Examination of witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
TUESDAY 11 JULY 2000
SIR DAVID
OMAND, KCB, MR
ROBERT FULTON
and MR STEPHEN
BOYS SMITH
20. There is no possibility it could all be
centralised in the new building?
(Sir David Omand) Even the Marsham Street site would
not be big enough to take all the Croydon staff. Nor would it
really make sense in terms of the travel-to-work area of the staff
in Croydon.
Mr Fabricant
21. It could take the Passport Office, surely.
(Sir David Omand) It would be pushed to take that.
The Passport Agency have already made plans for their London office
involving another site, which in the context of their development
looked good value for money.
Mr Howarth
22. In the meantime, you are conscious, I am
sure you are, that this building is a drain on your resources
to the tune of a million pounds a year, and the sooner you get
on with it the better.
(Sir David Omand) Very much so, and since it is a
privately financed development it will be in the developer's interest
to complete the demolition and complete the reconstruction as
quickly as possible, because their stream of revenue depends on
their being able to let that space.
Chairman
23. I am still confused, Sir David. Why is it
you are picking up the tab for the security of 2 Marsham Street?
Why did that not stay with the DoE until it got redeveloped?
(Sir David Omand) This was an arrangement we made
with PACE, the agency which looks after Government property, since
we were the preferred occupier of that site, which was validated
by an intergovernmental review of inner London accommodation,
which came to the conclusion that the Home Office had the best
claim on the site.
24. Who would have met that bill if you had
said no, you were not going to do it?
(Sir David Omand) PACE would have had to pick up that
bill.
25. Sounds very attractive to me, though.
(Sir David Omand) They would, indeed, having been
trying to sell the site. We came up with an imaginative scheme
involving the private sector.
Bob Russell
26. You bought an option, basically?
(Sir David Omand) Yes, we paid for the option of taking
the site. We certainly did not want the site reassigned to anyone
else which would have torpedoed our careful approach to the private
sector.
Mr Fabricant
27. Will you get key money when the property
in Queen Anne's Gate is sold off? You lease that, at the moment,
you said, but will you be able to sell the lease on? Will you
actually make from the sale of that property?
(Sir David Omand) No, we will not make any money.
We will make money from the buildings we own, which will be sold,
but, of course, that is factored into the financing of the rebuild
of Marsham Street. That is one of the things that makes it economically
viable and, indeed, produces a value for money solution.
Mr Howarth
28. Returning to the productivity targets, Sir
David, do you envisage that the Treasury is going to require you
to produce further productivity savings of this order year-in,
year-out? If so—and you have already mentioned the fact
that you are extracting more work out of the same number of staff—do
you envisage that this may lead to greater stress amongst your
staff, with consequent additional cost?
(Sir David Omand) On the first part of your question,
and without prejudice to the outcome of the spending review that
is currently in progress, I would be confident in assuming that
we will continue to have to produce year-on-year efficiency savings,
and that is factored into our planning. On the second part of
the question, we are moving from a phase of our productivity strategy
which is about doing more with what we have to one where we are
investing in new ways of working and in new technology to support
the business of Government. The bringing in of a private sector
partner to provide our IT business change services will open up
considerable opportunities for efficiency. The biggest single
step change will be when we occupy the new building and we can
organise our staffs and necessary secretarial and support services
in an efficient way. Running six buildings with six separate sets
of security staff and messenger staff and so on, is not the most
efficient way to run a department.
29. Can we move on to the question of ethnic
minority recruitment and retention. Can you tell us a little bit
about what your policy is here?
(Sir David Omand) Yes. We have set targets for recruitment,
retention and promotion in the Home Office and in Home Office
services, to ensure that we genuinely live what we say about being
an equal opportunities employer and about being a beacon of best
practice in race equality. This is an area where I have taken
a personal lead with my management board in making it clear at
all levels in the Home Office that we have to improve our performance
in the treatment of those of our staff from ethnic minorities.
We depend on them enormously for our work. The figures show that
if you take the London and Croydon offices, one-fifth of my staff
declare themselves as coming from an ethnic minority background.
Mr Winnick
30. All staff?
(Sir David Omand) Yes. Which is a very high proportion,
and I welcome it. These are the same staff who have been reporting
to us, through focus groups and surveys, that in the past they
have felt under-valued, they have felt that they have been discriminated
against in the Department's promotion procedures and in development.
We are determined to change that. So we have a programme, stretching
through the Office from the very top downwards, to change that,
and the setting of targets for recruitment, promotion and retention
is part of our checking that we are actually achieving what we
say we intend to achieve.
Mr Howarth
31. Is there not a risk here that you might
be misreading the signs? That it is very easy for somebody who
is black to suggest they were overlooked for an appointment on
the grounds of their colour, whereas somebody who is not black
may well not necessarily ascribe their lack of promotion to their
racial background; they may just say "I was not up to it",
whereas, partly because of all the hype in the media, there is,
I suggest, quite a lot of pressure on those from ethnic minorities
to be encouraged to believe they were discriminated against. Are
you alive to that risk?
