Examination of witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
TUESDAY 30 JUNE 1998
MR JOHN
BALLARD, MR
PHILIP WOOD
and MR PAUL
EVANS
240. How can you assess the benefits if
you do not know the costs?
(Mr Wood) I do not understand.
241. How can the Government assess the benefits
of the change when they do not know the cost of it?
(Mr Wood) The Government are not saying to themselves
that they must put in hand a grand exercise that exhaustively
identifies the costs and benefits.
Chairman
242. We are not asking for exhaustive figures;
we want some indicative figures. The department has not come up
with even vague figures. At least on the minimum wage the department
had a vague idea, but on this matter it is simply said that this
is what the Government have put in and they do not really know
what it has cost?
(Mr Wood) That is absolutely correct. I accept
that this is an important backward-looking exercise, but I emphasise
that local government reorganisation is not on the Government's
agenda. They are using their limited resources in a quite different
direction for the future of local government.
Mrs Dunwoody
243. The whole basis of the evidence that
you have given has been very precise as to the amount of money
that the department expends on behalf of the Government. You are
saying that the parameters for the political decision will govern
the way in which you advise government Ministers and the way they
disburse money. The reality is that the effects of local government
reorganisation are still reverberating throughout the local government
system. Without demanding the setting up of special units or resources,
it would not be beyond the wit of a man or woman in your department
to identify this information. It must have an ongoing implication.
We are not asking exactly how much was spent and exactly how much
came back in or what the cost would have been without reorganisation.
We are asking why, given that manifestly the effects are still
flowing through the system, your department is not keeping a running
total. One would expect an ordinary book-keeper to keep a running
total of what is going on. Why is that information not readily
available to the department?
(Mr Wood) Because it is not collected precisely
in that form. It may be helpful if I give a further figure that
may cast some light on it but not a conclusive light. As I recall,
the total of the bids which local authorities submitted for supplementary
credit approvals to be set alongside the £428 million was
some £570 million. In considering those the department must
take into account that they are bids and ask whether or not they
cover the sort of costs that it thinks should be covered by this
heading. Admittedly, these are not total outturn costs, which
is what you are really driving at, but they give an indication
of the costs that local authorities themselves said, albeit in
a bidding context, fell upon them—hence my confidence in
saying that the SCA figures must cover the great bulk of the costs
which local authorities anticipated they would need to spend.
Chairman
244. It seems to me to be very odd that
we are here to scrutinise your estimates and within your estimates
some of the figures are not robust at all?
(Mr Wood) The figures that I have given you are
very robust.
245. But you cannot justify why the £428
million was chosen?
(Mr Wood) It was a series of assessments made
of individual local authorities' bids over a period of five years
taken year after year after year. It is the sum of the allocations
to each of the individual authorities affected by the reorganisation.
246. The logic of it is that, having made
those guesses, they should be measured against the actual cost
to see whether your estimating process is any good at all?
(Mr Wood) I have heard, understood and will take
back the Sub-Committee's clear, strong message, but the Government
are now concerned with a different agenda.
Christine Butler
247. Turning to page 32 of the report of
the 2,114 businesses which started under City Challenge in 1995-96,
how many have closed?
(Mr Evans) We do not know the answer to that at
the moment. The arrangements under City Challenge did not have
specific monitoring for business closures. We do however have
in progress an evaluation of the whole of the City Challenge programme.
It is about half-way through. The contractors are bringing together
information from such monitoring as the individual City Challenge
authorities undertook and making inquiries of their own through
questionnaires of local businesses. It is hoped that at the end
of that process we will have some indication of the extent of
closures of businesses that have been started up under the whole
of the City Challenge programme.
248. What sort of information do you have
presently on the likely success rate?
(Mr Evans) It is very limited, in the sense that
we have a small amount of monitoring of information. But it was
not part of the routine of City Challenge to make an assessment
of the likelihood of success of individual businesses. Obviously,
they were started on the basis that they would succeed but their
chances of success were not given a percentage rating; nor was
that necessarily determined in individual cases and their success
or otherwise traced through. We have taken the implied lesson
in your question into the single regeneration budget. One of the
monitoring elements is designed to ensure that————
249. When was the decision taken to start
to monitor it?
