Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)

Wednesday 18 June 2003

SIR BRIAN BENDER, KCB, MR PAUL ELLIOTT, MR ANDREW BURCHELL AND MR DAVID BILLS

  Q1  Chairman: Gentlemen, welcome to the Committee. First of all, Sir Brian, congratulations on becoming a greater man since you were here last year.

  Sir Brian Bender: Thank you, Chairman.

  Q2  Chairman: You see what appearing before the Select Committee does for you. For the record, you are the Permanent Secretary at Defra; Paul Elliott is in charge of rural economies and he is the Communities Director; Andrew Burchell is a Finance Director and Mr David Bills is the Director General of the Forestry Commission. We are delighted to see Mr Bills's contribution to last year's report, which tends to be the tail wagging the dog, has now been reduced to an economical ten pages. That seems to me to be about right but we may wait for the film! Sir Brian, can I begin by asking you a question which I think has troubled this Committee in the course of a number of our inquiries and that is about the actual capacity of Defra to deliver in practical terms the policies which the politicians decide on. What I mean by that is when we did our waste inquiry we came across a series of concerns that the Department just simply did not have the expertise to deliver the sort of economic models and the forecasting which was a necessary part of the way the waste programmes work. We know there is a couple of areas where national legislation to transfer into European Union directives have not yet been laid even though the European Union directives are in force. It may well be that this is a problem across Government but our responsibilities obviously are with Defra. The question is not intended to be an aggressive question. Is there a problem now within Government of getting hold of the people with the expertise to deal with the extraordinarily complex areas which, for example, environment legislation now poses and the translation of that into accessible legislation which the people who have got to operate it can understand, assimilate, implement and apply?

  Sir Brian Bender: Can I come back to your point about legislation at the end of the answer because the essence of what we are trying to do with our change programme is to increase the Department's capacity; the capacity to deliver what the Government has said the Department should do. That is what it is all about and a crucial part of that is the process of delivery planning. So we have targets—and no doubt you will want to ask questions about some of those later on—and delivery plans then work through what is needed to be done in terms of the analysis, the skills, the people in place, the people we have to work with through local government or through other departments, or with other departments or other agencies or our own NDPBs to make it happen. That delivery planning process I would say, frankly, across Government was patchy up until the end of the 2002 Spending Review and one of the themes of the 2002 Spending Review was actually for all departments to raise their game and their capacity to deliver. As I say, the purpose of the delivery planning is to bring these various issues together. So if you take an area like waste—and I have, of course, read the Committee's report and the Department will be giving its response to it soon—we have a delivery plan now in place. We have been examining the skills needed and we have brought in someone as a programme director to lead that work who has external experience. We have brought in from within the Department a programme manager who has expertise in programme and project management and we are running the waste programme on a programme/project basis. We are setting up a steering committee which will be chaired by Mr David Varney, to bring in some external expertise to drive and make it happen and we are working on the links with local government and what actually makes a good local government perform well. An interesting example is the area of Sunderland, which is a high performing local authority under the Comprehensive Performance Assessment but has a very low performance on recycling. So the general answer to your question is the purpose of our change programme is to increase our capacity. We are focussing that attention in the first instance on the priority areas of the PSA targets but we are trying to do it across the board. Coming back to your specific question about environmental legislation, I do not think it is a question primarily of skills, although I think that is probably a part of it. I think it is a matter of ensuring that the Department and the implementers (in most cases the Environment Agency) work well together and that there is a better (again using these words) programme management relationship between the departmental lawyers and the administrators through the negotiating process and through the implementation, so that the lawyers are not brought in too late into the game. I think the history is that too often the lawyers have been playing catch-up on these issues. So I would not like to give the impression that everything is rosy. What I am trying to say to the Committee is that we recognise these sorts of issues and we have a lot of action in hand to improve them, and there is an internal assessment process of the Department's delivery plans by the Treasury, which they will be doing again in October, to see how our performance shapes up and is likely to be shaping up.

  Q3  Chairman: I will forebear on commenting on whether the fact that the Treasury is doing it gives me any confidence. So many of the targets set by the Treasury seem to be fantasist, somewhat remote from the real world. On the Civil Service, which you now manage a significant chunk of, how would you describe the difference between the skills it needs now and perhaps the Civil Service you entered?

