Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
Wednesday 18 June 2003
SIR
BRIAN BENDER,
KCB, MR PAUL
ELLIOTT, MR
ANDREW BURCHELL
AND MR
DAVID BILLS
Q40 Chairman: You are very welcome
to attend the hearing next week.
Sir Brian Bender: I will certainly
have a spy or two in the public area, if I may. Coming back to
the question on pay, I think it is too early because we are only
now part way through and we are just actually, I think, about
to table, having had Treasury approval, our pay offer for the
current year and therefore the second year of the multi-year deal.
There are three elements of it which are aimed at better performance.
One was more use of non-consolidated bonuses to the better performers,
the second was accelerated progression up pay scales for those
performers and the third was the use of special bonus schemes
for additional contributions. But I think at this stage it is
too early to say. On the question of how would we know, I will
give a non-reply to that. We will need to set out mechanisms for
capturing what we are getting for the money in terms of performance.
It may come back to the efficiency-type arguments earlier. It
may be simply that areas are delivering better or more effectively
against their targets; there may be a number of different indicators
but the Department's pay and workforce strategy will need to have
a means of capturing what is being gained for the increased pay
apart from a removal of discontent, which was not a mean feat.
Q41 Alan Simpson: Could you just
clarify one technical point for me. The pay workforce strategy,
is that something which is just to be confined to the central
department or will it address the differing pay and conditions
throughout Defra and its agencies and sponsored bodies?
Sir Brian Bender: It is certainly
not just London-based, it would be the core department, but I
cannot answer the question as to whether it covers the other bodies.
We can come back to the Committee on that point.
Chairman: You can come back to us on
that.
Q42 Alan Simpson: I heard my colleague
mentioning when you were going through your previous answer, "It
sounds as though there are an awful lot of carrots and I'm not
sure how many sticks there are." The issue about what you
deliver—and you made reference to the word "targets"—it
seems to me that in some respects one of the problems that you
face and that we face as a committee is addressing the culture
that you inherited and the prospect that that culture was a "No
can do" culture. My own experience and that of some of my
colleagues last year on the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation
Bill was that the role of your own senior officials was by and
large to frustrate any attempts to set targets. I note that at
the bottom of page 100 you have also thrown in a sentence there,
which says, "Leadership is essential in making change happen."
Sir Brian, I wonder if you would be kind enough, not necessarily
now but to come back to the Committee and just say something about
the leadership that you yourself offer in respect of the role
the Department is playing in this year's Sustainable Energy Bill.
I say that just because up until last week, when Brian Wilson
was Minister at the DTI, we had an agreement between the two departments
about delivering the reasonable steps to achieve carbon savings
in respect of this and as soon as he left your own senior officials
came in to scupper that and said, "No, we just don't think
it can be done." I would like you to have a look at your
role in delivering a change of culture into delivering a change
agenda, because it seems to me that the danger, on what you have
just said, is that you can provide all sorts of incentives for
people to move up the ladder but if the culture of the senior
management team that you are responsible for is a non-delivery
culture how do we change that?
Sir Brian Bender: I will look
into the specific issues of the Bill and come back to the Committee
on that, but I would hope that the Department's attitude towards
a piece of legislation like that was one that was determined by
Ministers on the advice of the Department, not decided on by the
Department, and my recollection at least in relation to last year's
legislation was that the view of the politicians, the Ministers
was that the costs associated with the targets envisaged was one
that the Government did not wish to pay, and therefore the attitude
of frustrating was not one led by officials. But I will come back
on the specific bit of legislation. As far as my own role on this
is concerned, perhaps I can make a number of points. The Management
Board of the Department contains nobody on it who was on either
the Ministry of Agriculture Management Board or the Department
of the Environment, Transport and the Regions management board
on 7 June 2001 apart from me. So we have a team of people, some
of whom have come up from inside the Department, like my colleague
on my right, and some of whom have come in from outside the Department,who
do not feel as much legacy and feel a shared commitment to making
a success of the enterprise. You will have seen in the media distorted
coverage of a leadership development programme that we are running.
