Examination of Witness (Questions 930
- 939)
THURSDAY 24 OCTOBER 2002
PROFESSOR TERESA
REES
Chairman
930. Can I welcome our next witness, who is
Professor Rees from Wales, who has been doing a lot of work for
the Welsh Assembly on public appointments issues, both diversity
issues and more generally, and we want to draw from her experience
of the wider public appointments picture. Thank you for letting
us see some of the material you have produced. Would you like
to say something by way of introduction?
(Professor Rees) Thank you very much
for inviting me. I welcome this opportunity to talk about what
is going on in Wales, because I think it is quite exciting. The
place to start, I think, is to say that the legislation that set
up the National Assembly for Wales had a clause in it which said
that everything the Assembly did should pay due regard to equality
of opportunity. There was another clause which basically said
there should be proper structures and mechanisms to make sure
that the Assembly could deliver on that objective of having due
regard. So this duty of having due regard is paid very serious
attention in Wales. It is in effect a statutory obligation to
promote equality, which exists in Northern Ireland and does not
exist in England, Scotland or in GB as a whole. This is delivered
through a cross-cutting Equality of Opportunity Committee which
is all-party. What is interesting is that the individual politicians
of all parties appear to be very committed to this clause. You
will be aware, I am sure, that 42 per cent of the Members of the
Assembly, (which has 60 Members), are women, which is, outside
two Swedish regional assemblies, the best gender balance of any
national or regional government in Europe. It is also the case
that five out of the nine Cabinet members of the National Assembly
for Wales are women, which as I understand it is unprecedented
in the world, as far as I can establish. So you have that gender
balance, which I think means that there is a particular interest
in this whole issue. The Assembly itself is by its words and deeds
very committed to participatory democracy and to social inclusion.
At the time the Assembly was set up, we had a situation where
it was post-Nolan, and there was a movement towards having independent
assessors. I myself was appointed as an independent assessor post
Nolan by the old Welsh Office, but it was the case that patronage
was regarded as the norm and ministerial appointments were administered
in the normal way for that period. So the Assembly has been quite
committed to cultural change in the whole area of public appointments,
and trying to open up the Assembly Sponsored Public Bodies, in
essence, not simply to try to get a more diverse group of people
putting themselves forward and being accepted for public appointments,
but to modernising public service in Wales more generally. This
participatory democracy is simply one element of that. It is worth
mentioning also, I think, that Wales was dubbed at this time "Quango-land"—I
think we had more quangos per square inch than other parts of
the UK—so it was a particular issue. When I became an independent
assessor in the mid-Nineties, it was clear to me that the civil
servants in the Welsh Office—and I have no reason to believe
they were any different from any other part of the Civil Service—were
not experienced in making appointments per se. They did not have
that system of appointment to public appointments or indeed to
their own Civil Service. There was also not much cross-learning
across departments. If you think of the old Welsh Office as a
mini-Whitehall in a sense, because all the different functions
were covered, each department was developing its own new trajectory
and way of dealing with things. That was the situation. What has
happened since then I think has been a very concerted effort to
improve the professionalism of the public appointments system.
There was a raising awareness week with Dame Rennie Fritchie,
a building up of the list of people reflecting the Public Appointments
Unit in London's own list and trying to ensure that there was
better gender balance and so on on that, moving towards advertising
appointments, and slightly jollier advertisements are now to be
seen than the ones in the early years, ones that say, "Do
you have these competencies? Are you interested in the National
Health Service? There is a chance for you." So rather more
exciting advertisements perhaps. A lot of advice was sought from
the various statutory equality agencies and the voluntary sector
on how to get a wider range of people to put themselves forward.
The scoping exercise you have a copy of, which was really a bit
of a brainstorm on some lines of approach to try to widen this
up, and there have been other pieces of work too, like Morgan's
report on the representativeness of the various communities. There
has been a consultation on the remuneration and expenses, and
much more use of the Internet in trying to convey information
about opportunities. The independent assessors such as myself
have all been sacked, because we were appointed by the "tap
on the shoulder" method, which was an in-built paradox, to
my way of thinking. That has come to an end, and now if you want
to be an independent assessor for the National Assembly, you need
to respond to an advertisement which is coming out next week,
and I myself will be responding and I am sure lots of other existing
assessors will be responding, and we will be vetted and trained
and professionalised in that way. Another initiative that has
been taken forward is the introduction of more elements on citizenship
into the National Curriculum in Wales to try and instil in young
people the notion that this is part of what they might do as an
adult. A number of ideas have emerged from all this. With your
permission, I will just mention them briefly. The first I think
is progression routes. We quite often see, for example, people
becoming involved in school governing bodies who, when their individual
child has left that school, are in a sense lost to public service,
and we feel in that sort of situation some of these people might
be harnessed and encouraged to move into another layer or tier
of public service, perhaps by applying for a public appointment.
