Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR
JOHN GIEVE
CB, MR MARTIN
NAREY AND
MR WILLIAM
NYE
15 JULY 2003
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. As you
may have gathered, I have recently become Chair of the Select
Committee, so welcome this morning. Perhaps you would like to
introduce yourself and your colleagues for the Committee?
Mr Gieve: I am Permanent Secretary
of the Home Office; Martin Narey is now Commissioner for Correctional
Services and Permanent Secretary in charge of Human Resources;
and William Nye is our Principal Finance Officer.
Q2 Chairman: We are grateful to you
for the Annual Report which we are discussing today and also for
the further information that you have submitted in response to
earlier questions from the Committee. This is very much a session
about the Home Office's performance over the year in question,
but I wonder if I could start by asking you a question that seems
to be quite immediate today, which concerns the reports today
that the Home Office's new building in Marsham Street is going
to be far too small for the number of people who work for the
Home Office, and whether those reports are true.
Mr Gieve: The Home Office building
will take, we think, all the people in the core Home Office headquarters
but will not be enough to take also the headquarters of the Prison
Service and the Probation Service, so that is true. Originally
the feeling was that the numbers in the Home Office would decline
between the commissioning of the building and the arrival of the
building—in fact, they have gone up—so that bit of
the report by the National Audit Office is absolutely right.
Q3 Chairman: When did that become
apparent?
Mr Gieve: It has been apparent
for the last two years.
Q4 Chairman: I see. Can I ask about
your PSA targets? You had eight PSA targets in 1998. How does
the Home Office's performance against its targets compare with
that of other government departments?
Mr Gieve: I have seen a league
table and I think we are in a respectable position in it. As you
know, many of the targets run over a number of years so we are
not yet in a position to say whether we have hit them or not.
I think of the four targets where the due dates have passed from
the original comprehensive spending review we have hit three.
The fourth was a target for getting a percentage of final asylum
decisions within six months and we did not hit that by the due
date although we continue to have a target, and we are improving
on that front now.
Q5 Chairman: How good a measure of
the Home Office's performance would you say the targets are?
Mr Gieve: I would say they are
a very important measure. Probably of all the departments that
I know the Home Office targets focus on outcomes rather than processes
and outputs and in the areas of crime, the fear of crime, criminal
justice, harm from drugs, escapes and the rate of re-offending,
I think they are the right targets and the right measures by which
we should be judged. They are not comprehensive—for example,
we have not got a target on terrorism—and clearly it is
an important function of the Home Office to maintain our defences
against terrorism. So there are a number of things which the Home
Office has to do, continue to do and to do well which are not
captured in the targets, but I think as a measure of the areas
where the Government and the Department most want to see improvements,
our targets are pretty good.
Q6 Chairman: You appear to have a
number, according to the most recent advice we have had from the
Home Office, like improvement in the level of public confidence
in the criminal justice system or the target for the proportion
of asylum applications to be decided at a particular time, or
the measurement of the improvement of police forces, which have
yet to be resolved as targets. Do you know when those targets
will be set?
Mr Gieve: Yes. For the ones which
have not been set yet or have not been fully defined yet I think
we publish the target and then there is a technical note which
sets out exactly how it will be measured, on which statistical
series and so on. We are hoping in the next few days, before Parliament
rises, to issue the technical notes on confidence and I think
one of the others—
Mr Nye: The joint target for value
of money in the criminal justice system.
Mr Gieve: That leaves two which
we have not yet published—one is the definition of frontline
policing which is a subsidiary target and we are hoping to do
that in the early autumn, and we also have a target which talks
about the performance gap between the worst and the best, and
so far we have got an "X" in there to say we will narrow
it by X% and we are going to define "X" again in the
autumn when we have our first comparative two years' data on police
performance.
Q7 Chairman: What is the value to
the public of targets that the year after the spending review
have not been defined?
