Northern Uproar and Overloading the Lords

Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government

Institute for Government

News, Politics, Government

4.6 • 252 Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2020

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Government’s emergency lockdown of Greater Manchester took the public by surprise and left them confused and resentful. Special guest Jennifer Williams of the Manchester Evening News describes the disarray and what Government needs to fix, fast. Plus: How fit were public services for coronavirus? Not very, says a new IfG report. What needs to happen, and why didn’t the Government act on the learnings from Operation Cygnus? And as Boris Johnson loads up on Lords, is the Upper Chamber becoming the Crony Express? “People can’t follow the logic. If you can’t sit in a friend’s garden but you can meet them in a beer garden, it’s little wonder people are confused.” – Jennifer Williams “Boris Johnson’s honours list touches all the bases of cronyism.” – Hannah White “The Government went for private contracts because they could scale up fast – but whether that leads to effective track and trace is another matter.” – Jennifer Williams “Lords reform needs something a bit more fundamental than moving some Lords to York.” – Jennifer Williams Presented by Bronwen Maddox with the IfG’s Hannah White and Nick Davies. Audio production by Alex Rees See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government.
0:14.4	I'm Bronwyn Maddox. The start of a second wave or the ripples of the first one,
0:19.1	an uptick in coronavirus cases across the continent
0:21.6	and a spike in parts of Northern England has seen further lockdown easing halted and prompted
0:26.7	the UK government to war game its options. Citywide lockdowns? A border on the M25? What can those
0:33.5	in power across the UK do to control cases and what has been learned from the first
0:37.8	attempts to local lockdowns. And if the pressures aren't going away, are public services any better
0:42.2	prepared to deal with whatever comes next? Our new report published on Monday explored how fit
0:47.2	public services were to deal with the coronavirus crisis. Spoiler alert, they weren't very prepared.
0:52.6	We're going to ask why and what they could be doing next.
0:55.9	And then we're going to turn to the House of Lords,
0:57.7	our third section, where we take a look at the latest round of political appointees,
1:02.0	among them, a Brexit-backing cricketeer,
1:04.9	the Prime Minister's brother and the owner of the evening standard.
1:08.3	So what next for Parliament's upper house?
1:10.5	Is this the sleazy side of
1:11.7	British democracy or an old institution that really still works very well? I've got a great panel
1:17.2	to discuss all of this. Hannah White, our deputy director and the former clerk in the House of Commons. Hi,
1:22.1	Hannah. Hi, yeah. Nick Davies who leads our public services work and was the main author of the report I was just talking about into public services. Nick, thanks for joining us.
1:32.0	Thank you.
1:32.9	And I'm delighted to be joined as well by Jen Williams, Politics and Investigations Editor for the Manchester Evening News.
1:39.1	Jen, hello. Hi, nice to be here. Let's start with a so-called Ring of Steel. Late last Thursday,
	...

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