(Sir David Omand) I recognise the point you are making.
I would have to say I disagree with that analysis. My personal
experience of looking at cases that come to me on appeal or grievance
is that too often poor management in the workplace has led to
difficulties between the predominantly white managers and black
and Asian staff, who have not felt that they have been accorded
equal treatment. Some of this is anecdotal, but there is enough
of it to convince me that we have a problem. The second part of
my answer would be to look at the figures for promotions in the
past. What we do is we look at the pool of eligible candidates
and look at its composition, and then we look at the result of
the board to see whether those coming through the board are on
a statistical basis within the margin of error you would expect
if you were selecting fairly. That gives a reasonable indication
as to whether the promotion process is containing unconscious
cultural or other bias. Since we started equality-proofing our
processes—training those who sit on promotion boards, checking
all the written material, and looking at the description of the
competencies by which we describe the nature of individual jobs—we
have been very pleased to see that our promotion process is now,
we regard, fair, and increasingly staff are beginning to accept
that it is fair. I think that is a great step forward.
32. Some people might suggest that the Home
Office, and, indeed, perhaps, this Government, is completely obsessed
with racial matters. I wonder how you would respond to the suggestion
that if 20 per cent of your staff are from ethnic minorities that
is a rather higher average then the proportion that they represent
in the population, and, therefore, you might be reducing them
and having a drive to recruit more white people. Would that be
part of your policy?
(Sir David Omand) No.
33. Why not?
(Sir David Omand) We are part of the Civil Service
and part of our ethos is recruitment on merit through open competition,
and we will continue to apply that very firmly. I am delighted
that members of staff from ethnic minority backgrounds choose
to stay with us in the Home Office. We find this encourages staff
to come and work for us. The problem comes when we look at the
numbers who make it through to the managerial grades, where far
from being 20 per cent, by the time you get to the Senior Civil
Service you are around 2 per cent. That is explicable if you look
at the historical analysis, but it would not be a situation I
would be comfortable with if, in five years' time, I discovered
the figures had not changed. Something serious would have gone
wrong, at that stage. If I may put it in the context of a private
sector manager, any manager who has a significant proportion of
staff reporting, through as objective surveys as we can make them,
that they feel under-valued, has a problem. I think to ignore
that is to make a serious business error, quite apart from the
moral issues that are involved.
34. The point I am making is that your Department,
in particular, is setting targets for police recruitment, for
example, and you have told us you are setting targets for recruitment
here. What I am suggesting to you is that this is a one-way ratchet;
that if the ethnic minorities are under-represented then you must
have a drive to recruit more, but if they are over-represented
then you have no answer. You say "I want to encourage that".
(Sir David Omand) No—
35. In other words, what you are working towards
is a policy of positive discrimination. I accept entirely your
point about recruitment on merit, but you are looking to increase
the proportion of ethnic minorities as a policy, not simply up
to the figure that they represent as part of the overall population.
(Sir David Omand) If I may say, I think your question
betrays an approach which is one of positive discrimination, or
perhaps negative discrimination. By approaching this on the basis
of the Civil Service code that we recruit on merit, we are not
altering our standards up or down. That is the first part of our
policy. The second is to look at how our staff composition matches
that of the natural recruiting pool, which will be different in
different parts of the country, different from each other. Where
we see that we are not reflecting what is clearly the pattern
in that part of society, we have to ask ourselves why. Is it because
we are discouraging particular people from coming forward from
certain groups in society?
36. I accept that, but where there are more
ethnic minority people in your business, way over the number in
the community at large, then perhaps, if you are going to be intellectually
consistent, you would say "Yes, we must recruit more white
people, because we have got an over-predominance of ethnic minority
people in this area".
(Sir David Omand) Were we to get to that situation
then that is an argument I would have to face.
37. It looks like that argument—let us
not pursue this any further.
(Sir David Omand) Not if you were to take the recruiting
areas from which you are recruiting.
38. May I put a final point to you on this issue?
The Minister of State, Mr O'Brien, described your department as
being "institutionally racist", which seems to be a
fashionable expression to bandy around. Given that you say that
you are rather pleased with the work that you have been doing
to meet the concerns of ethnic minority staff, would you agree
with the Minister that your department is "institutionally
racist"?
(Sir David Omand) I should, first, correct, I think,
on behalf of Mike O'Brien, your summary of the article that he
wrote, from which that headline was taken. Members who wish to
check the record will find a copy of the article in the library,
which was a more sophisticated argument than the one that has
been put to me.
39. He used the expression "institutionally
racist"—
(Sir David Omand) He used the expression and I have
used that expression as well, as has the Home Secretary. I think
the question I invite the Committee to look at is how does an
institution in Britain today demonstrate that it is not institutionally
racist?
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