Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence



Examination of witnesses (Questions 20 - 39)

WEDNESDAY 10 FEBRUARY 1999

MR KEVIN TEBBIT, MR COLIN BALMER, AIR MARSHAL SIR JOHN DAY and MR JOHN HOWE

Mr Hancock

  20.  A piece of land sold, probably one of the nicest pieces offered in Greenwich, the real estate owned by the Royal Navy, sold off not to the highest bidder. This is publicly known. That the highest bidder did not buy the site. When the question was asked: how much did the person pay who actually purchased this site and what were the reasons why you did not accept the highest bid? the answer was, "We aren't going to tell you."
  (Mr Tebbit)  This may be a very specific issue and I would be very happy to look into it

Mr McWilliam

  21.  A more general point. We have had a letter from the Secretary of State obviously explaining to us how he thinks the new information we are going to be presented with is going to be done. But there is another aspect of this as well. The Government have made it clear that in the near future they are going to produce a Freedom of Information Bill. Now, are you absolutely certain that your new method of producing and presenting information will be fully compliant with a Freedom of Information Act?
  (Mr Tebbit)  I am absolutely certain it will be compliant with whatever provisions finally emerge in the Act. I think there are two different things. We are volunteering information in order to explain how we are using £22 billion, in terms of reporting on how we are achieving our objectives.

  22.  That is not the thrust of my questioning.
  (Mr Tebbit)  Obviously individuals have the right to ask questions.

  23.  No, the thrust of my question is: the Secretary of State has given us a letter about how he intends to proceed in the future. My question is: will that method of proceeding be fully compliant with the Freedom of Information Act which was in the Government's manifesto?
  (Mr Tebbit)  The answer would be yes. However, I am a little puzzled about the link which you make.

Mr McWilliam:  You have only to look at the document you have given us to see why I am making that linkage, and my colleagues' questions.

Mr Hancock

  24.  What caveats have you asked to be put in? What have the Ministry of Defence said about the Freedom of Information? I sit on a Select Committee which is looking at that. We have been told that the Ministry of Defence have been very hard at asking for exemptions. I would like to know what exemptions you have asked for.
  (Mr Tebbit)  There will be certain exemptions requested on national security.

Mr Hancock:  Other than security.

Mr Cohen

  25.  My colleague, Mike Hancock, raised the issue of the 44 agencies. Are there any examples of significantly poor performance, in your opinion, that you can tell us of?
  (Mr Tebbit)  Within the agencies?

  26.  Yes, within the agencies.
  (Mr Tebbit)  I am not aware of particular poor performance in that context.
  (Mr Balmer)  If I could pick up the point about what agencies publish. All agencies are required to publish to Parliament, usually by an Answer to a Question, what their key targets are for the year. Those are published by each and every agency. They are required to deliver against those targets and they produce a report and in some cases full accounts at the end of the year. They are required to list where they have not achieved the targets. In the case of some of our agencies all targets are being met. In the case of some others some targets are fairly narrowly missed. I am not conscious of any of our agencies where we have had to say, "You have so badly and significantly missed targets that it is judged to be poor performance." I might need to remind myself of all 44 reports, but I am not conscious of any agency where we have had to call them in and castigate them for their performance.

Mr Colvin

  27.  I raised the question of Resource and Accounting Budgeting earlier and I wish to thank Mr Balmer for the briefing which he gave to the Committee. RAB will come in for the year 2001/2002 but the new Performance Report is earlier than that. Are you anticipating RAB in deciding the precise Report the performance format shall take, or are you accepting that you are going to have to adapt the Performance Report in order to take account of the changes associated with RAB when it is introduced?
  (Mr Tebbit)  I will start with the new framework. As I say, dividing our outputs into three: the Department of the State policy function; Military Capability; and Equipment. We will progressively get to the stage where we can link money very firmly to the individual sub-elements within that.

  28.  You take each of the nine objectives separately?
  (Mr Tebbit)  We do not do it as nine objectives. They will be reformulated under Resource Accounting and Budgeting. However, to start with, we will not be able to communicate costs precisely from sub-elements through to the final output because we will not have the full RAB system in place until, as you say, 2002. Before that we will have to use a degree of estimating to attribute the money until we have a full RAB system operating. We are moving to the system now. The transition occurs over the next three years. We will be moving to full cost communication to outputs by 2002.
  (Mr Balmer)  We can certainly expect to see the shape and nature of this Report change over the next few years as we become more sophisticated in understanding outputs. Again, one of the features of Resource Accounting and Budgeting under the Treasury proposals is the production of what is called an Output and Performance Analysis. Those are documents which would accompany the resource accounts and set out in quite a lot of detail what the outputs of the Department have been and our performance against them. As Mr Tebbit said, we are not yet good enough to do that. We do not have the information systems in place yet. What we are trying to do in the next year or so is begin to work out how those will look based on today's information. We are in discussion with the Treasury at the moment about what our current Output Performance Analysis should look like. This is a document which we may publish. The Treasury are contemplating publishing today's version of these documents later in the spring.

  29.  Mr Tebbit, you raised the question of the form in which future reports are going to take place, the two reports to Parliament. We have had a letter from the Secretary of State, which the Chairman mentioned earlier, dated 5 February, telling us that the "Statement on the Defence Estimates" is now going to be replaced with a Defence White Paper. We can expect the first one to take account of the Washington Summit, and then the Departmental Performance Report. In the Secretary of State's letter he says: "[It] will assess the MoD's activities over the past year and will contain most of the factual information published previously in the Statement on the Defence Estimates." What is going to be left out?
  (Mr Tebbit)  We will be providing more information. It is a question of balancing that information and the information we provide in October/ November.

