Select Committee on Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witness (Questions 360 - 379)

TUESDAY 11 APRIL 2000

MR MICHAEL FITZGERALD QC

  360. What about the Inspector who has made the illogical and unclear report in the first place, what happens to him or her?
  (Mr FitzGerald) From the material we have seen they are involved in the monitoring of that complaint and if that complaint is found to be justified then that is, as it were, an adverse mark against that Inspector, yes.

  361. Do you think there are any new indicators that may be used in your assessment?
  (Mr FitzGerald) Not by us. By "indicators", if you are meaning some other way of assessing in any numerical way then I think the answer is no unless somebody does come up with a more sophisticated way, such as the CPRE were advising you on. We would be interested in looking at that.

Mrs Dunwoody

  362. It all sounds very comfortable, if you will forgive me for saying so. "We do not have the time to do a number of things, we do as much as we can in the time that is given to us and we assess the quality of the man's mind", because it will nearly always be a man, women never have their minds assessed on them being of good mind. Forgive me, it sounds a little bit, I would hate to use the word incestuous, a little too close for comfort.
  (Mr FitzGerald) I very much hope it is not. I would be quite surprised if when you asked the Chief Inspector he was to say that they felt, if you like, cosy with us. We are, I like to think, perceptive, we are persistent, and if we do not get the information we want we jolly well say so.

  363. It is a bit difficult to be persistent when you are spending an average of about ten minutes on each case, is it not? I am by nature persistent and that sometimes means I keep worrying at things for some years. Persistence is a moveable feast.
  (Mr FitzGerald) I take the point but I do not think it would be quite right to look at it in terms of ten minutes only per case.

  364. Forgive me, given the numbers of cases you look at are you comfortable with the time that you are able to spend because some of these are terribly subjective judgments: "We have looked at the way the man has made the decision, we think it is a good decision because the quality of the mind behind the decision is clear". If you do that on a ten minute time span you are not spending a lot of time examining the quality of the intelligence behind the decision, are you?
  (Mr FitzGerald) We believe that we are spending enough time. We are actually quite happy with what we are looking at. We are able to appreciate it swiftly enough and understand what the Inspectorate is saying about that decision. If you are asking me would we feel better if we could look at every single decision—

  365. No, I am saying have you, for instance, said to them "if we did two extra sessions we could cover even more?" How do you do it, do you do it on a random basis?
  (Mr FitzGerald) We started off by examining every single decision which had excited a justified complaint and assessed to see whether those complaints were justified and whether the categorisation between significant and insignificant was justified. That was a major exercise and that took a lot of time and a lot of work. We also looked at the ones that had been decided as not justified. So we looked at a percentage of those. There were 400 and something of those, so we took a percentage of those to see whether we thought they were properly categorised as not justified. In the following years after that we did 25 per cent only of those, we did not do the whole lot.

  366. You have taken a base line and you have not changed the way that you operate from the base line. Have the complaints gone up or down?
  (Mr FitzGerald) They have remained surprisingly static. They have slightly gone up but I think that is more because there is a propensity to complain than it is about the quality of the decisions.

  367. So you have not looked at whether the method of complaining is clear to these people who might be worried about a particular decision?
  (Mr FitzGerald) Yes, we have. We are satisfied that the mechanism exists to enable people who have a complaint to register it and it is then duly processed by the Inspectorate.

  368. You are never worried about the bulk, the numbers of cases that you have to deal with and the amount of time you have to give to them?
  (Mr FitzGerald) No. We are satisfied that we are able to do that sufficiently in the time available to us.

Mr Brake

  369. You said that complaints have gone up but that is because the propensity to complain has increased. What evidence have you got to support that?
  (Mr FitzGerald) None, except that seems to be a logical conclusion given that the standard of the decision letters read more or less the same from year to year. In other words, the Inspectorate's training standards—this is where I pay them some credit—do indeed produce a product which is consistent. You could say consistent in producing X number of complaints a year, about one per cent of justified complaints a year, but that is really all it is, it is always around one or other side of the one per cent mark. The reason why it increases at any one time is in more recent years I believe it is logical that people are being encouraged to complain more. The Citizen's Charter and the fact the Inspectorate themselves are becoming more approachable and actually seeking people to comment upon their work has helped in that. I think that is a comforting factor myself.