(Mr Evans) I am not sure. We have certainly put
it in as one of the indicators to monitor the single regeneration
budget. Essentially, that would have occurred two years ago.
250. Why have Safe City projects been closed
down?
(Mr Evans) Safer City projects were part of the
time-limited sequence of programmes introduced originally on their
own, and then they became part of the single regeneration budget.
We have two follow-ups to that. As part of the single regeneration
budget and the ordinary round of projects being undertaken under
that budget, about half have community safety as one of the key
elements. Therefore, community safety in that sense has not ceased
to be part of regeneration programmes in local areas. In addition,
under the Crime and Disorder Bill the Government propose to have
multi-agency partnerships at local level which will carry out
similar work.
251. But what monitoring arrangements are
in place for the community safety partnerships which are continuing?
(Mr Evans) The Safer Cities programme was essentially
about a particular way of getting local partnerships together
to consider the creation of local community safety arrangements.
We are not directly continuing to monitor those individual partnerships
at local level. From the conversations that I have had with the
main contractors who manage the Safer City programmes for us,
quite a lot of them have become merged into the mainstream of
local activity either through police liaison arrangements or wider
local authority partnerships.
252. Does the department ever monitor and
evaluate these projects?
(Mr Evans) We have evaluations of the Safer City
programme but not of the long-term life of those individual partnerships
set up at local level.
Chairman
253. Can you tell me a Safer City project
that has been successful?
(Mr Evans) The ones of which I have experience
have been in the North East. I recall that wider partnerships
were being created and it appeared that the impetus that the Safer
City programmes had given had brought into play quite a lot of
community safety activity, particularly the local police force.
Christine Butler
254. What about the London Docklands Development
Corporation and the investment promised from the private sector?
Was that realised?
(Mr Evans) London Docklands has been significantly
successful in bringing a great deal of private sector investment
into the area.
255. Were the targets realised?
(Mr Evans) Substantially, I believe. We are in
the middle of the final evaluation of all of the urban development
corporations. One of them that is about to be published is on
London Docklands. We can let you have information about the final
outturn.
256. Therefore, you will be having an evaluation
of the whole initiative. It is coming?
(Mr Evans) Yes. There have been a number of partial
evaluations that the individual urban development corporations
have gone through, but we are bringing together particularly the
large-scale exercise on London Docklands as one of the most significant.
Smaller scale evaluations are being made on a number of urban
development corporations.
257. Do you have a cost per job created
for the UDC scheme in the period 1996 to 1998?
(Mr Evans) Yes, with some caveats. What we are
able to measure over that period are the total figures for the
jobs created and the total spend which can be looked at in two
ways. Of course, the jobs are only part of the bundle of benefits;
they are only particular forms of spending over the period. With
that caveat, in the two years that you quote the last eight urban
development corporations led to 55,800 jobs being created. If
one compares that with the grant-in-aid of a little over £350
million—the sum of money which the Government gave to the
urban development corporations - the cost per job was £6,400.
If one compares it with the total amount that UDCs spent over
that period—they were at that stage using a good measure
of the receipts available to them - the cost per job was about
£15,300.
Mrs Dunwoody
258. Are you going to include estimates
of the cost to the taxpayer of the Limehouse Link which was very
much what the LDDC wanted?
(Mr Evans) In what sense? The overall figures
for the cost of the UDC will include its contributions to infrastructure
improvements like the Limehouse Link.
Christine Butler
259. Which was the most successful regeneration
initiative?
(Mr Evans) I think that all of the UDCs had successes.
We have been looking at them in a sense to try to evaluate them
in two ways. For example, what are the kinds of projects and processes
that were done well and succeeded on their own terms at local
level? Obviously, the urban development corporations are a set
of programmes which effectively are now finished. What we have
been trying to establish are the broad lessons emerging from that
work that might be carried out forward into further regeneration
programmes.
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