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Mr. Garrett: It did not say that.
Mr. Davies: The answer to that question has been given by the hon. Member for Norwich, South(Mr. Garrett) from a sedentary position--that it did not say that. Again, we have come down to the ideological divide over what is the best way of securing jobs. Restrictions are placed on HMSO, as it exists at the moment, which prevent it from securing jobs in the way that many hon. Members believe that it should be able to do. Over the past 15 years, the staff of HMSO has been reduced from 6,300 to 2,800
As a result of the changes introduced by management in that organisation, sales per head have increased substantially. Productivity has increased substantially. For
example, sales have increased from £41,000 per person to £121,000 per person. As an organisation, most aspects now have International Standards Organisation 9000 accreditation. HMSO is meeting the Treasury targets and paying money into the Treasury coffers.
As other hon. Members have said, there has been a 10 per cent. cut in turnover in the past five years. The growth has been restricted by Government controls. We are told that, if HMSO remains in the public sector, its costs will continue to rise because it will not be able to win other business or use its equipment to capacity. We are told that a sale to the private sector is the only realistic course.
From my perspective as a Liberal Democrat, I believe that that is the logic of the lunatic asylum. If HMSO cannot survive--despite the evidence that it is now doing well and management is meeting the targets set by the Government--it is because Treasury rules are restricting its development. But who makes those rules? The Government make those rules, and they can change them. They are not rules which apply in other countries of the European Union, where the targets for organisations in the public sector are different. The Government have the ability to change the rules.
The Government cry that they cannot do that because HMSO would be able to compete unfairly because it would not have to pay corporation tax and could borrow more cheaply than organisations in the private sector.I accept those points--and they must be addressed. The playing field should be level. My party has no problem at all with the idea that these changes can be introduced to level the playing field, but the Government should lift the controls so that HMSO can go out and win business, pay tax and maintain the work force at its existing locations.
What should we be looking for by way of return from this publicly owned organisation? It seems to me that the basic element that we should be looking for is that HMSO is able to provide printed requirements for Parliament and Government effectively and at no cost to the taxpayer because it generates enough money to meet that outlay through its work in the private sector.
I understand that at present only about 10 per cent. of HMSO's turnover arises from Government and official publications. If it can generate a 10 per cent. return from the work that it gains in the private sector, it will be doing very well indeed. Any money paid to the Exchequer on top of that would be icing on the cake. That would be a very good deal for the country and its taxpayers.
To return to the ideological divide, there is a belief that the private sector is good and the public sector is bad, and that only by sale to the private sector will the taxpayer get a good deal. I regard that as simplistic rubbish. With large organisations, it is not ownership that matters but the targets that are set for managers and the disciplines imposed on them.
The Post Office has been transformed in recent years by the setting of clear targets for management, who have been expected to get on with the job and manage according to the disciplines of the private sector and the market. In fact, the Post Office is doing so well that the Government are using the price of stamps as a tax to subsidise the public purse.
Strangely, railway managers did remarkably well throughout the 1980s. By the beginning of this decade, we had created the most cost-effective, least subsidised
railway system in Europe. The Government did not recognise that, but chose instead to put their ideological complaints about the public sector up front--to castigate managers. As a result, they now have the public relations mess that I am glad to pass on to them.
In the past 15 years, managers in HMSO have demonstrated equally well their ability to turn what may have been an old-fashioned, out-of-date, lackadaisical organisation into one that is able to meet the tight disciplines of the marketplace, making the efficiencies that we would expect.
The public sector has a bad name in this country because of its inefficiency, high costs and need for subsidies. It is remarkable that the Government do not claim a bit more credit for their successes when there are successes to claim credit for. The turnaround of unprofitable, uncompetitive public sector organisations into ones that are able to compete in the private sector is something to be proud of. The Government should welcome that development instead of immediately thinking that such organisations should be sold off.
