Examination of Witness (Questions 834
- 839)
WEDNESDAY 17 JANUARY 2001
MR GEOFF
MULGAN, MR
JAMIE RENTOUL
MR STEPHEN
ALDRIDGE, MS
ANN STEWARD
MR BOB
EVANS AND
MR STEFAN
CZERNIAWKSI
Chairman
834. Could I welcome our witnesses, on behalf
of the Committee, and thank you very much for coming along and
helping us with our general inquiry into making government work.
I would particularly like to welcome Geoff Mulgan who is the Director
of the Performance and Innovation Unit, and Ann Steward who is
the Director of e-Government in the Office of the e-Envoy, and
supporting cast. I understand that perhaps the two of you would
like to say something by way of introduction. If so, by all means
do.
(Mr Mulgan) Yes. First of all, I would
like to thank you for the invitation. We are very grateful for
the chance to take part in what has been a fascinating series
of deliberations. I want to make a couple of points by way of
introduction. First of all, I would like to say that I have only
actually been in my current post for about four months, which
is one of the reasons why I have brought along two colleagues—Jamie
Rentoul and Stephen Aldridge—who have worked in PIU since
its creation and therefore can answer some questions more authoritatively
than I can. Secondly, as the paper which has been circulated to
you I hope makes clear, we see our role very much as being about
achieving practical change on the ground. We are not in the business
just of producing reports, and the memorandum sets out some of
the results that have already been achieved by PIU projects in
the past. The focus on implementation and results is absolutely
essential to where we are going as a unit. The final thing to
say is that we are, in a sense, an innovation as a unit, and attempt
to be self-critical, to be willing to learn, to recognise where
we are not getting things right. I would very much welcome your
feedback, your contribution to what is for us a continuing process
of trying to improve our work.
835. Thank you very much for that. Ms Steward?
(Ms Steward) Thank you. Again, can I thank you very
much for the opportunity to come and be part of the session here
this afternoon. We have provided a short memorandum on my areas
of activity and what I have responsibility for. I thought it might
be useful to give you a flavour of the progress that has been
made since we launched e-Government in April of last year. Perhaps
I could focus on about three areas and introduce those. We went
live with our Citizen Portal in December of last year. That is
an important initiative that the Government has taken on board.
That really is about our efforts to join up government information
content on the Internet and so to make it easier for citizens
to gain access to government information, and then, in support
of that, to enable the citizens to have secure transactions. We
are also working on what we call the Government Gateway, a piece
of infrastructure to help bridge the back office and the front
web-facing services to citizens. Finally, I think, on the progress
that we are making overall in terms of our online services, our
report that was released yesterday indicates that 40 per cent
of those services we have identified as being able to be put online
are actually online now. Thank you.
836. Thank you very much for that introduction.
Perhaps I could kick off with some general questions. I think,
Geoff Mulgan, you are a unique resource for this Committee, because
you have been thinking about the public sector and how it works,
and should work, for these many years in different roles. I would
like, if we could, to tap into that, to help us with our thinking.
I must say, I did stumble across a splendid article you wrote
just ten years ago, in 1991, in that late-lamented journal Marxism
Today, where you say this: "Public sector remains in
the midst of a profound long-term crisis that will dominate the
politics of the 1990s as much as the 1980s. The root causes of
this crisis are economic, the interaction of a remorseless rise
in the cost of providing services and steadily growing demands."
Is that still your view on the central problem that the public
sector faces?
(Mr Mulgan) I think public sectors around the world
probably do still face precisely those tasks. The unit I now run
is responsible for trying, in a small way, to address two parts
of that. One is how to increase the performance of Government
as a whole within limited resources. In addition, what was not
emphasised in that quotation is that Government has to innovate,
to become more enterprising, more imaginative in its use of its
own resources, its people, its structures. It is a long time since
I wrote that article.
837. No, it is a splendid article. It is unfair
and horrible when people take you back to things you have written
before, but in this case it seems to me to be entirely illuminating
of where we are now. The reason I asked that question is obviously
the approach that you bring to thinking about Government and about
how it operates; it is obviously structured by what you think
Government is, and what you think the central tasks are that it
has to get hold of. If the central task is somehow to resolve
that dilemma that you identified, then how you approach state
services will be entirely different if you identify the task as
being rather different, so it is rather important to know whether
you still attach yourself to that broader view of what you think
Government is all about.