Mr Gieve: First of all, the spending
review runs from this April for three years and many of the targets
run beyond then so while we are a bit late in setting these targets
and we would have liked to have done it earlier we are not so
far behind the game. Secondly, as I say, to narrow the gap in
performance, for example, between the worst performing police
forces and the best is a valid target. We have said we want to
do it and we are setting in place, as you know very well, a quite
sophisticated mechanism for measuring performance. Now the Department
has been working on how we narrow the gap since the target was
set. The fact we have not yet got the statistical series precisely
defined does not mean no work has been done and on that one, as
you know, a huge amount of work has been done.
Q8 Chairman: The Prime Minister recently
made a speech in which he seemed to suggest that there would be
less focus and less emphasis on targets in the future and public
sector delivery than in the past. Has that message been communicated
to the Home Office?
Mr Gieve: No. I went to a meeting
with the Prime Minister and other ministers and it was made very
clear that what we were talking about was, if you like, delivery
plus rather than a switch. We have got to hit our targets but
I think the emphasis we have been given is that merely improving
performance is not enough and targets are not enough, so no one
has suggested that we can slacken off—attractive though
in some ways that would be.
Q9 Chairman: So you are not expecting
to have less targets to report to us in a year's time?
Mr Gieve: In a year's time we
should have completed the next spending review, and I expect there
may well be less targets. We have ten PSA targets at the moment
and there may be a few less, but I expect that targets in the
areas of reducing crime and the fear of crime, improving the performance
of the criminal justice system, reducing the harm from drugs,
improving our performance on immigration and asylum, will still
be there—and rightly so.
Q10 Chairman: Finally, you have told
the Committee that the details of the confidence in the criminal
justice system measurement target will be published, you hope,
before the House rises. Targets are meant to be SMART—specific,
measurable, achievable, relevant and timed. Are you confident
that the technical definition you publish will meet that criteria?
If so, how?
Mr Gieve: Yes, I am. Broadly speaking,
we are going to measure it by surveys of people's confidence in
the criminal justice system. As you know, the British Crime Survey
has for a number of years included questions on how people think
the criminal justice system is performing and that will give us
something which is measurable, specific, timed and relevant. The
question of "achievable" is the most difficult one because
obviously people's attitude to the criminal justice system, just
as to government in general, is affected by many things other
than what the Home Office does, or in this case what the three
criminal justice departments do. But we think we can influence
it in a number of ways by improving the treatment of people who
come into contact with the criminal justice system as witnesses
or victims because that, we know, influences how people view the
system as a whole, by improving the actual performance and telling
people about it. We have not tried to do this systematically before
and we hope that will have an effect.
Q11 Mrs Dean: The expenditure tables
in the Departmental Report suggest that the growth of your resource
budget will be significantly slower between 2002-03 and 2005-06
than it was between 1999-2000 and 2002-03. Are you confident the
Home Office will be able to keep spending to the amounts in the
table?
Mr Gieve: You are right that the
rate of growth will be slower and was expected to be slower. The
tables are a bit complex in that some of the years include transfers
into the Home Office which other years do not and William will
say something about that. On your broad question of can we stick
within these budgets, the one point I would make on that is that,
as the report notes, we are still in negotiations with the Treasury
about our budget for this year and future years for asylum and
immigration, so those may change the numbers. Also, as you know,
there is a reserve which, depending on events, we may or may not
get access to.
Mr Nye: In addition to the point
about asylum and immigration, we also anticipate receiving transfers
from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the National
Assembly for Wales in 2004-05 and 2005-06 in respect of an element
of the total police funding settlement. This happens on an annual
basis so we have had those equivalent transfers in the past years
and also in 2003-04, but not 2004-05 and 2005-06. So if we were
able to take account of those in the tables—which we cannot
at this stage—then it would show a slightly higher growth
rate.
Q12 Mrs Dean: So the tables are distorted
because of transfers in that have taken place in previous years
but are not shown yet?
Mr Nye: I would not say distorted.
