Examination of Witnesses (Questions 178
- 199)
WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE 2000
MR RICHARD
CORK AND
MR TOM
FARNHILL
Chairman
178. Gentlemen, welcome. You were at the back
during the last session so you will know what we are all about.
We do not need to explain that. We talked to your colleagues in
Crewe and Northallerton and I think it is fair to say that the
impression they gave is that they were not defending the status
quo as such. They did not think that the arguments in defence
of the status quo were ones which were so majestic that they had
to be defended at all costs. When you answer the first question,
would you just identify yourself for the record? In your memorandum,
you give yourselves an opportunity to talk about the PCS vision
for the future. I did find it quite difficult to find out what
it was. Then you said your priority was to defend the current
RSC structure on the basis of its proven track record. First of
all, to what extent are you defending the status quo and is the
present structure the ideal structure? Secondly, if I can push
you on what your vision might be, what might it be?
(Mr Cork) Richard Cork, President, PCS,
MAFF. In terms of the status quo, it is always difficult to defend
the status quo because change is an inherent part of life. It
depends very much what we are talking about in terms of the status
quo. From PCS's point of view and our members' point of view,
we recognise that we must always keep an eye open for improvement
and development, particularly in a changing world such as we are
in at the moment. Where we have concerns and would be arguing
that the status quo at the moment would seem to be the best and
certainly the safer option is in terms of the actual structure
of the regional presence. We have no objections whatsoever to
utilising IT to its fullest extent in developing that and also
improving the way in which we deliver our services to farmers
and the farming community. Where we have arguments with some of
the proposal put forward is the notion that it would be possible
to do that and deliver the services to a required standard from
a reduced number of locations. I think it is that element where
we are defending the status quo to the extent that the nine Regional
Service Centres that we have at the moment is the most reliable
method of delivering what we believe needs to be delivered in
the future as well as at present. That is not to say that there
is any magical significance about the number of nine offices.
That is what we have and that is what has developed over the last
few years. It is that which, we believe, has proved to be effective
in terms of the delivery of service to a fairly consistent standard.
179. Would you like to define the functions
of the Regional Service Centres? Let us for the minute leave the
geography and talk about the functions. How many functions would
you identify?
(Mr Cork) In broad categories, there is the need to
be responsive to queries, questions, demands from the farming
community within a particular geographical area. There is obviously
the need to administer the various schemes, both the CAP related
schemes and all the various other agri-environment schemes. Also,
to provide—and this is probably more an abstract thing—the
Ministry's presence within the regional community. I think it
falls roughly into those three areas. There is also the enforcement
aspect in terms of inspections, which is coordinated with the
RSCs themselves. Those are the broad areas I would categorise
in terms of the functions.
180. That is five. I have added one which would
be the sheer physical collection of forms, the collection point.
Leaving that aside, response to queries, the administration of
the scheme, policing broadly and flying the MAFF flag, as it were,
in the regions.
(Mr Cork) Yes.
181. You refer to local knowledge and expertise.
How possible is this in nine regions, given the heterogeneous
nature of the regions, perhaps the most obvious one being the
south-east where the office is in Reading and yet you are dealing
with farms on the south coast?
(Mr Cork) What we mean by that is knowledge built
up through experience over time, in dealing with the farmers on
a regular, day to day basis, finding out through that process
about the types of agriculture they are involved in, the particular
problems that you might have in particular areas within the region
which result in specific queries which may crop up time and again.
That sort of base of knowledge is built up amongst the staff within
that Regional Service Centre, just through doing the job.
182. It is just basic experience?
(Mr Cork) Yes.
183. If we were to amalgamate MAFF's offices
within a wide regional structure, would you see that as having
possible advantages to your members and for your clients or not?
(Mr Cork) Amalgamating in what sense? Do you mean
reducing the numbers and—?
184. For example, the attribution of some of
the more policy making functions into a wider regional structure
and the separating out, the filtering out, of the processing side.
I was quite struck in Northallerton in particular—it was
also true in Crewe—when officials were saying that they
had very little contact with other parts of the government machine.
They were not close to other centres and they did not feel that
there was really much interrelation with other bits of the government
machine.