Mr Olner

  370. To follow on this theme of questioning. Are you really happy that a total of 75 out of 1,900 complaints provide an adequate sample on which to base your assessment of quality?
  (Mr FitzGerald) No, I am not.

  371. Is this a random 75?
  (Mr FitzGerald) That is a very good point. I am not at all satisfied with that. We have made it clear from the very earliest of our Annual Reports that we do not think complaints is really the right way of assessing quality. It is an assessment and it has value. It has value because firstly it does identify whether there are any trends in the Inspectorate that need to be arrested. At one time there were a lot of complaints about site visits, for example, so the Inspectorate took that point and make it clear to Inspectors what they should do on their site visits and those complaints have gone down. It is useful in that regard but it does not really tell you very much about the quality of the decision because the complainants I guess nine times out of ten—there are statistics on this—are the people who have, as it were, failed in some planning case or other and they are more naturally liable to complain than those who have succeeded. It does not tell you whether the decision is a good or a bad one.

  372. Can I put it to you that the Inspectorate's Quality Assurance Unit has laundered, to put it mildly, some of the things that come to you as an unjustified complaint or an Inspector's planning judgment that could be questionable. Are you happy with the Inspectorate's Quality Assurance Unit?
  (Mr FitzGerald) We are very much on the look-out for that. I say that because when we were first set up in 1993 there was a great apprehension about us in the Inspectorate and we found it quite difficult sometimes in the early days to really get answers to the questions that we wanted. We persisted with that and made it absolutely clear that we were determined to have that and were adverse in our criticisms when we did not. Over the years I am absolutely satisfied now that the Quality Assurance Unit is completely open in everything that it gives us and, indeed, answers our questions very quickly indeed. Whether they launder things, the answer is they cannot launder in this sense: in so far as one is looking at complaints we have the whole file, we have the complainant's file, we have the letters of complaint, we have the whole correspondence.

Mrs Dunwoody

  373. But you have got ten minutes for the whole file.
  (Mr FitzGerald) We can read that.

  374. You are all speed readers to a man.
  (Mr FitzGerald) I am sure, like hon. Members, we are very quick readers, yes. We have to be. Seriously, some take longer than others. I do not think it is right to look at it on an average basis, with respect, because some will take longer.

  375. Some might take 15 minutes.
  (Mr FitzGerald) Some might indeed take an hour and we discuss some of them as well.

Mr Olner

  376. Have you ever come to a different conclusion from the Inspectorate's Quality Assurance Unit?
  (Mr FitzGerald) Yes, we have.

  377. How many times?
  (Mr FitzGerald) I do not have the statistics on this but I would guess probably a couple of times in looking at these decisions we question the way along the line the QAU has categorised something either as significant or insignificant.

  378. A couple out of 75 out of 1,900 means that there might be an awful lot getting through that have been wrongly categorised.
  (Mr FitzGerald) I am not a statistician but I think it is not a bad percentage actually. If you get a consistent message from 75 out of that, that is not a bad statistic.

Christine Butler

  379. How satisfied are you that the PINS' treatment of complaints remains at a "high standard" in view of the "significant discrepancies" you discovered last year in the Inspectorate's assessment of unjustified complaints?
  (Mr FitzGerald) That was a point we made last year, thank you, and indeed as part answer to an hon. Member a moment ago. That was a bit of a first for us. We had not quite come across a distinction in that categorisation before and we were slightly alarmed about it. We raised it directly with the Inspectorate and we put it in our report. I would regard that as very much a shot across the bows so that if the QAU is trying to pull the wool over our eyes in some way we are on to that and we will have a jolly good look this year.



 
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