From my point of view--from the point of view of the Government's opponents--that is all to the good. The Government repeatedly throw out the baby with the bath water, not by accident but by design. As long as my party wishes to score political points at the expense of the Government, long may they continue to do so, but it is not good for the country that they continue to do so. Stripped of featherbedding and subsidy, it is good that some organisations in public ownership are seen to be doing well.
The retention of HMSO in public ownership will help to keep the private sector, which dominates more than95 per cent. of the market for printing and publishing requirements, on its toes. Moreover, it will be good if it can manage to survive competitively while the managers of the organisation pay themselves reasonable salaries instead of meeting the excesses of the private sector, which have become all too common in recent years, especially in organisations that have been privatised by the Government.
I do not understand how selling a profitable, efficient organisation benefits the public. There will be a one-off payment to the Treasury and the public purse, but thereafter one loses the profits--the annual contribution to the country's coffers--which would be coming in for many years to come. Knowing the way the Government have privatised in the past, I suspect that the public cannot even be sure that they will receive the one-off payment.
The assets of many industries that have been privatised--public assets--have been written off so that those organisations may be privatised, to such an extent that I see from the weekend newspapers that it is said that the public are now subsidising the shareholders of those privatised companies to the tune of £2,000 each because of the billions of pounds of public assets that have been written off.
The public therefore cannot be confident that they will get a good deal from the privatisation of HMSO. I suspect that, in the accounts or the Treasury books, a trade-off will be made--a writing off of publicly owned assets--to make the sell-off of HMSO more attractive. Only later, if the right parliamentary questions are asked at the right time, will we belatedly discover the truth.
Mr. Robert Jackson (Wantage):
I shall be brief, and I intend to focus on access to Crown copyright material.
First, a few remarks about privatisation. I served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Office of Public Service and Science with responsibility for HMSO when it was transferred from the Treasury to the Office of Public Service and Science in 1992. The House may be interested to know that there had been a full dress review of the issue of privatisation of HMSO in the Treasury only a year before that. This was conducted by my good friend John Maples, who is no longer with us but who we hope will return at the next election. That review in the Treasury concluded that HMSO should not be privatised.
In 1992, when HMSO came to the Office of Public Service and Science, the issue was again raised, and I was instructed to go into the matter all over again. I concluded, once again, that HMSO should not be privatised.
The wheels of Government grind on and now, four years later, we find that HMSO will, after all, be privatised. I have no particular quarrel with that decision because it seemed to me in 1992 to be a matter of finely balanced judgment, but I shall make three observations which I hope will be relevant.
First, I wonder whether Ministers can imagine what it must have been like trying to manage HMSO and its thousands of employees during those years, when one review after another and one ministerial decision after another failed to settle such a fundamental question.
Secondly, I put it to Ministers that the essential case for retaining an organisation such as HMSO is the case for collective bulk purchase. That point has hardly been mentioned in the debate, but it is the largest part of HMSO's business. When the Public Accounts Committee inquires into the performance of Government Departments as purchasers of their own office and other supplies, as I hope it will, I hope that it will find that the sum of their several efforts is as cost-effective--and as free from corruption--as the record of HMSO as a collective purchaser on their behalf has been. I doubt, however, that the PAC will find that this trend has been to the taxpayer's advantage.
My final observation about privatisation is that I hope that, after last week's vote in the House of Lords on the privatisation of the Recruitment Advisory Service, the Government will not underestimate the perhaps sometimes sentimental resentment that a policy of apparently ruthless privatisation can promote. We heard something of that in the speech of the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster). It is quite a sight to see him with his hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson) at his side--the new Labour paladins of institutional conservatism.
Not long ago, HMSO celebrated its 200th anniversary. Occasionally, a Conservative Government--like Labour Front Benchers--may like to recall that Conservatives
used to hold that antiquity is a merit and that a tradition of public service over a long period is worth preserving: I believe that it is called civic Conservatism.
The specific matter that I want to consider today is the terms on which Government copyright material is made available for publication and for dissemination by the private sector, whatever happens in respect of the privatisation of HMSO.
