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

Christmas has come early for fans of constitutional reform, which luckily is all of us here at the

IFG and we're hoping a lot of you listening at home too.

Because this week Gordon Brown has published a 155 page blueprint for reform, the grand

deed title, Commission for the UK's Future.

It's packed with ideas and Keir Starmer seems to like them.

But are these proposals any good? What would they mean in

practice? Will they ever make it from the page to reality? We've read the report, yes, all of it,

and we'll give our judgment. We've got our own report this week, which scrutinises how well

Parliament scrutinises legislation, and the answer is not very well. But that's because the

government doesn't let it.

So what can be done? How could scrutiny of bills be improved? And why would it be good for government

to subject itself to more scrutiny? We'll take a look. In fact, there's not one but two new

IFG reports out this week. The second one runs the rule over the civil services approach to diversity

and inclusion, and results are decidedly mixed. We'll run through the findings with its author.

To discuss all this, I'm joined by two IFG colleagues who ploughed their way through the Brown

Review, and that's senior researcher Jess Sargent and Deputy Chief Economist Tom Pope. Hi, both.

Hello. Hello. And I'm delighted that we're

joined today by Henry Zephman. The Times is Associate Political Editor. Hi, Henry. How are you?

I'm very well. Thanks for having me. And you're back after a stint in the US. What are the relative

merits of reporting from the US and the UK? I always say to people, and this is going to sound

really trivial, but my main two takeaways from my time in America,

...