So the issue of progression routes is one that we are quite interested
in. Also, the use of independent assessors: at the moment it is
my view that they are rather under-used. They are keen, they are
willing, sometimes they are only called once or twice a year,
they come from all over Wales, they are fairly diverse—hopefully
they will be even more diverse after this recruitment exercise.
We have been suggesting that they could go out into the highways
and byways of Wales, making connections with voluntary organisations
and so on, and doing presentations to those members of those organisations,
encouraging them and informing them about opportunities for public
service in this way. We have looked at work-shadowing, for example:
attending board meetings and opening up some of those meetings
to people who do not really know what goes on behind these doors.
We have discovered enormous ignorance really about the whole issue
of public appointments and public service and what goes on. I
think the ignorance is a major barrier to all sorts of people
participating. The use of head-hunters is a very contentious issue
on the equality angle. My own view is that as long as they are
properly briefed to go out and look for diverse heads, there is
nothing wrong with using them. It is when they are in effect rather
lazy, and rely on existing networks and knowledge that they have,
that tendency to be rather restricted in their characteristics,
that it can become a problem. The issue of retention I think is
also important. I was very interested in the debate about performance
appraisal and review. That is all part of the agenda in Wales
for modernising public service, but how do you also keep good
people? Also, I think the issue that was raised about how you
assess competencies. You might be a very good, competent person
who had been at home for many years looking after children and
developed competencies in stress management, multi-tasking, all
these things that are essential for this kind of existence—how
do we draw those people in? There has been an enormous change
in the forms used from the mid Nineties, which asked you to list,
for example, your marital status, the name of your wife and her
maiden name and to list your medals. We have moved on from that
now to a situation where we ask people to look at the competencies
required for the post and to explain how they have them. The Assembly
emphasizes in the forms that these may come from being at home
looking after children or sick relatives, they may come from voluntary
sector activity or from employment. It is not presumed that only
people with traditional forms of employment will have these competencies.
That is very much emphasized. I think we have to look at the enigma
of merit and potential. As a social scientist, I would want to
deconstruct these terms and say, "What is it we really are
trying to get at here?" and we like head hunters must not
be lazy and read off from a person's career that they must have
or must induce that they must have these characteristics because
they have had that career or because they have been on 19 public
bodies already—they may have been terrible! That is the
way in which the debate is developing: a search for these competencies,
not how they were acquired. There is one particular appointment
that maybe, if you were interested, I would like to have the opportunity
to describe at some stage, and that was the appointment of the
Children's Commissioner in Wales, which I believe does not exist
elsewhere in the United Kingdom at the moment, where children
from care were involved in the appointments process. Seventeen
children took part in this. Some of them had learning difficulties.
They were not a statistically representative sample of children
in care, but they were a cross-section. As the independent assessor
on that appointment, I was asked for my advice on how to involve
children. I found this very unnerving and ran immediately to Dame
Rennie Fritchie, who thought it was extremely interesting and
worthwhile, it probably had not been done before, and wished me
luck but I was on my own on this one. To cut a long story short,
the children visibly grew up before our very eyes. They took the
exercise extremely seriously. There were two independent panels,
in a sense. The children went through all the short-listed candidates
by themselves and submitted them to extremely gruelling tasks
and interviewing. Fortunately, their top candidate was the full
panel's top candidate, including the Minister's. What we would
have done if that had not been the case I am not sure. I was very
heartened by that process, and I think it is an extremely interesting
example of participative democracy and one that meant that the
Children's Commissioner basically had the vote and support of
children in care as well as the Minister and the Appointments
Committee. Maybe I should stop there. I am hoping I am conveying
an enormous paradigm shift in approach to this whole issue, and
an attempt to professionalise and to enhance participative democracy.
It is a slow process. It is like turning a great ship around.
But I think there are some welcome signs that we are having some
results.
931. That is very interesting indeed. Is that
what you mean when you talk about the democratisation of public
appointments? You have given an interesting example there of involving
users in new ways. What are the other kinds of things you might
be talking about?
(Professor Rees) I think the most important issue
is increasing the diversity of people who put themselves forward
and are appointed to public appointments. At the moment, like
any other part of the country, it is largely men, particularly
in the more senior appointments; it is largely white people; there
are very few disabled people, and so on. Of course, in Wales we
have the Welsh language as well, and the urban/rural dimension.
So it is ensuring that the people appointed to the Assembly Sponsored
Public Bodies reflect better the population that they are serving.
At the moment it is clear that there is quite a long way to go
on that. That is the first issue. Following on from that, it is
not simply a question of getting a few quick wins by targeting,
for example, some disabled people, getting them on to the boards.