  Sir Brian Bender: I think it is very different. The sorts of skills needed now include—the word "leadership", which had not been invented in 1973 when I joined the Civil Service. Management became a theme during the 70s and 80s, and now we have the issue of what makes an effective leader, whether it is in a school, a hospital or a government department, at many levels. So the whole issue of leadership skills is crucial. I have mentioned already the issue of programme and project management skills. In many cases the reason for failed Government projects is because of a lack of skills within the organisation, so up-skilling in that area. Skills around what I call partnership working, working through others, and that is an area again where Defra certainly needs to raise its game because so much of our activity is done through local government, through the Regional Development Authorities, through local communities of one sort or another. I think there are skills that are different, so it is not the sort of mandarin Civil Service that I joined where if you are good at giving policy advice that was the main criterion. But you still need to be able to give good policy advice.

  Q4  Chairman: But technical skills as well? The skills you have just described tend to be skills of process in a sense but there are also sheer technical skills, economic and metric skills, modelling skills, are there not now, which so much depends on?

  Sir Brian Bender: Well, we need legal skills in all departments, we need sufficiency in or access to economic/statistical skills. A department like Defra needs to have and have access to, scientific skills, self-evidently, veterinary skills. Again, in the Civil Service I joined human resources was handled by bright people seconded there for a while, who learned it on the job. Professionalising the internal services like human resources, finance, communications and of course like IT, having people who have those skills. Those things have changed certainly over the last ten years and increasingly over a longer period.

  Q5  Chairman: We will obviously want to talk about Lord Haskins's recommendations and indeed this time next week Lord Haskins will be sitting where you are so we will have the opportunity to ask him about it. So I am not going to pursue that now, although quite clearly the implications of what he suggested, as anybody who listened to the Farming programme this morning heard—which Mr Jack, I have to tell you, did so and has been kind enough to inform the Committee about this particular discovery—has got very wide implications. You are going to have to throw the whole lot up in the air if that was implemented, are you not?

  Sir Brian Bender: I suppose the slightly facetious answer to your question is we asked for it: that is to say we recognised a little over a year ago that there was an issue around the way in which the Department's rural policies and services were delivered in rural communities. Therefore, we wanted a study led by someone external to look at, that because the delivery organisations, the bodies had grown up historically, some to Environment, Transport and the Regions, some to MAFF, and therefore we wanted a review. The terms of reference were how to simplify or rationalise the existing organisation and establish clearer roles and responsibilities so that everybody is involved. He has not yet made recommendations. He referred on Farming Today to his thinking and he has referred more widely to his thinking. The only thing he has published at the moment are some guiding principles, one of which is devolution, that the delivery of economic and social policy must be devolved in accordance with the principle of public service reform. Devolution away from central departments rather more is actually something that both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have mentioned in various speeches, the notion of separating out from a core department the responsibility for delivery but then ensuring there are good and close links of accountability back. If he makes recommendations that follow that through to its logical conclusion there will be fairly profound implications for bits of the Department, yes.

  Q6  Chairman: We will wish to explore it. Can you just put something to rest really in one word. I have picked up the feeling that there is still some debate as to which department should handle energy policy. Is there still a debate as to that?

  Sir Brian Bender: I will not answer in one word, if I may. The Energy White Paper was a joint White Paper between Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Beckett. The implementation of the Energy White Paper is being pursued by a virtual network based in the DTI but involving people from a number of departments, including our own, working on a programme management basis across Government in the same sort of a way as we are pursuing the farming and food strategy across Government. Ultimately the lead is with DTI but we have a strong shared interest in following it through and making it happen and we are very much involved in that.

