Examination of witnesses (Questions 180
- 204)
TUESDAY 7 DECEMBER 1999
MR J REES
and MR B PAGE
180. Some people do not have addresses.
(Mr Page) I am quite happy to admit that it probably
underestimates or under-represents people living in hostels, but
as a percentage of the population, they are very small. Bed and
breakfast will be okay, but probably hostels and people sleeping
on the Albert Embankment are not on the People's Panel. I would
not pretend for a minute that it is an accurate survey of homeless
people. It does have, for example, a man who only speaks Cantonese
in Ipswich in it. Where people did not speak English, we would
actually send a translator out and we have looked at the profile
and we have the correct proportion of people in rundown inner
city areas in the sample.
181. Given that there is going to be a census
in 2001, what has the Cabinet Office done about linking the kinds
of question you are doing in the People's Panel into the census
work? If there are other innovative techniques, how do they link
in to what you are doing?
(Mr Page) The demographics we collect on the People's
Panel and indeed are collecting for the question on ethnicity,
on how people define their ethnicity, are consistent on the booster
sample with the census and also obviously the people running the
census are very good at communicating about how they are planning
to ask questions in 2001. We are trying all the time to keep it
consistent with that.
182. You are actually suggesting questions for
the 2001 census.
(Mr Page) No; oh, no. What we are doing is making
sure that questions on the People's Panel, in terms of how we
collect demographic data for example, are consistent so they can
be compared. We are using the same sort of question wording.
183. May I ask the Cabinet Office whether they
are prepared to use the census in 2001 as an addition to the People's
Panel?
(Mr Rees) It is not something we have considered.
It is something we could look at. I should be happy to look at
it.
(Mr Page) Methodologically, there would be a number
of issues. There is a lot of pressure on the census questionnaire
already. I do not run it but I know, I am aware as a researcher
of the issues. They will say you cannot just stick on some other
questions about this, but you could always try.
Mr Browne
184. What is the optimum length of time that
a person should remain on the Panel?
(Mr Page) There is no textbook on this. It depends
very much on how quickly they are becoming conditioned. I would
certainly think two to three years would certainly be the maximum
one would want. If there were evidence of people becoming conditioned
more quickly, one would probably want to keep them there for only
a year. It is about cost again. In a perfect world you need people
there long enough so you can go back to them to find out how their
views have changed. Do you see what I mean? The tradeoff of course
is that you are worried all the time that they are going native.
Three years is a reasonable period.
185. Do you have plans at the moment for turnover?
(Mr Page) Yes.
(Mr Rees) Yes. Clearly of the 5,000 we originally
recruited some will have died, some will have moved away and so
on. There is a constant need to boost them, so we have already
recruited another 500 since last summer. One of the issues for
us is clearly how quickly we want to replace them for the reason
that Mr Page gave. The advantage of a panel is that you can go
back to the same people. So if they are not the same people, it
rather undermines the advantage of a panel. Equally, you must
make sure that you are not overusing them and they are becoming
conditioned. The general view at the moment, and it is one of
the things the evaluation will look at, is that attrition, that
is people dying, people moving away, is more of a problem than
conditioning. That is something we will keep under review.
186. If I have understood you, your measure
for the representativeness of the Panel is the consistency of
its views when benchmarked against other survey data.
(Mr Page) And its demographic and geographic profile.
187. Has this Panel in fact come up with any
surprising information at all? Has it given you answers to any
questions which you could only have got from this type of consultation?
(Mr Rees) The answer to that, whenever you see any
research is, "Oh, yes, that's obvious, isn't it?". What
it has given us is a much better insight, which we can actually
use for certain purposes of international comparisons. For instance
we asked the same questions as the Canadians did in terms of how
quickly people would expect a response to a letter or response
to an e-mail to a government department, a fairly straightforward
task. What it showed is that Canadians have much higher expectations
than people do in this country. That is something which you need
to build into in terms of where you are going. It is not surprising
in the sense of people actually wanting to have responses to letters
quite quickly. There is nothing yet, but we are still asking different
questions, where you say, "Gosh, I'm really surprised by
that". What is more interesting are the distinctions between
regions, Scots being much happier with their public services than
people elsewhere, certainly in England, but also looking for instance
at people in London's views of public services and the differences
between age groups, which again is one of the features that we
can do.
188. May I say at this point as a Scottish politician
who spends part of his life in London, it does not surprise me?
(Mr Rees) What we can do is begin to break down information,
including how recently people have used the services. One of the
things we have always found with public services is that most
people's attitudes relate to the last time they used them. A lot
of the comments on public services come from people who have not
actually used them, have not been to a Benefits Agency or an Employment
Service for years. Again it is one of the factors which we can
take into account, looking at whether attitudes depend on how
recently people have used the service.
Chairman
189. Just to make the point, if after three
waves of research it is still not possible to point to any surprising
data, someone might say £632,000 buys quite a lot of things.
We know it has been pure gain for MORI, but have we had £632,000
of value from this?
(Mr Rees) The answer is that we will evaluate whether
it is cost effective. It has given us information which has helped
inform policy making. £632,000 is a lot of money: it is less
than one quarter per cent of the Cabinet Office's budget.
(Mr Page) May I just take issue with the word "surprising"?
One is not surprised when one reads it but if I had asked you
to fill in a questionnaire and predict what the public's answers
would have been to a number of questions, which we sometimes do
with politicians at a local level who always say they knew what
the answers to the poll would be, very often it may not be "surprising",
but actually the answers which the public give are different from
the ones the politicians themselves might have anticipated. For
example, young people are particularly enthusiastic about elected
mayors. I do not know whether that is surprising but that has
interesting messages for people looking at political structures
in local government.