It is also about changing the way in which the boards do their
business to facilitate the participation of these people. It is
no good having people who are not terribly experienced in working
in committees if they are going to be interrupted and overruled
the whole time. The culture of the way in which the business is
done needs to accommodate these people and needs to hear their
voices. It might mean more telephone work, it might mean more
video-conferencing, instead of the standard way in which business
is done. It is about changing the nature of the engagement, not
simply getting more people of a diverse background in. The second
way in which I think the democratisation is occurring is through
transparency. There has been a tremendous shift from the old system
of the minister tapping on the shoulder to these appointments
being advertised, but being advertised very proactively, through
the web, through organisations, including the voluntary sector,
being encouraged to nominate people or encouraging people to nominate
themselves. It is very much an outreach programme to try and get
information out to people and to encourage people to apply, and
to make the whole system transparent. What I have noticed in getting
on for ten years of working in this area is that people in the
past would say, "Well, there is no point in applying. These
things are always fixed. They may be advertising them now, but
that's obviously going to go to X." That is now changing.
You are getting more people applying for these posts and a more
diverse range of people putting applications in, particularly
from ethnic minorities, and that is very heartwarming. Part of
what this project will hopefully do is to monitor and provide
some baseline data, to see which under-represented minorities
populations still need to be targeted and tackled. The equality
agencies have worked very hard with the Assembly in partnership
on this whole agenda. They have been very active in trying to
get the message out to groups.
932. Staying with that last point, Sir William
Wells was telling us just now that he believed the fact that appointments
had been put on to an independent basis was helping with this
business of getting people to trust the system and not believe
that it was fixed, and therefore increasing both the number and
variety of appointments. I wonder if that would be your conclusion
too, because if it were, it would lead you down the same route
in thinking about making the actual business of appointments an
independent process.
(Professor Rees) Yes. I think in Wales the scale is
not as great as we were hearing about with the NHS, and so it
is more manageable within the existing structure. Ministers still
play a role. The appointment panel will produce a recommendation
and a very detailed report, and that report is increasingly professional
in stressing how this name has emerged through merit and through
fitness on the competencies. It is much more difficult for a minister
then to disagree with the outcome of an appointment panel if that
demonstration is there. So ministers still have the last word,
if you like, in these appointments.
933. That is why I am asking you. If we have
been hearing about the virtues of that last word having been taken
away from them, why on earth would you want to retain it?
(Professor Rees) I am not sure that I could make a
very coherent argument for retaining it except in that these are
elected people.
934. That was what was wrong with the old patronage
system. People were saying because they were elected, they could
appoint anybody they wanted to public bodies.
(Professor Rees) That was the point. They were entirely
in the gift of the elected people, and there was no system of
matching up, as far as I could see, merit and the skills needed
for the post. Indeed, the skills needed for the post were not
even articulated at that time. This, I think, is a system where
you have checks and balances, but you still have some ministerial
input into the system, but essentially, what is driving it is
merit and fit-for purpose, not political preference.
935. It is important for us to get to the bottom
of this, because if ministers retain the ability to specify the
kind of job it is, which they do have, even with an independent
appointments system, if you then have an independent appointments
system that produces the best person, taking account of all these
complex ways which you understand best, why then do we want the
politicians to retain the right to make the appointment?
(Professor Rees) I am not going to go to the wall
on this one. What I can say is that in the National Assembly the
politicians' involvement is cross-party, and if they arrive at
a consensus and have that cross-party support, it strengthens
the position of those public appointees to know that they have
come through on the basis of merit a fairly rigorous appointments
system, and they have support not simply from one person but from
the Assembly. That is quite a powerful support. That is an imprimatur,
if you like; that is a permission to go out and do the job with
that backing. If you removed that, you may then set up a situation
for these people where ministers have a go at them, criticise
them publicly. You could end up with a situation where actually
that post becomes untenable. I think there needs to be some sort
of compromise there. I think the system in Wales is rather different
from the ministerial system here. Partly there is a two-party
pact in Scotland and in Wales, of course, so you have to have
consensus politics to an extent because of that, and there is
in essence in the National Assembly an all-party commitment to
making the Assembly work, and therefore, in that spirit of good
will, the system currently works, to my mind, effectively. If
any of those things were to change, the concerns that you are
raising would be stronger.
936. So you think it is the bipartisan imprimatur
that goes on these appointments that makes it all right.
(Professor Rees) It helps to strengthen the position
of the appointees to have that all-party support.
Mr Trend
937. You have put yourself up for re-appointment
with the others as an independent assessor. How is that going
to be fixed?
(Professor Rees) You can get into Chinese boxes. Who
are going to be the independent assessors on the appointment of
the independent assessors? I do not know how that is going to
work. That is a very good question.
938. It is, because if you were tapped on the
shoulder, who is going to decide whether the tap was OK? Is it
the Minister? Who has a constitutional duty to make sure the new
assessors are correctly appointed?
(Professor Rees) It will be the responsibility of
the First Minister to make sure the system was done properly,
but the purpose of terminating all the independent assessors and
starting afresh is precisely to improve that system, and to make
sure, of course, that all the independent assessors have the appropriate
training. I think that is incredibly important. They are the guardians
of the fair system.
939. So you have applied for a position but
you do not know the process that is going to be used.
(Professor Rees) The assessor posts are being advertised
next week. I am not on the inside track.
|