That, I think, was incorrectly characterised as "Bonfire
of the Mandarins" earlier this year. But the top 550 of the
Department, everyone from grade 7 upwards, including me, is going
to go through this programme (we are piloting it at the moment)
between now and next summer, and it will involve two days of working
and testing at a development centre and a follow up twelve month
development programme addressing gaps. The purpose of that is
to raise people's games on leadership against a leadership profile
that we have prepared which incorporates the Senior Civil Service
leadership characteristics. For some people I would expect that
the conclusion they will reach at the end of this is that the
Department is not for them, and the Department does have some
money for early retirement; indeed tomorrow my senior managers
and I are considering a first tranche of early retirements against
some criteria which match the leadership profile but are not directly
linked to this programme; that has not properly started yet. For
some people I would expect we will be in a situation where they
have scarce skills but they are not leaders and we may therefore
want to move them, if you like, off-line but not lose them. So
there is a lot going on in the Department on raising our game,
on leadership and on skilling in the sort of areas that I was
answering the Chairman's question earlier and I see my role as
crucial to making that happen.
Q43 Alan Simpson: I can see the way
in which specific incentives can play a role in both setting the
targets and delivery on objectives. Can you just tell me in what
ways you think a multi-year pay settlement will help you in that
process? We are talking as politicians about a much shorter time-frame
for setting the targets and the delivery of those targets and
I was just wondering how you saw that being advantageous to you
to be working within a multi-year pay settlement framework.
Sir Brian Bender: We were keen
last year to try, if practicable and if affordable, to get the
issue of pay off the agenda for a period. The Committee will recall
we had five months of selective industrial action by the PCS Union
through the summer and autumn of 2001 and some serious grievances
that I remember the Committee asking me about, about issues of
equality or lack of it in pay. Therefore, we saw benefits of a
multi-year pay deal in its own right in trying to remove the issue
as a sore off the agenda and indeed moving towards equality between
the different parts of the former department; and the pay differentials
in the main will have disappeared by 2005/6. We are not the only
department to have done multi-year deals, the Ministry of Defence
did, I think the DTI did and a number of others did, but clearly
it is not intended as and should not be simply a matter of buying
peace, which is why I identified in my earlier answer some of
the elements of the deal which are intended to incentivise good
performance. The flip side of that should be that through rigorous
appraisals there may be some people who get very small or no increases
as a result of performance and again one of the things we will
be looking at later this year is our appraisal performance appraisal
system, how it has worked this year and what we need to do to
revise it and improve it as a means of managing performance.
Q44 Mr Drew: I am intrigued that
in the public sector at the moment we are still trying to justify
job cuts through early retirement. In these days when it is actually
quite difficult to get skilled people is there not a mechanism
within Defra where people who may feel that they have reached
the end of a particular job profile could be realigned to work
elsewhere? I am afraid I have a particular problem with early
retirement and I am just disappointed that the public sector continues
to see this as the way of solving short-term financial problems.
Sir Brian Bender: Forgive me,
it is not in a way of solving short-term financial problems; it
is quite expensive. We have £3 million in our budget this
year to pay towards early departures and these would not be job
cuts. The metaphor is "making space" and bringing in
people more fitted or with greater aptitude for the post in question.
So it is not an issue of job cuts. There may well be people with
scarce skills whom we would not want to lose for that reason,
and indeed there was someone who reached the age of 60, who worked
for Mr Burchell earlier, who retired a few months ago and we brought
her back for two or three assignments because she has skills,
she has wisdom and she has something to contribute. So I do not
see these in the terms that you presented the issue.
Q45 Mr Borrow: Could I just move
on to the issue of diversity within the staff. It is my understanding
that in terms of the senior Civil Service grades the last survey
produced a figure of about 20% for women and 3% for ethnic minorities.
I would be interested in what targets the Department has set for
achieving greater diversity, particularly in terms of women, ethnic
minorities and people with disabilities and what programme is
in place to actually achieve those targets.