  Q7  Chairman: Finally, in this initial batch, can I come to one of my little sort of bête noir, which is these PSA targets, because I do sometimes feel that the targets are either imposed upon you or agreed with you, which do make an enormous amount of assumptions, many of which are not under your control. If we look back to page 57, which is the CSR target: "Cut the overall cost of the CAP to European Union (EU) consumers and taxpayers from its current level of 88 billion ecus (£62 billion) a year." That of course was in the 1998 PSA target and then that has been slightly modulated (or whatever the fashionable word might be), modernised I suppose I ought to say when you get to page 73, where it says: "Secure agreement, by March 2004, to reforms that reduce the cost of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to consumers and taxpayers." The only inconvenience of this is that of course it does rather depend on what fourteen other Member States say, does it not? Why does the Treasury sort of stick in targets which, quite frankly, have no realistic sense at all? We all want to reduce the cost of the CAP but you are no more capable of delivering that unilaterally than the man in the Moon is capable of delivering it unilaterally. As far as I know, Mrs Beckett has disappeared to Luxembourg about a week ago and has not been seen since. She may still be there for all I know but not much is coming out.

  Sir Brian Bender: Well, she is there, although she did appear in the interim and there was a new Presidency compromise tabled this morning, which is still from the United Kingdom's point of view looking encouraging, but there are hard negotiations still to go.

  Q8  Chairman: Are these really useful tools or, quite frankly, are they simply saying something which any sane department would do in any case and are they not just becoming a liability for you?

  Sir Brian Bender: I think if you have got sensible targets and targets and they can actually focus the mind, a focussed effort, recognising that actually some of the levers (like this one) are beyond our control but we can still influence them and sort of try and pull them a bit. I have no problem with the target providing the Treasury and commentators recognise that our ability to deliver the result is not entirely within our control. Nonetheless, if Margaret Beckett comes back from Luxembourg with an agreement that does not involve some form of satisfactory CAP reform but is still an agreement then in a way it does not matter whether there is a target that says it or not. You and colleagues in Parliament may well criticise the outcome and the media may. So it is a way of encapsulating what it is we are trying to achieve. It is a difficult one, but if you look at the one on waste we have to implement that through local government, through industry, with other players in Government.

  Chairman: Mr Jack, as a reward for having listened to the Farming programme (and I suspect he was probably jogging at the time), gets a brief supplementary and then we go to Mr Wiggin.

  Q9  Mr Jack: It is not about that yet, Chairman, but I just wanted to follow on the point you were making about the way that this report deals with some of these PSA targets. I refer you to page 75. Here we see the bold statement which says: "Achieve a reduction of 10% in the unit cost of administering CAP payments by March 2004, and 95% electronic service delivery capability for such payments by March 2004." A strong, definite target. In the slightly greener box next to it, it says: "Some slippage. Target has been revised in the Spending Review 2002," and leaves us with the tantalising question as to what and to why, so perhaps you could fill in the missing bits?

  Sir Brian Bender: I hope the Committee received a note that we provided yesterday which actually I think did answer this question. In this particular case the slippage was primarily as a result of the diversion of staff, the impact of Foot and Mouth duties on the people in the Rural Payments Agency who should have been working on this. So there is about a six month slippage in the programme. That is why the Spending Review 2002 period has a similar results target, but a slipped timetable target and we are on track (he said, with fingers crossed) for achieving that.

  Q10  Mr Jack: Just to tantalise me with the answer, what is the new target?

  Mr Burchell: It has moved back by one year.

  Q11  Mr Jack: So it is 10% but one year later?

  Sir Brian Bender: Yes.

  Q12  Mr Wiggin: I am sorry you are not wearing the uniform of your predecessor but it is a hot day! On 2 May 2003 you launched a strategy called "a more sustainable future for everyone" but this strategy is not allied to your PSA objectives so it cannot be regarded as a coherent strategy for the delivery of PSA targets. I believe the Animal Health and Welfare strategy is not included either and that is planned for later on this year. When will the Animal Health and Welfare strategy be published?

  Sir Brian Bender: We hope it will be published as a basis for further consultation in July, although that is a matter for our Ministers.

  Q13  Mr Wiggin: How are your strategies integrated with the Department's PSA objectives and targets?

  Sir Brian Bender: We published a document, I think it was the one you referred to, which identified six strategic priorities, which six of our PSA targets relate to in one way or another and then there are others that come in in various ways underneath that. The document I think you are referring to highlighted the areas where the Ministers in our Department attach most priority to achieving progress over the next few years. As I say, all the PSA targets come, one way or another, under them; some more obviously than others. So the rural one comes very obviously under the rural issue; the one on sustainable farming and food comes under what is said there. Some of the ones on countryside access, on SSSIs and so on, come in in different ways in relation to what we are trying to do on biodiversity, for example.