(Mr Cork) Yes, there is that feeling, I think. Whether
that is a structural problem or one of management and morale and
integration in the sense of being a unified department, I am not
sure. It may be more that than a structural thing. In a sense
though I think it is almost an inevitability that, where you have
a dispersed and diverse department such as the Ministry, where
it has to deal with a whole range of different situations nationwide,
you are inevitably going to get some sense of lack of cohesion
at times between the disparate elements of that department. Whether
that is sufficient justification for a change in the structure
I think we would have some doubts about. We are not conscious
from our members that this is any kind of overwhelming or overriding
feeling that they have. Indeed, there are interchanges of staff
between offices anyway, admittedly normally at lower and middle
management levels. We do not think it is a problem to the extent
that it results in a feeling of isolation at any particular individual
office.
Mr Borrow
185. If I can move on to the role of the Regional
Service Centres, part of what we are looking at is both the functions
that now exist and whether they are in the appropriate places
and also the need for those functions in the first place. In your
submission you did state: "It is our conviction that the
service provided by [the RSCs] ... is also essential to the future
success of British agriculture." How convinced are you that
each of the functions that you mentioned when you were speaking
to the Chairman are actually essential?
(Mr Cork) The sense in which it is appropriate is
in the wider sense of the overall administration of government
policy towards agriculture. The Ministry obviously is key to that
and the way in which that policy is applied and implemented has
a direct bearing on the way in which farming develops and, from
our point of view, hopefully is successful. If you break it down
to the individual functions, in a sense, each one is debatable
but that becomes part of the political debate. For example, do
you subsidise farmers directly or do you do it through some other
means? That would obviously have a direct bearing on whether or
not the CAP payments continued to be made and in what form and
therefore where, but from our point of view it is the overall
presence of the Ministry in the regions, having to be a presence
which the farming community has confidence in and feels is giving
them what they need to do their job. Our concern is that if there
are radical changes made to the way in which the Ministry delivers
its services in the regions, or at the front line, if you like,
with the farming community, that will both undermine the confidence
of farmers even further and may have a direct bearing on the actual,
practical help of the various schemes which the Ministry runs,
which are designed to help farmers and then that too is undermined
to a serious extent. We feel that that could be a devastating
blow at this particular time for farmers if they are not able
to get what support there is currently in the way in which they
want it.
186. We have heard evidence from a number of
sources that it is essential for the processing of the CAP forms
to take place within the RSC; it could not take place at a separate
site for the whole of the nation. If that processing was done
separately from the Regional Service Centres, is there enough
remaining work and functions to actually justify the existing
network of Regional Service Centres?
(Mr Cork) At the present time, if you remove the whole
of the processing side of it, probably not, without replacing
it with something else. What we are greatly concerned about—and
certainly this is something that the staff have been at pains
to point out—is that we do not believe that it is sensible
or feasible to actually remove the processing side of it. It can
technically be done, obviously. Technically, you could do it in
Sri Lanka or Australia with electronic methods of transmission,
but the separation out of the processing side from the elements
of problem resolution, query resolution and the direct contact
with farmers in that process we feel would be a big mistake. You
would end up expanding the process, making it longer to complete
and making it less efficient, because you would have to transmit
queries and the responses to queries through at least a third
party, perhaps more; whereas at the moment the farmers can contact
the person processing their application direct, speak to them,
identify, whichever side it is coming from, queries and problems
and sort out what the root of those is, get that resolved within
a very short space of time, perhaps hopefully in one conversation
and then the process moves on very quickly. Once you remove those
two elements and separate them out and, for example, intersperse
a telephone call centre in the middle, you inevitably, in our
view, lengthen the process and also make it less efficient.
187. My understanding at the moment is that
a farmer will come to the Regional Service Centre with a completed
form. That form will be checked, not in terms of accuracy but
whether the appropriate boxes have been filled in and he will
get a receipt for that and that form, some time later, will be
processed by different staff upstairs, who will then go through
that form. They then get back to the farmer and say, "You
have done this wrong" or, "That is wrong". I cannot
understand how actually having the physical separation between
the MAFF officer who collects the form and says, "I have
received it and you have filled in all the boxes", with the
officer that actually processes it through in that sense; that
needs to be in the same building because presumably the farmer,
when he deals with any queries by the officer processing the form,
will not come back to the Regional Service Centre to see that
officer. Presumably that contact will be by telephone or by correspondence.
(Mr Cork) Not always, no. Sometimes there can be direct
interviews between the officer dealing with the claim or application
and the farmer, if the farmer comes in. The separation I was meaning
was the mechanical processing of the claim or the application,
checking it, running it through a machine and authorising any
payment or whatever or dealing with queries that arise from that.