  30.  So there will be no duplication?
  (Mr Tebbit)  No, no.

  31.  In other words, combine the two. We are going to be receiving more information in a more understandable form than we have received previously?
  (Mr Tebbit)  The emphasis will be on linking it to the outputs. That is the important thing so you know what we are delivering.

  32.  Can we, please, year on year, try and retain the same format. This is because comparing one year with the next becomes a great deal easier if we can do that.
  (Mr Balmer)  We will, of course, continue to publish our volume of statistical information which is published during the summer. This used to be part of the White Paper but it is now a separate document. That contains an awful lot of detailed information of the sort which Parliament have shown an interest in over the past years.

  33.  The Secretary of State also mentioned in his letter, which you may have seen, that: "This new approach to the White Paper will enable us to give policy issues a deeper and more thoughtful treatment than has been possible in past Statements on the Defence." Could you elaborate a bit on what you think he means by that.
  (Mr Tebbit)  What he means is exactly what he says. We are trying to engage in a bigger debate, based on the process in the Strategic Defence Review, of explaining what it is we are trying to achieve. What our aims are in carrying out the various defence functions. Whether it is the classic defence role or the more expansive acting as a force for the good in the world, or indeed the defence diplomacy activities. We have a varied range of activities now because we are able to bind our defence functions around our foreign policy objectives rather than simply reacting to a clearly defined threat. Therefore, there is more flexibility in the options available to the Government. The Secretary of State wishes to set these issues out more fully in that form.

  34.  And, presumably, with fewer constraints, as far as security is concerned, since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
  (Mr Tebbit)  I think the policies have always been relatively unconstrained. It is the detail which is the problem.

  35.  Come off it! We normally go to the United States of America to find out what is going on inside the MoD.
  (Mr Tebbit)  I think I did explain at the beginning that I thought what we had done on nuclear weapons was really quite transparent. I have yet to see any other country in the world have as transparent a nuclear policy as this country.

Mr McWilliam

  36.  Where is it in here then? It is missing.
  (Mr Tebbit)  I must say, Chairman, you chose to ask me to come and talk about this particular Report. I am very happy to do so but I am also happy to talk about the Strategic Defence Review, on which you have had a very full discussion already. I do not think there has been a lack of information available to the Committee recently.

Mr Blunt

  37.  I want to take up some of the more detailed issues about military capability. You did explain that one of the reasons why this Report was, in a sense, so thin in detail was that the SDR was happening at the same time. You described the SDR sea change in strategy. I am not sure that this is a description that many commentators would recognise about the SDR: a confirmation of the existing strategy and an elaboration of the development of it rather than a sea change. Perhaps this Report could have been more detailed. However, let us examine the issue of military capability. When you were asked about how you evaluate this, you spoke about force elements and readiness being the two elements of it. Would you not accept that deployability and sustainability are as important?
  (Mr Tebbit)  Yes, I think that is true. If I were to articulate it more fully, the methodology we use to measure readiness asks itself whether a force element has the following components to meet objectives within a given element: whether it has sufficient manpower; whether it is suitably trained individually as well as collectively; whether it has the necessary equipment to do its job; and whether it is able to deploy and be sustained in a particular field of operations. All of those things have to be met within a given readiness time.

  38.  How does the Ministry of Defence evaluate that?
  (Mr Tebbit)  On the assumption that we are not actively engaged in operations it is through exercises, through simulation - increasingly these days.

  39.  No, not how you achieve it, how you evaluate it.
  (Air Marshal Sir John Day)  The process basically starts through the setting of performance indicators, through the setting of objectives, all the way down to unit level. At unit level individuals will have training requirements set for the year. They will be assessed by their own superiors. The unit training will have objectives to achieve. Unit training will then move up into larger formation training—I am talking generically, this applies to all three Services—moving then on up into joint Service training, coalition training, and finally into operations. There have been times perhaps when we have not been doing many operations but we are now. At every level there is an evaluation process against the objectives set. All exercises have a lessons learned process. The bigger the exercise, the more that the MoD becomes involved in assessing those lessons learned and reacting to them. We also have within the Navy, Flag Officer Sea Training, whose staff evaluate Performance against set criteria. Within the Royal Air Force, we have the NATO Tactical Evaluation System, which has been going for many years and which has been modified over the last two or three years to take account of the change in the kind of operations we are doing. Similarly, for the Army. We also have the Director of Operational Capability, who works directly for the Secretary of State, who carries out a lessons learned process on operations. So for any operations we mount, right from the outset we lay down the requirement for a lessons learned process. I actually sign off a note each time detailing who and what is to be collated so that we can learn. All that then feeds back down. We clearly have to get the balance right between the amount of training we do because there is no point in wasting time on activities which we are good at. It is getting that balance right. The exercise programme for all three Services is put together in a methodical manner. We have an exercise policy. The policy documents are currently being revised and will go before the Chiefs of Staff within the not too distant future. We are revising it because of our continual effort to make sure we get the right policies laid down, so we can get the balance between individual unit training, joint training with all three Services, training with other allies, training in different parts of the world. It is a continual process which I believe suits our purposes. The proof of the pudding is shown today by the number of operations that British military forces are involved in. Our capabilities, our deployability and our sustainability are held in very high esteem by our allies. Indeed, I hope by the nation itself. That does not mean to say there are not areas which we do not need to improve upon, but we are taking steps to improve upon them.


 
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