Sir Brian Bender: The target for
women in the senior Civil Service is 30% by 2005. I think the
figure is now 21% but it is more or less what you said. For people
from ethnic minority backgrounds the target figure for 2005 is
4% and the current figure is, I think, around 2%. There are similar
figures for people with disabilities. The target figure is 3%
and we are around 1% for the Senior Civil Service, so we have
work to do. The numbers of course are fairly small so if you take
the issue of women, on current staff numbers in that level we
are talking about an additional 16 and obviously a corresponding
reduction in the number of men. So they are not vast numbers and
therefore for people from ethnic minorities we are really talking
about two or three people. It is an issue which does trouble me
and I have recently asked for a paper especially on the issue
of women because I think across the Civil Service there will be
the greater difficulty in meeting the target for women in the
Senior Civil Service by 2005 than for people from ethnic minority
backgrounds. The issues are around how we recruit and retain people,
whether the appraisal systems and promotion systems, and so on,
are fair but without of course moving towards reverse discrimination
or not selecting the best people on merit. It may well be that
through some of the early departures, on which I was replying
to Mr Drew's question, they will create some spaces and at grade
7 level the number of women in the Department is at the moment
29%, so still not very high but there may be some shift through
that. Then one has positive action as against positive discrimination,
ensuring that the right sort of training and coaching is available
to people for them to advance. But these things are not easy and
I do not want to kid the Committee that I think they are.
Q46 Mr Borrow: I understand that
Defra has published a draft Race Equality Scheme, which seems
to focus mainly on the issue of bullying and harassment in the
workplace. I wonder what steps the Department is taking to actually
eliminate that and whether or not that is a problem which is actually
affecting achieving the targets on diversity as well.
Sir Brian Bender: I hope and believe
our Race Equality Scheme is significantly wider than that but
one of the issues from our last staff survey, the one I referred
to earlier, I do not think I have the figures with me but the
levels of people who felt there was bullying and discrimination
were unsatisfactory. What we have done as part of a follow-up
to that, in addition to re-issuing guidance is to actually ask
each senior manager to discuss the reasons for it in their teams.
The reasons may vary from one team to another, some may be local,
some may be another part of the Department, but it is an issue
we are taking seriously and we are tackling it. Whether it is
linked to people's progression, either gender or racial background,
I do not know, but it is an issue any employer must take very
seriously.
Q47 Mr Borrow: To what extent are
you in discussion on these issues with the trades unions involved?
Sir Brian Bender: We are in discussion
with them. It is an issue where, whatever differences one may
have in other aspects of industrial relations, in principle we
ought to be on the same side on these issues. I have monthly meetings
across the board, informal meetings with the chair of the trades
unions' side and we are having a meeting on how we can carry forward
partnership in the Department, I think next month, but this is
an issue which is on our agenda. There are not straightforward
answers, otherwise we would have cracked them some time ago.
Q48 Mr Borrow: On a slightly different
issue, when the old Department of Agriculture disappeared and
Defra was born one of the aspects of the new Department was the
breadth of issues that were being dealt with and obviously a decision
was made by the Prime Minister at that point in time to appoint
a certain number of Ministers to cover the responsibilities of
the Department. So at the moment we have got five Ministers covering
that range of responsibilities. Have you any views as to whether
or not five is adequate given the range of responsibilities and
the fact that there are certain areas where public opinion and
parliamentarian opinion is certainly putting pressure on your
Department to increase the amount of work you do, particularly
on the environmental side?
Sir Brian Bender: I have thought
about it and I have actually discussed it with Margaret Beckett.
It is quite tough and tight with five, but not so tight that I
would launch an impassioned appeal to Number Ten or the Cabinet
Secretary for the next re-shuffle, so to speak, or for the last
re-shuffle. Without wanting to sound obsequious to our Ministers,
we have some hardworking Ministers in the Department and they
get through the work. So they manage at that level but there is
not a lot of slack in it with four Ministers below the Cabinet
Minister.
Q49 Mr Borrow: If the Prime Minister
in his next re-shuffle decided to increase the number from five
to six, given the changes and that he may have the odd spare place
floating around as a result of some of the shared jobs which exist
now, that is something you would welcome rather than regard as
unnecessary?
Sir Brian Bender: I would not
regard it as unnecessary. I am not sure at this stage I would
say, "Wow! That's really good. We needed that." But
my response would not be, "Well, I don't know what we're
going to find for this person to do." So I am sort of mid-way
between your two.
Mr Borrow: I see where you are coming
from.
Chairman: It would take Elliot Morley
about six weeks to come down from the euphoria of getting rid
of fisheries at last, will it not?
Q50 Mr Jack: I was intrigued by Lord
Haskins, who seemed to want to go further than "I will speak
to the world in September," this morning. As I say, he gave
us a very clear steer that he could see all kinds of abandonment
of Defra activity to the extent that he had your entire activity
sub-contracted to a whole raft of agents with this hard core of
people left in Smith Square busy creating policy. Was this just
kite flying by Lord Haskins or does it bear some resemblance to
the sort of lines of inquiry which he has no doubt confided in
you he is pursuing?