That is where the separation would cause problems. If the person
processing the form is not the same person that is trying to resolve
the queries which it throws up, that is where we feel significant
problems arise. There is not that much of a separation between
a distinct group of people who simply collect the forms when they
come in and a distinct group of people who process them. They
are a homogenous group of staff and very often some forms come
into a central point and are distributed for processing. There
would seem to be little point in separating those two bits out
because you just have to duplicate the collection process at the
processing site anyway. It is the process of processing which
is the crucial element. Our concern about some of the proposals
is that that process should be split, so you would have a paper
factory which would just be churning the forms through and dealing
with the pure, simple mechanics of it and someone else dealing
with the query resolution which those forms throw up. That is
where we see a fundamental flaw in the proposals because the problem
resolution in respect of all these schemes is very much an iterative
process. You cannot resolve it with smart forms. All smart forms
will do is tell you that there is a problem. They will not solve
it for you. There has to be human contact. Whether it is face
to face or over the phone, it has to be direct contact with the
person actually processing the claim because there are stages
at which the problems have to be resolved. If you hand over that
process to someone else, you are undermining the effectiveness
of the whole procedure.
188. In your view, to have a central centre
which processes the forms and those same offices then deal with
any queries and problems on those forms from that central centre,
that system would be efficient?
(Mr Cork) If you have centralised processing? If you
take that purely in isolation, it can be done. It could be made
to work. That does not necessarily mean it would be right. When
you take other elements of the role of the Regional Service Centres
into account as well, such as the local knowledge and experience
mentioned earlier on, and you take that out of the equation too,
it is hard from our point of view to see what benefits you gain
from central processing above and beyond what you currently get
from regional processing.
189. One of the things we have picked up from
farmers and farmers' representatives is how important it is for
them to have somewhere to go with the form and see someone and
actually get a receipt saying they have received the form and
that sense of confidence. They would have much less confidence
if it was a matter of sticking it in an envelope, posting it and
hoping somehow that it gets in on time and that they have ticked
all the right boxes. The actual physical seeing someone across
the table is important to them. In your submission, you talk about
increasing the social role of MAFF in terms of building up a relationship
of MAFF at local level with individual farmers. Do you want to
elaborate on that?
(Mr Cork) This links in probably with the concept
of integrating the services that are delivered to local communities
through government offices of the regions and things like that,
the idea that government needs to be responsive to the needs of
citizens in local areas. We see MAFF as having a specific role
to play in that because in many ways it traditionally has always
played that role to a greater or lesser extent. It has never been
sufficiently given formal recognition that it has a role to play
in terms of answering problems in rural communities and those
areas with which it has direct contact. It was in that sense that
we were referring to that, because we do recognise, as you say,
that there is great weight placed by farmers on what they feel
to be the benefits of that direct contact with a government presence
that deals with their interests in their particular area.
190. Would it be reasonable if the government
were to pursue that sort of approach, to examine the existing
footprint of the Regional Service Centres, to perhaps look for
a different configuration which would allow those services to
be more local than they are at the moment?
(Mr Cork) In theory, yes. It is an easy thing to say
yes to and would depend very much on how that was taken forward
and what the footprint, as you describe it, would end up being
and whether that made operational sense in the wider context as
well. In principle, yes, there would be value in that being explored.
Mr Todd
191. The processing function as it currently
is carried out in Regional Service Centres is of course not—you
have presented this picture of an individual who takes the form
and does the whole task, is able to talk to the farmer and so
on, but the picture we have actually seen does not comply with
that at all. What we actually have is the processing of the form
is split up by administrative grades, the traditional demarcation
disputes of the Civil Service, in which someone says, "I
do this part of the form. I am not fit to do the next bit."
That is passed to someone else. They then process that and then
it is passed to someone else to handle the queries. I think you
are presenting an idealised picture of this work. Would you care
to qualify it?
(Mr Cork) I am not sure it is quite as you have presented
it. I do not think there are quite those specific corridors. It
does vary to an extent from scheme to scheme as well.
192. We saw a form in which the person said,
"This person over there has been allowed to fill in this
part of the form and now it is my job to put in the rest of it.
When I have finished that, then I pass it to this other person
who does this." That is what they said.