  Q14  Mr Wiggin: I believe you are also undertaking a number of initiatives to improve and develop the service provided to customers. Who are your customers?

  Sir Brian Bender: We have been debating that quite a lot in the Department. In this context what we mean are our direct customers, those for whom Defra provides services directly. So, for example, farmers whom we pay money to through the Rural Payments Agency, farmers who will have agri-environment schemes or the fishing industry in relation to the fisheries' work. They are not customers in the sense that they may necessarily be satisfied with the policy. So in some respects we are actually paying to change their behaviours, as we are in agri-environment schemes. But for these purposes we mean the direct customers. Many of the issues the Department deals with have 58 million indirect customers when we are looking at something like air quality. We are talking about the whole nation and indeed when we are looking at climate change, it is rather more grandiose than that. But in this context we are primarily referring to the Department's direct customers.

  Q15  Mr Wiggin: So how do you assess the requirements of these people?

  Sir Brian Bender: Through feedback, through dialogue with them, through knowing their views and therefore having a customer feedback process. Some parts of the Department have got fairly sophisticated arrangements in place. The State Veterinary Service and the Rural Development Service are only beginning to have these arrangements in place.

  Q16  Mr Lepper: Am I right that the overall budget of Defra is just under £3 billion?

  Mr Burchell: Around £3 billion, yes.

  Q17  Mr Lepper: There is a report on the 2001-02 resource account, I think, by the Comptroller and Auditor General's office last year and that was critical of some areas of Defra's financial management, I believe. It did highlight, I think, a significant underspend which it was suggested from some weaknesses in financial management. I think another issue which was raised in that report was the ability of the Department to respond quickly and effectively in terms of allocating resources when changes in public policy or priorities arose. Could you tell us what has been done over the last year to ensure that there is greater flexibility in terms of financial and human resources in the Department?

  Sir Brian Bender: Can I first just comment, if I may, Mr Lepper, on the qualification by the Comptroller and Auditor General. It was plainly disappointing. However, our own view in discussion with the National Audit Office was that, given the previous starting point of the accounts for the previous year, which were heavily qualified primarily because of the complications with Foot and Mouth disease, this was a lesser qualification. It was within the same scope as the previous one and smaller, and the Comptroller and Auditor General was clear that the progress being made provided a sound basis for unqualified accounts in the period ahead and the Comptroller and Auditor General acknowledged a number of improvements. You can ask me next year whether we have achieved that. In terms of resource allocation, the most important exercise we are doing at the moment, which will not be completed until after the summer, is actually looking at all our activities—the jargon is an Activity Baseline Review—and breaking down all our spend so that we are clear what is being spent on, I think, about 6,000 different activities and with the help of some experts who have done this in other organisations trying to allocate that to the outcomes we are trying to achieve. The purpose of that exercise is to work out with our Ministers whether we are spending the right sums of money on the right sorts of things; are there things we should be spending less on; are there things we should be grouping together in different ways or stopping. Part of the purpose of that would be to create headroom to spend money on other priorities. This will also enable us, knowing exactly where the money is being spent, to have a greater ease for flexibility. Meanwhile, our internal resource allocation for the present financial year which was conducted through last winter had, by its nature, to be a fairly interim process until that had been done. So we did business planning for this year on a one year basis reflecting the sorts of priorities which are in the strategy document and which Ministers had agreed in principle last summer. Those priorities were recognised in the way we allocated resources for the current financial year, but still having business planning on a one year basis is not satisfactory and we are planning to move through this autumn for two years through the current Spending Review period.

  Q18  Mr Lepper: So what you have just described to us should increase that flexibility and make the Department more responsive?

  Sir Brian Bender: Correct.

  Q19  Mr Lepper: You are inviting us to expect, we hope, an unqualified report from the Auditor General's office next year?

  Sir Brian Bender: I certainly expect it and my finance director knows!


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2003
Prepared 23 July 2003