Examination of Witness (Questions 1 -
19)
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2002
RT HON
MARGARET BECKETT
MP, MR BRIAN
BENDER AND
MR FRANCIS
MARLOW
Chairman
1. Secretary of State, Permanent Secretary,
welcome to the Committee. There has now been a clutch of reports
on foot and mouth, being the three commissioned by the Government
itself, there have been the Devon and the Cumbrian reports and,
as far as I know, the European Parliament report has just been
published as well, so we have a clutch of reports available to
us. Have you seen the European Parliament conclusions, Secretary
of State?
(Margaret Beckett) I am aware of it.
I have not had a chance to study it in any depth, I am afraid.
2. Neither have we. We have just seen the reports
of it, but I do not know whether it differs massively from the
other one. I wonder if I could start with something which really
ran through all the reports and that was about the question of
the sort of culture in the Department. Indeed you yourself and
Mr Bender have both argued the need for a change of the culture
and the fact that the raison d'être of the new Department
was in fact to engender a new culture. Dr Anderson talked about
"a culture predisposed to decision-taking by committee with
an associated fear of personal risk-taking", and elsewhere
there was discussion of risk-taking in sort of silos. How do you
respond to that criticism? I know that you have published your
rejoinder of course to the report itself, but in terms of management
and delivering a sustainable "deliverability", if I
may use that word, where are we?
(Margaret Beckett) There are two things I would say
about that and I will ask Brian if he wants to add something in
a moment because obviously on the management side, it is very
much something that we share, but both of us very much take the
view that there is a lot in the Department that we want to change
and I think that view is actually held quite widely in the Department.
People do, I think, see the opportunities that a new department
and a new remit offer and want to be, and be seen to be, a department
that is well regarded across Whitehall and beyond. We have in
fact put in place or begun to put in place quite a big programme,
in conjunction with people like the Office of Public Service Reform,
to look at how we change behaviours and culture and so on in the
Department. The only other thing that I would say though, which
comes out to some extent from some of the things Iain Anderson
said and which is sometimes said and quoted by other people, there
was a reference, and I cannot recall the precise provenance at
this second, to whether or not there was a culture of being risk-averse
and things of that kind. I completely accept, and it is one of
the things we are trying to get a lot of work done on, that risk
assessment and risk management is a very important part of the
role of a department like ours, but I also think this is a wider
responsibility than just for the Department that we head or indeed
for the DEFRA management team. I think it is something that actually
is part of our public culture and indeed our media culture because
if we get ourselves more and more and more, and it is a personal
theory of mine that this is the direction in which we are going,
into a frame of mind where, if something goes wrong, the immediate
reaction is somebody must be to blame, "Let's find the person
who is to blame. Let's identify them and see them punished",
et cetera, et cetera, then I think as a society we have
to begin to think more deeply about this and really to make up
our minds because if we are going to seek for "the culprit"
every time something goes wrong, then people will be more risk-averse
than they are now.
(Mr Bender) Would you like me to add something, Chairman?
3. Do you think you have got something to add
to what the Secretary of State has just said?
(Mr Bender) Well, if I may, there are perhaps four
points I would like to make. First of all, and I know the Committee
understands this, we should not underestimate the task we faced
in June 2001 with the Department which was created in effect overnight
as an unplanned merger, with no new money and still in the throes
of a major national crisis which is indeed the main purpose of
today's hearing. The second point I would want to make is that
I really do believe we have made major strides in the past 17-18
months in setting the direction for the Department and in managing
the transition. I think, when I was last giving evidence, you
asked about merger versus takeover. That is not a subject for
discussion in the Department now; it is a reality. We have achieved
along the way an important number of business successes. The third
point I wanted to make is, as the Secretary of State has said,
we both recognise we have a lot more to do. We do believe we have
made a start, and the Committee will of course get a formal reply
soon to the report you recently produced on the role of DEFRA,
but I would contest the assertion in it that the change of the
culture has barely begun, but what I would not contest, I would
accept, is that there is a lot more to do. The last point I wanted
to make was just to follow up what the Secretary of State said
about risk. There are two aspects of this in that there is risk
assessment and risk management and then there is risk-taking and
we have got more work to do in the Department on that. We recently
did our first DEFRA-wide staff survey where 43 per cent of staff
felt encouraged to identify and address risk and 58 per cent felt
they would be blamed if they took an action which subsequently
did not turn out well. Those are not good figures and we need
to work on that.
