of peoples and communities with the Government’s plan to increase the number of Ministers by 10% relative to the size of the legislature, which is the representative of peoples and communities? Is this not the old Tory centralist state at work?

[Mr Letwin]

The hon. Gentleman is clearly an apprentice of the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson), because that was the most marvellous manipulation of statistics. We propose to reduce the number of Members of Parliament, but the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) describes that as an increase in the proportion of Ministers to the number of Members of Parliament. That is a very strange way of describing the situation. We are keeping the number of Ministers constant in order to ensure that we can impose political will on the machine to get the fundamental reforms that give power out to the people of this country. That goal is far more important than particular numbers of Ministers.