Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Hannah White. So Christmas is only a week away, but the government is keeping busy and keeping the RFG busy too. We have new peers,

new labour peers, and plenty of them. We'll discuss what this means for the House of Lords

and the way this country does government. The devolution revolution is in full swing,

with Angela Raina setting out the government's plans to give power away across England. So what does

the plan contain and does it stand any chance of working?

We'll then turn to one of the trickiest issues facing this or any government, asylum.

We've got a new IFG paper out exploring what has become a chronic policy problem for the government.

We'll talk to one of its authors. Throughout the podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Salma Shah,

a former special advisor to Sajid Javid at the Home Office and many other departments,

and now Director at Craiken Strategy. Hi, Salma.

Hello.

I enjoyed your new conservative home piece about the importance of leaders of the opposition

picking the right people for their top team.

What's your judgment on whether Kemi Bidnock has done that? I think that she needs to search for new talent. I think the

retreads of former MPs is too easy an appointment. And that's not to say that there isn't

talent with those people that she's appointed. It's just actually she needs to go and look out for

what she wants rather than the people that she has appointed, it's just actually she needs to go and look out for what she wants

rather than the people that she has at the moment. Because about what, a fifth of conservative

MPs now are new, so there will be some interesting new people amongst those. Yeah, but the people

that she's hiring are those who lost their seats at the last election. And you've got to sort of

question the logic of that,

if you're trying to build something new and create a different kind of momentum, actually is

...