Chairman: Mr Bender, I thought I heard you say
that there had been an "unplanned merger" in the Department.
Mrs Shephard: Yes, I thought I did too.
Chairman
4. So this was not planned?
(Mr Bender) No.
5. So on the morning of the Election, somebody
had the super idea and said, "Let's club these two departments
together". That is the impression we got, but I did not realise
it had been the reality. I thought this had been a planned merger
which went wrong.
(Mr Bender) What was planned was the implementation
of the stated Manifesto commitment of the Labour Party which was
for the creation of a Department for Rural Affairs. What was unplanned
was the decision in the course of 8 June that it would be a department
which included environment and rural affairs and that made a substantial
difference, as the Committee will well recognise, so the extent
of the merger was not planned in the sense of several weeks of
planning during the Election campaign which we in the Civil Service
had done for a Department for Rural Affairs.
Chairman: It became much bigger than had been
envisaged.
Mrs Shephard
6. This does not seem entirely to accord with
the Mission Statement which we had in our own evidence on the
role of DEFRA. We are told, "DEFRA was created to improve
the delivery of what Ministers and stakeholders expect of us.
Our objective is to be more than just the sum of our parts. The
new Department brings together environment protection groups,
the Wildlife and Countryside Directorate, MAFF" and so on
and so forth. It does not sound very unplanned. Why are you telling
us that today and why does it not say that in your Mission Statement?
(Margaret Beckett) There is no conflict whatsoever
in what was set out.
7. Really? But it was unplanned.
(Margaret Beckett) What has that got to do with it?
8. Everything, I would have thought.
(Margaret Beckett) That is a perfect statement of
what DEFRA is for and what it is charged with trying to do.
9. Well, I think we will form our own conclusions.
(Margaret Beckett) I cannot imagine on what basis.
Mrs Shephard: What the Permanent Secretary has
just said is the basis.
Chairman
10. Let's move on because we could have an interesting
time looking at what time on 8 June the inspiration struck. Dr
Anderson, when he was in front of us, talked about the need for
the sort of three "S'"s, with "systems", "speed",
and "science" being the three things which he emphasised:
"systems robust enough to cope with major challenge";
"speed of response, speed of decision-making, speed of action";
and then science in preparing for emergencies. How close are we,
do you think, to making those criteria immediately deliverable
within the Department?
(Margaret Beckett) I think we have moved a long way
and there has been a huge amount of work, but this is something
the Committee will be able to consider and examine because, for
example, we take systems, things like the contingency-planning.
Again the updated contingency plan is on our website and we have
begun the process of starting to test it and exercise it in exactly
the way that Iain Anderson wanted us to do, so I think in that
sense a huge amount of work is going on, and again I will ask
Brian if he wants to add anything to this, in terms of the information
systems and so on in the Department. This Committee, like every
select committee across government and Parliament, will know that
planning major updates of IT systems and other information systems
is not an easy process whether in the public or the private sector,
but again that work is under way and is being undertaken. On the
issue of speed of response, I think some of that is addressed
by the response we made to the Inquiry in terms of, for example,
an immediate movement ban and so on, but again we are talking
about how you implement the systems and that is all, I think,
in the public domain and is part of the trials which we are running.
Then with regard to the science, again work is continuing and
I think the Committee will know that the new Chief Scientific
Adviser to the Department is presently undertaking quite a thorough
science review and I think we have now announced the advisory
group that is to work alongside him in the ordinary course of
events and from which a group would be drawn against any future
necessity, like the one we faced with the FMD outbreak, to provide
a pool of scientific support and advice which is readily available
and familiar with the issues which face the Department. Therefore,
I think we have put in place, and it is my understanding, although
no doubt the Committee may want to ask him themselves, I think
that Iain Anderson himself is of the view that we have made a
lot of progress in laying the foundations to tackle issues which
he identified and I do not think any of us disputes that there
is still an enormous amount of work to do.
11. Professor Follett, when he was talking about
the contingency-planning, was talking about the need to have a
series of plans which were public where everybody knew what their
role was, but also a set of plans which in a sense had received
a public endorsement.
(Margaret Beckett) Yes.
12. He made a great emphasis that it should
be so, so people knew where they stood and the responses were
clearly laid out and there was an expectation about them.
(Margaret Beckett) Yes.
13. Now, you have been developing the contingency
plan, but we have not yet got to the stage at which you have sought
to anchor them, as it were, in some form of public consensus or
parliamentary process. Is that something which you are working
towards or recognise?