(Mr Cork) There is a degree to which there are limits
on the authority of individuals as to what they can do, particularly
in terms of signing off money, quite rightly so. The fact still
remains that you are dealing with a situation where the process
that is undertaken is an integrated process. There are not artificial
barriers and separations of contact between the individuals who
may be involved in dealing with the claim.
193. We have also seen evidence of very substantial
differences in processing efficiency. Your department focuses
on one measure which is the disallowance issue. If you look at
the unit costs of processing, which the information has shown
vary dramatically between RSCs, how can you explain that? It does
appear that the fragmentation of the system as it is between the
different RSCs produces significant variances in performance and
in efficiencies.
(Mr Cork) We focused on disallowance obviously because
you are talking millions there so it is the most significant effect
of things going wrong, but in terms of the differences between
offices, yes, we recognise there are. Whether they are that significant—
194. Factors of 100 per cent?
(Mr Cork) For a start, you get the problem you get
with any league tables, that you are only superficially comparing
like with like. If you compare Cambridgeshire and Herefordshire,
for example, you are dealing with two entirely different scenarios.
The sorts of problems that can occur in one area may take much
longer to resolve than the problems that occur in another. You
also get differences in different parts of the country in terms
of staff turnover, which is a significant factor, particularly
at the junior levels. That can have an impact obviously on performance.
Beyond that, I do not have all the figures to hand. You need to
address that to MAFF officials perhaps.
195. I am sure we will.
(Mr Cork) I am sure you will, yes. We recognise that
there are differences but I am not sure that we would accept that
they are sufficiently wide and disparate to say that that automatically
justifies the closure of a particular office and whether that
indeed would actually solve the problem that is at the root of
it.
Mr Drew
196. If I can look at some of the comments of
other organisations, it is fair that both the CLA and the TFA,
whilst liking the concept of Regional Service Centres, were critical
in some respects. The CLA were critical in the sense that they
felt that you were unable to deal with local problems. The TFA
felt that you were somewhat remote. I just wondered how you would
look at those criticisms and answer them.
(Mr Cork) Once again, I am reluctant to answer that
on the part of the department as a whole. I can only speak on
behalf of our members. In terms of the CLA talking about inability
to deal with local problems, it depends very much on what sort
of local problems they are envisaging. That could mean anything.
I am not sure what the view is there really.
197. Clearly, the biggest dilemma is that you
cannot offer advice. You can tell them how to fill the form in,
but you cannot tell them that they should be seeking to pursue
this type of "business" rather than that. That seems
to be a fundamental weakness in the whole system.
(Mr Cork) I am very conscious of that. Members do
say to us that they find that situation frustrating. They would
like to be in a position to be of more help, but they are constrained
by their role as civil servants, having to be impartial, so they
cannot appear to favour one farmer against another, but also having
to be sure that they do not do anything which contravenes the
rules that are laid down for them, the audit requirements and
various other things. It could be a mine field if individual civil
servants started offering individual advice to their customers.
Whether or not it would be a good thing for that to be formally
instituted in some way is for others to comment on and consider,
but it is true to say that staff probably find it almost as frustrating
as the farmers themselves do. There is a clear problem and the
staff recognise what it is but they are not allowed to point that
out to the person they are talking to. It is a difficult area.
198. Are not the two roles of acting effectively
as a policeman in terms of making sure that the system gets value
for money in contradiction to acting as something of an advice
worker, given that there is limited advice you can give, but what
you can give is effectively you are looking two ways at the same
time?
(Mr Cork) It is not necessarily contradictory. I do
not think the staff perceive it in the way you have just described
it. I do not think they feel torn in that respect. They feel perhaps
limited by the constraints that are placed upon them, but I do
not think the majority of staff in the RSCs see themselves as
policing the system in that sense. They see that they have a job
to ensure that the rules of the scheme are adhered to, but that
is slightly different from the enforcement role which perhaps
those doing field inspections might have. When you are actually
dealing with a scheme, I think they tend to regard their role
as being as cooperative as is allowed within the boundaries that
the scheme places upon them. I do not think the conflict is necessarily
there.
199. It is said that we all get the management
we deserve. Have you got the management you deserve?
(Mr Cork) That is a very interesting one. There is
no slick answer to that, because management is not a single thing.
It is a disparate thing. If I were honest, at some levels we have
extremely good management; at other levels it leaves something
to be desired, but that is probably true of any organisation.
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