Sir Brian Bender: As you said
earlier, he will speak for himself next week. I read earlier the
terms of reference for his inquiry. The main thrust of what he
is looking at is the way in which delivery is organised and its
relationship with the Department, and therefore it may well be
that his final recommendations will say that this part, which
is currently delivering agri-environment or delivering some other
operation which is part of the core department, should be separated
more from the core department in some way and may be aligned with
some other organisation. That is the sort of thing he is talking
about. They would still be accountable back to the Department
if that happened and I would still be accountable to Parliament
for the expenditure, say, on agri-environment schemes. What he
is saying—and that is consistent, as I said earlier, with
what the Chancellor said in his Budget statement and what the
Prime Minister said on a number of occasions—is that it
is right to devolve the delivery more away from core headquarters
departments. Then the question arises of what is the better organisation
to do that, but with some more separation and looking for a smaller
policy core. That is the direction he is exploring and discussing
and then we get into the relationship between Defra's direct delivery
arms like the Rural Development Service and some of the non-departmental
public bodies like the Countryside Agency and English Nature which
are also involved in activities to do with rural policies and
rural services.
Q51 Mr Jack: From your standpoint
one of the areas he is looking at is this question of the number
of non-departmental bodies, public bodies/quangos, agencies and
the like, all of whom seem to roughly occupy the same territory.
Do you think you have got too many? Will some have to go? Will
they be amalgamated?
Sir Brian Bender: If we did not
think it was untidy we would not have asked him to do it and I
repeat, his terms of reference were how to simplify or rationalise
the existing organisation of rural delivery in England. That is
the first part of his terms of reference. It became increasingly
clear to Margaret Beckett and to me around Easter 2002 that, from
the point of view of the customer, in most cases farmers who were
receiving our rural services, it was a fairly confusing picture.
Whether that means bodies are got rid of, whether they are aligned
better in some way, whether there is some merger, that is the
sort of issue we were asking him to look at and it would be wrong
of me to express a view at this stage because we set up an independent
person to look at it and give a kind of business perspective from
a business process point of view back to the Department. So he
will be making his recommendations on it certainly formally after
the summer.
Mr Jack: Okay.
Q52 Paddy Tipping: Where has this
got to, because all we have seen in the public domain are these
seven principles, these seven pillars of wisdom? Is it right that
you have had an interim report from Lord Haskins?
Sir Brian Bender: He shared some
interim thinking with our Ministers, to which Margaret Beckett's
response was, "Thank you. Now carry on working it up with
the evidence to underpin." But he and she agreed that the
issue for publication was the principles that he is following
and that is the press notice which was released on 5 June. Margaret
Beckett gave her reaction in that press notice.
Q53 Paddy Tipping: So people are
living with ambiguity through to September?
Sir Brian Bender: Yes, and later
because of course—
Q54 Paddy Tipping: What is the timescale
after that then?
Sir Brian Bender: As soon as practicable
is what we are saying. I hope it will be a matter of weeks rather
than months.
Q55 Paddy Tipping: That is quite
ambiguous, is it not?
Sir Brian Bender: It is ambiguous.
It depends on the complexity of his proposals. Defra Ministers
will need to reach a view and then there will need to be some
collective decision making within Government. So I think I would
be pretty unwise to give a precise timetable. My firm hope is
that we are talking of weeks rather than months.
Q56 Paddy Tipping: Do you think this
is dysfunctional, this review?
Sir Brian Bender: No. I think
Lord Haskins has his style of doing things but he has run businesses
and we asked him to look at it knowing that he would do it from
a business process point of view. He is talking to a lot of people,
he is gathering evidence, so I do not think it is dysfunctional.
I know there are a lot of anxieties out there but I do not think
he can be criticised for not consulting and engaging with people.
Q57 Paddy Tipping: One of the principles
which he talked about is dividing policy from delivery. The point
you made earlier on, Sir Brian, was that in the old days senior
officials were good at policy and were not very good at looking
at the results of policy and learning from the lessons of policy
to see what is happening on the ground. If there is a sharp distinction
between policy and delivery how are you going to keep these wheels
rolling, as it were?