(Margaret Beckett) Yes, it is and we hope, I think
I am right in saying, by about March next year to have completed
that further process in the sense of being able to sort of semi-formally,
if you like, lay the contingency plan before Parliament. It is
on our website and we are continuing to receive input. As I say,
we have begun the process of trialing and exercise and so on which
we hope will give us further experience, understanding and advice,
and we do hope to be able to lay it before Parliament by March
or thereabouts. I have some slight hesitation. My impression is,
and I hope I do not misrepresent Professor Follett, that Professor
Follett thought that this would lead, should such a contingency
plan be needed again and let's hope it is not, to a much greater
political consensus in approaching and handling such a crisis.
I am sure and hope that would be the case, though I am perhaps
slightly less optimistic than he is that this automatically follows
from the plan being laid before Parliament and discussed by it,
but we shall see.
14. I think what he had in mind was perhaps
trying to put into balance this argument about vaccination or
slaughter.
(Margaret Beckett) Absolutely.
15. Because, as you will be aware, there was
a lot of argument about it during the course of the epidemic and
there were expectations that certain courses would be pursued
and then at the end of the day they were not pursued. Much of
the debate about the report tends to be debate about the desirability
of vaccination and, therefore, the more that hypotheses or contingencies
can be laid out, then presumably the idea is that some of the
venom or speculation can be taken out of this debate and a more
predictable set of responses can be built in.
(Margaret Beckett) That, I think, is very much everybody's
hope and that does of course bring us back to your third point
which is the area of science because we still do not have some
of the testing capacity, the discrimination capacity, I mean by
that, and we still do not have all of the advances in science
that Professor Follett believed and hoped could be achievable
within a measurable timescale, although not next week. Again this
is very much an area not only where we are continuing to work,
but where we are continuing to encourage others not least elsewhere
in the European Union and in the international community to do
work to get international acceptance because of course that again
is very much part of the issue.
(Mr Bender) Can I perhaps add one point to that. Another
method we are following to try and get greater public discussion
and understanding is that earlier this month we published the
consultation document about the available disease-control strategies
and the sort of decision tree we would follow, the criteria that
would involve choices between the different strategies. The idea
of that is that it would aid transparency, help build public support
and speed up decision-making and our intention next on that is
to have a meeting with some of the key stakeholders before Christmas.
16. I see I am going to have to get myself used
to decision trees as well as things being rolled out, Mr Bender.
(Margaret Beckett) I am afraid so.
Mr Jack
17. Secretary of State, could you tell me, what
other risks which are within the area of responsibility of your
Department do you have contingency plans for?
(Margaret Beckett) I do not know whether "contingency
plans" is quite the right description. It might be but I
am sure Brian will correct me if I get this wrong. Basically we
have ownership of a considerable series of other risks—flooding,
radio-active waste management, a string of things. What we have
sought to do in the Department is to identify the major risks
that do fall to us as a department and to place them within the
Department in terms of where the responsibility for that lies.
In particular I suppose it is the members of the management board
in whose areas of the Department a particular risk is identified
as lying who are now charged with developing their plans both
to a degree where it is necessary for risk assessment and certainly
also for risk management.
(Mr Bender) Each business directorate in the Department
has identified its own top risks and the board above that has
identified the ones that it thinks are most significant for the
Department and we have risk management plans against each of them.
Some of them are more detailed than others. Some of them may impact
on the wider world. Some of them are financial risk management
plans like disallowance.
18. So what lessons have you learned from foot
and mouth in the re-appraisal of your contingency planning now,
which we will talk about in more detail later on, that have informed
your dealing with risk in the areas which the Secretary of State
just mentioned?
(Mr Bender) Some of the points that the Chairman referred
to a few minutes ago from Dr Anderson—speed, the systems,
the science, ensuring the links are understood, not only within
the organisation but with the outside bodies who would need to
play a part in responding to that risk if it is realised, those
are the sorts of things, and also inculcating it in the organisation
so that it is not a tick box but part of the way they plan and
manage their business.
19. And all of those other contingency plans
are the subject of regular scenario runs through to see if the
systems are robust in the event of a risk realising?
(Margaret Beckett) Not yet. As we have already made
plain, we are in the early stages of this work and that is part
of the ongoing work which has to take place. Certainly the issue
of whether we can and how it is practical to run some of these
things and what we would need to do will be part of the assessment
that the relevant management board members are undertaking.
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