Examination of Witnesses (Questions 56
- 59)
TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2000
MR DAVID
DAVIS MP AND
MR ARCHY
KIRKWOOD MP
Chairman
56. Can I apologise for keeping you waiting
for a quarter of an hour. We think we organise our affairs well
with a very simple, short agenda and when you actually come to
deal with the private business it proves rather longer and more
difficult and contentious than was originally thought. Can I welcome
you, Mr David Davis, as Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts,
and Archy Kirkwood, as Chairman of the Committee on Social Security.
We are very grateful to you for being prepared to come and help
us with our inquiry into the use of Section 82. Can I start the
questioning from the chair. Last week we had, of course, the Minister,
Angela Eagle, in front of us and we asked why the Government had
not utilised the traditional method of a paving Bill. The Minister
replied: "Not only is parliamentary time scarce, but so is
Parliamentary Counsel's drafting time." The Minister went
on to add: "Using legislative time ... for purely administrative
expenditure did not seem to us to be, if we were going to do it
a lot"—that is significant - "a reasonable use
of Parliament's time." Can I ask both of you to answer in
turn. Could we begin by looking at why the Government originally
sought Section 82 powers. Do you think it was actually necessary
to grant these powers in this form as opposed to using a paving
Bill or awaiting Royal Assent on the principal legislation?
(Mr Davis) Thank you. Good afternoon
to you. We thought we would get some really difficult questions
as a result of the wait! Let us start with the fact that there
is a real issue here. There is a real issue in terms of making
IT projects work in government. The DSS in particular has a terrible
track record with NIRS2 and all of the other issues that go with
that. They are conflating two problems here. One is the problem
which is at the heart of most of the failures in IT, namely they
do not put enough work into the very first part of understanding
precisely what they are doing in designing software. The other
problem is the pressure on them to deliver on a certain timetable.
So it is an important issue—and I do not deny it is an important
issue—but I do not agree, I have to say, that the argument
put in the Memorandum to you in section 2.5, as well as in the
Minister's evidence to you, is an argument that stands up. Firstly,
how much time are we talking about? A paving Bill, if we are talking
about a paving Bill—and I accept they would perhaps want
to start before the main Bill is through—should be a relatively
uncontroversial Bill. It is fairly straightforward, it has a clear
purpose to it, but it is amendable and, as a result, it gives
powers to the Chamber of the House, to all Members of the House
to actually exercise some influence. So, I do not think it is
quite the pressure on the timetable that it is claimed to be.
I cannot imagine a paving Bill for something like this running
for a long time. It could be got through in a few hours on the
floor of the House with everybody having a say to it. The second
thing, however, is that I think the Department has been a little
less than clear in its own thinking in terms of the types of expenditure
it is already allowed. There are various categories of expenditure—preliminary
and preparatory expenditure. What Section 82 is about is allowing
preparatory expenditure. The preliminary expenditure in the definition
by the Treasury is expenditure for scoping or pilot work or detailed
implications of policy. They were allowed up to £500,000
on that until recently when it went up to £900,000. Nobody
approached the Committee of Public Accounts or me to say, "Could
we make it £2 million?" because if they had said, "In
order to prevent some of these IT disasters, could we make this
£2 million for IT projects?" I suspect I would have
recommended to the Committee of Public Accounts that that would
be a better way to do it because that allows a small amount money
to be used for a very narrowly defined and specific purpose. My
judgment is that this was an unnecessary change and delivered,
you may remember, in a very difficult way because it was not debated
and it was one that fell within the guillotine. You may remember
the reason that we were able to even get the procedure we have
now arose from my raising a point of order, the first point of
order under the new procedure as it turned out, at the end of
business when we were voting, during the division. To be fair
to Stephen Timms, though, he did arrange to meet both Archy Kirkwood
and myself. The issue was not debated properly, not thought through
properly and, in my judgment, was probably unnecessary.
57. Can I bring our discussion to a halt. There
is now a division in the Commons. I am obliged to suspend this
meeting for ten minutes. Can I ask everyone to be back within
ten minutes then, Mr Kirkwood, it will be your turn to respond.
(Mr Kirkwood) It will give me time to think of something
to say.
Chairman: I do not think that will be difficult
in your case!
The Committee was suspended from 16.50 to
17.01 for a division in the House
Chairman
58. Can we resume. Mr Davis, you had answered
the first question. Mr Kirkwood, as Chairman of the Social Security
Select Committee, over to you.
(Mr Kirkwood) I do accept, Chairman, that contracts
of this kind are unusual, but if the question is was it necessary
in this case, frankly, the answer is no because the contract was
eventually only signed after Royal Assent for the Child Support
legislation that it was seeking to prepare for. There was no need
at all, in fact, for the Department to take a Section 82 activity
through the House at all. My view, and I concur with what David
Davis was saying earlier, is that a project of the scale of replacing
the Child Support Agency's computers occurs very rarely. It is
a major piece of information technology re-engineering. I think
it is the kind of event that you could anticipate happening once
every ten years or so. If that is the case, and it is difficult
to disentangle what expenditure the Department is engaging in
with the Affinity Group because they are a supplier of choice,
the Department is working closely with them to try and work out
projects and there are good reasons for that which we understand,
the totality of the ICT contracts that the Department may be entering
into in the next couple of years may be as much as £2.5 billion,
so it is a huge amount of money. This was certainly a first and
very significant step. You could perfectly well argue, in my view,
that a paving Bill would have been a more elegant way and transparent
way to proceed. I suppose the DSS as a Department is unique because
it is forced to use technology as it does all its work through
technology. I think Ministers are right to identify the lack of
adequate technology as one of their main problems and they are
addressing that as quickly as they can. If they are going to resort
to Section 82 procedures every year in order to address these
matters, then I, for one, would be very, very nervous about that.
The Child Support computer was a separate case and I think in
retrospect they did not need it, but if they felt they did need
it, they should have brought forward a paving Bill. I agree with
David Davis on cause shown, working with the House closely and
the Committees closely, that we could have seen it through in
a very short space of time indeed.
59. Your answers, gentlemen, dovetail very well
into my next question. Please could you describe the discussions
between your respective Committees and the Government during the
passage of the Welfare Reform and Pensions Bill. Did you feel
that the Government were receptive to input from the two Committees?
(Mr Davis) I can answer very briefly. We saw the proposal
and passed it straight on to the Social Security Committee because
really they had the expertise in this area. It was not one where
we had a great deal of interface with the Government.
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