Sir Brian Bender: It is hugely
important, it is not unique to this issue and it is not unique
to Defra, it applies right across Government. There are three
aspects of it. One is ensuring clarity of what is being expected
from the delivery body, so a clear performance framework, performance
targets and measuring the right thing. The Passport Agency when
it went belly-up was achieving all its targets, I seem to recall,
so it is quite important to set the right targets. So the first
thing is clarity on that. The second is having some form of, I
will use the term "audit" but it may not be as formal
as that, to ensure that the delivery body is doing what it says
it is doing. The third is making sure there is actually a feedback
loop between the two so that actually, coming back to my first
point, when the policy is being determined and the framework set,
somebody from the operational side is in the room, able to comment
on whether it is practical. This is a real lesson for Government
of ensuring that there is that loop and that policy is not created
in an ivory tower in the Westminster area.
Q58 Chairman: You will be very mindful
of course of the creation of the Rural Payments Agency and the
serious problem of the actual delivery which was occasioned by
the organisation getting over-technical?
Sir Brian Bender: I am, but I
would say that actually the problems they have had and which the
farmers have suffered were not primarily as a result of the creation
of the Rural Payments Agency. I know you have cross-examined Johnston
McNeill on it and I have read your report, but the problems arose
because there were two different databases, one owned and developed
by the British Cattle Movement Service for animal ID and tracing
purpose, and the other developed by the Rural Payments Agency
for subsidy payment purposes. While they were in different parts
of the organisation and owned by different people and prepared
for different purposes, reconciling those was the problem and
it really was not directly connected with the setting up of the
RPA or its change programme. That does not make it any less important
to get it absolutely right and I fervently hope that progress
is being made on that. Actually, the merger of the British Cattle
Movement Service with the Rural Payments Agency was intended to
ease the resolution of it and actually avoid farmers who rang
one organisation being told they really should be speaking to
the othe, because it should not be of any interest to farmers
who they need to speak to. So I believe progress is being made
on avoiding similar problems this year and a lot of lessons have
been learned.
Q59 Mr Lepper: Back at the beginning
of this year Alun Michael was asked about the costs of developing
the new logo for the Department and the figure that he gave in
the House, I think in a debate, on 7 January was £137,510.
Then last week a story appeared in The Sun claiming that the cost
of the logo had escalated to £500,000 and it said in The
Sun story "a firm of image consultants was hired to devise
the symbol [...] but the cost spiralled after Tony Blair threw
out the first version." Had The Sun got it right?
Sir Brian Bender: Not entirely,
Mr Lepper. I think a colleague used the phrase in a completely
different context this morning of someone not letting the facts
get in the way of the story. The most recent information was actually
in Parliament in an answer to Norman Baker on 3 June. There is
a Parliamentary question—I think it is number 111, Order
Book 16 May, which will help the Committee identify it—and
that had the figure of £329,000. That is not the cost of
the logo. That is the cost of creating a new organisation. When
the Prime Minister set up Defra one of the things he said in a
letter to Margaret Beckett was that he wanted a single identity
with a markedly new culture. Being a new organisation we wanted
to work out how to make our communications more efficient, how
to understand and target stakeholders better and actually how
to create a new culture. So there was a series of activities,
of which developing the logo was one and the direct cost of that,
which actually was in a PQ, I think to a member of this Committee,
Diana Organ, at the end of the year. The cost of that was £24,000
and that has not changed. The reason for the change between £137,000
and the £329,000 which was in the more recent answer is that
the December answer represented invoices already received. So
people for us have not done another £200,000 of work, invoices
have come in since December, quite a lot of that work done beforehand.
So that is the background. Now, how do you get from there to £500,000?
There is another £200,000 which is about changing the signs
from MAFF or DETR on 200 offices and in 200 locations around the
country. For example, when I was in Reading last week at our operation
there I noticed when we drove into the car park you could still
see through something papered up "MAFF". There was then
a paper version of what the experts called "the interim brand"
and in due course there will be something which looks and says
Defra rather more clearly without MAFF showing through and the
cost of all that across the whole estate, 200 locations, comes
to £200,000 internally and externally. It sounds a lot of
money but it is actually £1,000 per location internally and
externally. So that is how we get to the £500,000, of which,
as I say, the direct cost of the logo is £24,000.
|
