Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Hannah White.

Questions about standards of behaviour in public life and the rules and systems that are meant to govern that behaviour were front and centre at the last

general election. Remember the Partygate story, the revolving doors and the resignations by ministers?

It's fair to say, though, that those questions haven't entirely gone away since the election

either. I've seen Freebie Gate and most recently cash for questions. So So are the rules tough enough and do the systems

work? Well, this week, the government has announced new plans, which will, it says, drive up

standards in public life. So are they right? We will talk today to the man who is going to lead

the government's new ethics and integrity commission. And from setting up new bodies to abolishing

existing ones, a new report that has been published on the state of the water industry,

says that off-watt the water regulator needs to be scrapped. We will take a look. And then, as Parliament

rises for the summer, we'll assess the reshuffle that wasn't and the one that was. So all that to come. Joining me throughout in the studio is my IFG colleague Tim Durant, who leads our minister's team. Hi, Tim. Hi, Hannah. Plenty going on for you. Lots to talk about. Yeah, absolutely. As we head into the summer. Okay, well, let's start by looking at what the government has announced on ethics and standards.

These announcements, Tim, build, don't they, on things that Labor said they would do in opposition,

but we've been waiting to see what they would do with them now that they are in government.

Absolutely. So Labor made a big deal out of ethics and standards issues when they were in opposition.

Angela Rainer came and spoke at the IFG a couple of times talking about an ethics and integrity commission that she wanted to create. And that made it into the manifesto. But since then, it wasn't really clear what exactly that body was going to do. They sort of had this headline that they wanted something new. And I think since then, since they've got in, they've kind of been doing a lot of work,

talking to lots of the existing kind of ethics regulators as this whole patchwork of different organisations

and all the kind of external organisations that have views on this.

So that ministers can work out, okay,

what is actually the best way to take this forward?

How do we create something that adds value

rather than just duplicating

or kind of creating more alphabet soup without actually strengthening the system? And is it really true

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