13 June 2007
The Prime Minister hosted a special reception for public sector champions in London.
Parts of this transcript may have been edited
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Prime Minister:
The purpose of this is really to say thank you, everybody here is wondering how they managed to get selected to come tonight. The reason that you are here is that you would have done something remarkable, what it is you will know better than everyone else, what it is. Everybody has been chosen for this is an essential of the representatives of people we can through you, say thank you to.
In particular the purpose of it was to thank those people who are at the front line in public services whether it’s health or education or fire fighting or the Home Office or Immigration or whatever, whatever it maybe, Britain, education education. You see I said to them before hand don’t get me to start listing, you will miss someone out and it [inaudible] but everything that you do makes a difference to peoples lives in a fundamental and fun way and the trouble is some times what you, especially when your doing it day in day out and trying to make everything work and you don’t sometimes realise that it is in fact appreciated by people but each of you in your own way is making a difference in public service which after all is as I’m sure you will remind me, not always as much remunerated as everything else that you can do but does have the quite distinct characteristic that it is making someone else’s life better and I think that is a tremendous thing to be able to do.
So what we wanted to do tonight was to bring people together from the frontline of the public services and really in order to say thank you and have a nice and sociable evening but most of all, through you to say thank you to all the people who stand behind you and work with you and do such a marvellous job in our public services.
Now as you know in fact before, the reason I am a bit late Incidentally, I have the best excuse, I have been to see the Queen at Buckingham Palace. You can’t get better than that, and in two weeks time this will be the end of my time as PM but I wanted particularly just before I signed off and left office to say thank you to people who I know at times I have put through rather a lot of, and I am sorry about that. It is all of our joint endeavour to try and do the best for our country and you have certainly done that and so I would like to say thank you very very much indeed tonight. Some people I know I will probably have met as I have gone round different parts of the country over the last 10 years. Some people I won’t have, but one thing I see whenever I go in our country about people who work in our public service is the dedication and a commitment and professionalism of which actually the country should be proud of not merely you.
So that is enough from me tonight except to say have a wonderful night tonight. This is a very historic building incidentally which it is where Lancaster House many of the big negotiations over the years have been done including the most recently a lot of the crucial Northern Ireland negotiations and actually it is worth just having a look round it for its artwork and also for some of its State rooms which are magnificent and I’ll make sure that they have been up for you particularly if it starts raining too much but most of all thank you very much indeed.
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