At this point, I declare an interest, albeit expired. In 1994, the commercial publishers asked me to give them some advice; I did so, and duly declared it in the Register of Members' Interests. My relations with the Publishers Permissions Group have long since ended but, as so often with such transactions--a point perhaps not sufficiently recognised in the Nolan debate--through my dealings with the group I was able to learn about an important issue. How should the undoubted public interest in offsetting the costs of the Government's publishing activities be balanced against the public interest--another public interest--in the widest possible access to Government publications?
Three factors make that an increasingly important and difficult issue. The first is the advent of electronic publishing. Listening to the hon. Member for Glasgow, Springburn (Mr. Martin), who referred to such matters as storage, I wondered whether he understood the possible implications of electronic publication, which could transform the current position. Secondly, there is the increasing publication by Government of a vast range of non-statutory material, known in the jargon as "quasi-legislative material" or QLM. That includes a number of categories--planning policy guidance notes, circulars from the Department for Education and Employment, Home Office guidance on access to children in care--thousands of such documents are published every year. The third important factor is the growing commercialisation of government--both in HMSO in recent years and, in future, in Departments with delegated budgets, delegated authorities and a brief to maximise their earnings.
Those developments are taking place against a background of long-standing arrangements between the Government, through HMSO, and the commercial publishers, in relation to the old-fashioned printed legislative material. We have had a simple royalties system and a non-bureaucratic approach to licensing, which has made possible the growth in the United Kingdom of large-scale, high value-added commercial publishing operations--whose exports, incidentally, have risen substantially--and which has developed extensive services for users in the courts and elsewhere. This has helped to secure the public interest in the widest and deepest dissemination of legislation and governmental material.
However, with the emergence of the three factors that I mentioned earlier, those long-standing arrangements have come under increasing strain. The issue on which I advised the Publishers Permissions Group in 1994 related to its dispute with HMSO about the terms for the publication of quasi-legislative material in printed form, given that the growing commercialisation of HMSO was making it increasingly demanding in respect of royalties and licensing arrangements. That dispute was satisfactorily resolved, and I was able to help; but a dispute continues in regard to the electronic publishing both of legislative materials and of QLM.
What material are we talking about? My more technologically advanced colleagues will understand these matters better than I. They include multiple on-line information services, distributed databases--for example, CD-rom--self-standing electronic editions such as electronic books, multiple transaction support systems, licensed loadings on to user databases, and fax and satellite document delivery systems. All those are beginning to be important factors in the information marketplace.
In relation to all those new forms of publication, the Government must now decide how to balance the narrow perceived public interest that Departments have in exploiting their control over the publication of Government material with the wider public interest in facilitating publication of that material by commercial publishers using the most advanced technologies. Of course, such issues are not unique to the United Kingdom. A statement from the Office of Management and the Budget in the United States sums them up admirably:
the Paperwork Reduction Act--
That is surely the central issue at stake.
I consider that an admirable statement of the position.I was pleased to note that in his statement on13 December my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said--speaking on behalf of the Crown--said that he would like much greater access to Government documents to be provided. That is reported at column 998 of Hansard.
I want to emphasise what the United States Office of Management and the Budget says about the way in which information markets develop and expand when a non-restrictive approach is followed. Not only is there an important public interest in promoting the use of new electronic media for disseminating information about Government; the commercial interest of Government in exploiting their copyright material will also be promoted if they pursue a less restrictive policy.
"The information policies contained in the PRA"--
"are based on the premise that government information is a valuable national resource and that the economic benefits to society are maximised when government information is available in a timely and equitable manner to all."
"Maximising the benefits of government information to society depends, in turn, on fostering diversity among the entities involved in disseminating it . . . some nations take advantage of their domestic copyright laws that do permit government copyright and assert a monopoly on certain categories of information to maximise revenues. Such arrangements tend to preclude other entities from developing markets for the information or otherwise disseminating the information in the public interest."
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