(Mr Mulgan) I should say that in my current role I
am commissioned with specific tasks by the Prime Minister, by
Government as a whole, and we as a unit work according to briefs
which we are given. Most of the PIU's work, as you will see from
the document, is to do with fairly discrete policy issues like
adoption, or renewable energy which we are working on at the moment,
and some structural issues within Government like the organisation
of regional offices. That is, broadly speaking, the main business
of the PIU and will be for the foreseeable future, working very
much on a project basis on specific issues where hopefully over
relatively short periods of time—our projects tend to be
completed within six to nine months—we can make significant
breakthroughs in understanding of the issues and come up with
very specific recommendations which can be fairly quickly put
into effect. So to that extent, we are part of a rather pragmatic
approach to policy-making; we are not particularly in the business
of creating grand visions or grand analyses of the tasks facing
Government. I think our value-added, and the test for us, is whether,
on those practical projects, we really do achieve advances.
838. I understand that, but your argument was,
it seems to me—I was convinced by it—that unless one
had a grand vision, then pragmatic initiatives would come to nought,
because they had to be consistent with this broader view of what
the public sector wants. I can see I am not going to press you
very much further on that. What I do want to know is, again as
someone who is doing it now, but having thought about it for a
long time, broadly speaking—and you are among friends, you
can talk to us—what is your analysis of what is wrong with
the way that we do Government now and in the past, for which initiatives
like your own are designed to be a remedy?
(Mr Mulgan) My opinions have not greatly changed since
being outside Government, and I think they are probably fairly
widely shared. Much of the rationale behind the creation of units
like the PIU, the SEU, and many of the reforms which have taken
place in recent years, have been trying to address a series of
problems, things which are seen to be failing in the system: insufficient
capacity to innovate, to be entrepreneurial, to be able to link
in to the best thinking in the rest of British society and indeed
worldwide; capacity to reform; to be efficient, to use resources
in ways that actually meet customers' needs rather than the needs
of producers; a culture which to some extent was not sufficiently
reflecting British society as it currently is in terms of diversity
of employment and a whole series of other aspects. One of the
big themes which again has been talked about for many years, one
of the big critiques of Government in practice is that it is short-termist
in its behaviour, as are politicians and ministers, and a high
long-term price is paid for that. So in all of those respects
I think there is a fairly widely shared analysis of some of the
things which are wrong within Government and within the public
sector as a whole, which a whole host of different reforms and
institutions, including the PIU, are trying to address, as indeed
is the e-Envoy Office. Only time will tell how successful they
are, whether they are going far enough or, indeed, whether the
analysis is absolutely spot on, but I think a lot of progress
is being made, and that progress can only be made because there
is a widely shared analysis of what is wrong.
839. The word is that you are the person who
gave us the term "joined-up Government" for which you
either deserve enormous credit or discredit. Could you tell us
whether we had unjoined-up Government before, and also how we
are to do it?
(Mr Mulgan) I think it is a rather ugly phrase "joined-up
Government", and I am not certain that I did in fact coin
it. Much of what Government has to do has to be organised in vertical
structures, with clear lines of accountability, functionally divided
structures, but it has very long been recognised, back to Haldane
and indeed before, that many of the tasks which Government has
to address in our current era—issues such as small firms
competitiveness, social exclusion, the environment, the family—do
not fit well into those functional, vertical hierarchies; that
the needs of citizens are not easily sliced up into those functional
silos, and that therefore in some fields, and in a variety of
different ways, Government needs to operate more horizontally,
more joined up, more holistically—you can use whatever language
you like. That can sometimes be achieved through the ways in which
budgets are structured; it can sometimes be achieved through the
ways in which ministerial responsibilities are structured; it
can sometimes be achieved through the ways in which particular
things like technology are organised across departmental boundaries;
and sometimes it can be addressed through creating units either
in the centre of Government or within departments, but which have
a cross-cutting remit covering fields beyond their traditionally
set departmental boundary. All of those different tools are currently
being used to try to make Government more joined up than it has
been in the past. Inevitably those horizontal aspects have to
co-exist with what is still primarily a set of vertical structures
responsible for delivering services and achieving results in very
clearly defined areas. This is not a specifically UK debate and
discussion; other governments all around the world have been grappling
with the same issues. Past British Governments have tried to be
more joined up in different ways and with varying degrees of success,
and I am sure that in ten or 15 years' time your equivalents and
my equivalents will still be grappling with how to achieve it.
It is clearly very difficult to achieve the right balance between
the horizontal and the vertical.
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