But the tables necessarily show the position of the Home Office
as a snapshot at a moment in time, the moment in time being the
point when this was published, effectively at the same time as
the Budget and the Main Estimates. They show the position we had
then but not things we can anticipate either for this year or
future years necessarily.
Q13 Mrs Dean: You mention immigration
and asylum matters. Why has it taken so long to finalise the budget
for those?
Mr Gieve: I think the main answer
to that is that we have been changing the policy and our programmes
very substantially over the last year. At the time of the last
spending review we put in some numbers, as you will see, over
the period but we knew at that point we had not yet got sufficient
grip on how big an influence the new measures introduced in the
Bill last autumn were going to have on the intake, particularly
of asylum seekers, and therefore the numbers we had to support.
The biggest single part of the budget is asylum support costs
and we are still discussing what a reasonable profile for that
is likely to be.
Q14 Mrs Dean: When are you likely
to be able to produce those figures?
Mr Gieve: I hope shortly.
Q15 Chairman: Could you be a little
bit more specific?
Mr Gieve: No!
Mr Nye: In terms of formal notification
to Parliament we would anticipate bringing something forward in
the winter supplementary estimates.
Q16 Mrs Dean: Turning to prisons
and probation, spending increased at a rate of 8% per year in
the three years up to 2002-03 but your plans are for annual increases
of under 5% per year in three years 2005-06. What steps are you
going to take to hold back increases in spending?
Mr Narey: The spending on Correctional
Services has been pretty generous over this period. It has allowed
us to set up the National Probation Service and the Youth Justice
Board and across all three services, including the Prison Service,
put a considerable investment into things which we believe will
work to reduce offending. The increase in spend right across that
period is significantly above inflation and has allowed us to
start to do things which seem to be delivering the results we
want and there is some emerging and encouraging evidence about
some of the programmes being used both in probation and in prisons
and particularly being used by the YJB which are cutting re-offending.
Q17 Chairman: Just following up one
point briefly on immigration and asylum, if the budget is not
settled, what figures are the people in the Immigration and Asylum
Service working to at the moment? The published figures? Or do
they have a different budgeted figure working for which has not
yet been agreed?
Mr Nye: While the discussions
Mr Gieve has referred to are going on, people in the Immigration
and Nationality Department need to work with indicative budgets
in order to ensure there is financial control within the organisation.
As part of the overall position of management of the finances
of the Department, we authorise them to have indicative budgets
to enable them to do that management. They are not precisely the
same as the sample that is here but give a view of what we could
manage within the Home Office as a whole, on the basis of what
we could do about moving money around or reprofiling money to
ensure they have budgets that they can work to and live with.
Q18 Bob Russell: Gentlemen, moving
to crime and the justice gap, as I understand it the target is
to improve the delivery of justice yet the information given in
the Departmental Report shows that, since that target was set
from March 1999 to September 2001, it fell, then began to improve,
and although there has been a slight increase it does not really
fit in with the Home Secretary's view that crime figures were
a "disgrace". With that background, how can you make
realistic predictions of your future success in meeting the target
and bringing more offenders to justice if you cannot explain why
the measure has already fallen? Albeit it has stabilised, it is
still way below what it was three or four years ago.
Mr Gieve: This was an occasion
when we announced a target for increases and the numbers promptly
went in the opposite direction, and we have had to put in place
measures to reverse that. As with crime as a whole, it is quite
difficult to be completely certain about what caused this. There
was a decline through the 1990s in experienced police officer
numbers: that has kicked up in the last few years and as those
new recruits gain experience we think that is one factor which
is helping us boost the number of people brought to justice. There
was also, at the time that this fell away, a great concentration
within the court system on reducing delay, and we think that that
also had an influence on the number of cases taken through—
Q19 Bob Russell: You mean the cases
never got to court?
Mr Gieve: Yes. We think that in
some cases people put their efforts into advancing the cases they
could advance. I have not got numbers on this; I am just looking
at the fact that delays came down at the same time and there was
a lot of emphasis on reducing delays. But why should we be able
to reverse this, which is our target, that was the main point
of your question.
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