Mr White: Having been a victim of that, I can
confirm it.
Chairman
190. Part of the difficulty we have with this,
and your Canadian example almost tells us, is that there is a
kind of fascination in knowing how many seconds Canadians would
like to elapse before a benefits officer answers the telephone
compared with how long someone here would like it to be. Would
they like it to be 10 seconds or 20 seconds or 30 seconds? If
you are going off asking those kinds of questions, but not asking
whether people would like to see incapacity benefit means tested,
what are we getting?
(Mr Rees) There is naturally a huge range of questions
which you could ask and it is for Ministers to decide which questions
they want to ask. Having said that, we have a mission to improve
public services. If you want to improve public services you need
to know what people think about them now, you need to know how
that is broken down according to the region of the country so
you can begin to track improvements over time. It is not a simple
step to work out whether we will have made progress towards modernising
government in five years' time. Getting evidence as to what people
think a service is now and what they think in five years' time
is not just simple user satisfaction, because we know that relates
to expectations, but actually whether people think that the standards
of the time they are waiting, the issues like how polite the staff
are, a whole range of different issues, how quickly complaints
are dealt with, is part of building up a picture which we need
to know in order to assess whether this programme we have launched
is actually going to make a difference.
191. Would it be possible for Select Committees
to get questions into the People's Panel?
(Mr Rees) Yes, I see no reason why not, provided you
are prepared to pay?
192. How much would it cost us to get a question
on the People's Panel? If we want to ask one question on the People's
Panel, how much would you charge?
(Mr Rees) I think we would give you one question for
free.
193. Would you?
(Mr Rees) Yes.
194. That is a splendid offer which we shall
snap up and I am sure other Select Committees will also be interested.
(Mr Rees) I do not know how many Select Committees
there are.
195. It is not a frivolous question.
(Mr Rees) No, and I am giving a serious answer. We
have made it clear throughout that we are very happy that people
should make maximum use of it, precisely because this is not rocket
science. To some extent we are learning as we are going along
and therefore if the Committee has an area which it would like
to ask questions on relating to one of your areas of inquiry,
I can see no problem at all.
Chairman: That is very kind of you. We
shall certainly come back to you on that.
Mr Oaten: What about Opposition parties?
Chairman
196. Hang on, let us not press him too hard.
Let us take what we have got so far.
(Mr Rees) Even the Labour Party does not use it, it
is government that uses it.
Mr White
197. Is Modernising Government about improving
policy decision making?
(Mr Rees) You know what the five themes are. Modernising
Government is indeed about improving the way that we make policy,
but it is also about making sure services are more responsive,
higher quality, that we use IT effectively and that all of the
staff who work in the public sector feel empowered and valued.
What the People's Panel is about is clearly that it does contribute
to the policy-making end. It contributes in some sense to trying
to make services more responsive and if we use that information
effectively it will help us have more quality services, using
new technology better.
Chairman
198. May I ask about your evaluation? The evaluation
will obviously ask many of the questions which we are asking this
morning. Your literature says, ". . . we will evaluate it
annually, for at least the first three years of its life".
Who is "we"?
(Mr Rees) We conduct the same process as we did with
MORI in that we have appointed an outside contractor, Evaluations
Associates, who will be responsible for doing the evaluation under
our supervision.
199. So there will be an independent evaluation.
(Mr Rees) Yes.
200. Will that be published?
(Mr Rees) Yes.
201. When shall we see this?
(Mr Rees) We have just appointed them and we asked
them to do the work over the next three months, so I would hope—spring
is what a politician's answer would be—it would actually
be by Easter.
Mr Rees) Part of learning
from experience is indeed to have the evaluation. Very clearly
we do need to find out what people on the panel have thought about
the experience. It is part of our learning to find out whether
they have been conditioned, whether they know about it, but it
is also about what other government departments have thought about
it, whether they have used it, what their experience is. It is
part of our customer responsiveness. We have said we want it to
be a resource across government. We need to find out what other
departments think of the way we are behaving.
203. How does the Cabinet Office itself see
its role in relation to the whole spread of innovative public
participation and consultation exercises? Does it see it as being
the engine within the whole of government for this, or does it
have a looser coordinating, add-on role?
(Mr Rees) The Cabinet Office generally works in three
ways and we work in all three ways in answer to your question.
We run something, so we run the People's Panel; we also challenge
departments and that is what we are going to be doing with things
like the new consumer test; we are also there to spread best practice,
to help fertilise good ideas across departments. That is also
something we will be doing in this area. Part of our responsibility
is indeed to look at what is working and what is not working in
terms of consultation mechanisms, not only in central government
but also local government, tapping into some of the new ideas
that are going on in the NHS with the NHS survey. That is one
of the functions which we do fulfil.
204. I have a sense though that this is unclear
territory, that the extent to which the Cabinet Office really
is the body which is responsible for all this across government
as opposed to simply being a facilitator, enabler, innovator itself,
is genuinely unresolved.
(Mr Rees) There is clearly an awful lot of research
going on and consultation going on across government, so we cannot
be responsible for that; it is for every department to decide
whether it wants to do it as part of its business planning. What
we are responsible for is to try to ensure that departments do
do it and the way we do that is through encouragement but also
a certain degree of asking them to report annually on how they
have engaged their users. That is then information which can be
used by Select Committees and indeed by the public to keep them
up to the mark.
Chairman: We are very grateful to you
for coming and telling us about all this, this morning. We are
grateful for your fine offer of a free question. We think we have
probably done enough to justify a free pen. You have been most
helpful. Thank you very much indeed.
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