Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
16 JUNE 2004
SIR BRIAN
BENDER, MR
ANDREW BURCHELL
AND MR
LUCIAN HUDSON
Q1 Chairman: Sir Brian, you are very
welcome indeed to the Committee for our annual tour through the
Department's annual report[2]and
an opportunity to ask you and your colleagues more or less anything
we decide to ask. We always look forward to this occasion with
keen and eager anticipation. For the record, you are accompanied
by Andrew Burchell, the Department's Finance Director, and Lucian
Hudson, the Director of Communications. Gentlemen, you are all
known to the Committee and all are welcome. Can I, on behalf of
the Committee, send our thanks to you and your colleagues for
the very useful pre-briefing session which we had.[3]
I think it enabled us to cover a number of important points about
the overall objectives of the Department. That will not stop us
revisiting some of the territory again today. One of the topics
that we touched on was the efforts that the Department has been
making during its still relatively short lifetime to bring together
the different cultures of the old MAFF and the Environment Department.
Indeed, on page 209 of your report, there is a reference to the
Developing Defra Programme. It certainly reads very well in terms
of what you are hoping to do. It says, "While our primary
focus is to help achieve wider departmental objectives, many will
also generate efficiency gains." You talk about some of the
things that you are going to get out of it. Perhaps you could
give a commentary on how Developing Defra is progressing and whether
you really do believe that you are now integrating the different
backgrounds and cultures so that you are getting a Defra house
style as opposed to almost a silo mentality.
Sir Brian Bender: First of all,
the purpose of any change programme like Developing Defra is to
improve our capacity to deliver. Therefore, one of the measures
of whether it is successful, which no doubt the Committee will
come on to later this afternoon, is whether we are delivering
any better. A second measure is whether the purpose of the organisation
is becoming increasingly clear and we have done quite a lot of
work on our clarity of purpose. We have done a lot of work too,
which is still work in progress, on the nature of the interventions
as a government department, the combination of incentives, persuasion,
regulation and how we should get those right, do them more smartly
and modernise them. Again, there is a reference in the report
to the regulation task force that Margaret Beckett set up. There
are then issues about whether we have improved systems to underpin
the business, HR systems, finance systems, and whether or not
we are getting any better at seeing how the Department is performing
overall. We shared with you some of the work we have been doing
on a Balance Scorecard. Then we get into the softer stuff of improved
ways of working, skilling people and leadership development. How
are we doing? My first answer would be that my personal view is
we are doing pretty well considering the circumstances of the
creation of the Department. I think this Committee was surprised
when in a session the Secretary of State and I had I referred
to Defra as an unplanned merger, but it was an unplanned merger.
We were not expecting, until the call came from the Cabinet Secretary,
that environment would be part of it and it was created at a time
of national crisis when 5,000 people were still working on foot
and mouth disease. Three years on, I really do think we have come
a long way. The second question is: is the job done? Certainly
not. We have come as far as I would have hoped and indeed further
than I would have expected. We have a further way to go. The next
part of the answer is that the right people to ask about how we
are doing are a combination of the customers we are providing
services to, the stakeholders we relate to—which of course,
at one level, includes this Committee—and our own staff
through staff surveys. That is again another set of measures for
how we are doing. If I can turn to the issue of integration, there
are two or three replies. First of all, an increasing amount of
our work is done on a cross-functional basis crossing the silo
organisational boundaries on a programme and project management
basis. The whole of our Sustainable Farming and Food Strategy,
the work that we are doing and will be launching publicly tomorrow
on diffuse water pollution, the inter-departmental work on the
Sustainable Energy Policy Network with DTI to follow up the Energy
White Paper—all that is done, if you like, ignoring the
functional parts of the organisation, working across the piece.
The second measure of integration looks at things like staff movements
and, at management board level, I am the only person who was on
either the MAFF or DETR board on 8 June 2001. At senior Civil
Service level, just over 50% of all senior civil servants in Defra
are new to posts at that level since 2001. At Director level,
which is part way up the senior Civil Service, 15 out of 27 are
people who are in new appointments at that level in Defra, six
of them from other government departments and five from outside
the Civil Service. Again, there is quite a lot of deliberate churn
to try and freshen things up.
Q2 Chairman: You were talking about this
Balance Scorecard as the way you can perhaps comment on how well
you are doing against some of the items in the Developing Defra
agenda. You were kind enough to send a document to the Committee
on this subject. The indication is that it helps you to measure
things. It says, "A framework that at its highest level helps
organisations translate their strategy into objectives that can
be measured."[4]
Then I looked through the document to see if I could find some
numbers because that, to me, is what measurement is about. I was
struggling to find any numbers. I was struggling in this document
which lays out what you might be measuring because you dealt,
at our earlier meeting, for example, with the reductions in manpower
that you were going to be making. We talked about some of the
financial assessments as to how you are doing. Those are measurements
by my normal, simple way of doing it but this Balance Scorecard
seems to be a measureless environment. Why is that?
Mr Burchell: In terms of the indicators
we selected, rather than choose the indicators which you have
data on because you collect them routinely, we spent a lot of
time identifying the indicators which we believe would support
the successful delivery of our objectives. For example, we have
indicators around getting the right people with the right skills
in the right job.
Q3 Chairman: Pick one area. Give me an
indicator. Tell me what you are measuring and give us a quick
commentary on success. It is all right talking in this management
speak but I would like something tangible to get hold of.
Mr Burchell: Motivation and satisfaction,
people knowledge and culture as informed by our annual staff survey,
which is measurable and is also going to be updated on a quarterly,
sample basis through electronic staff surveys about people. That
is one example.
Sir Brian Bender: There would
be therefore an indicator of how this compared with previous quarters
to measure trends.
Q4 Chairman: When did you first set up
the base line measure?
Sir Brian Bender: We had a staff
survey around 2002 for the first Defra one and we have just had
one early 2004, so 18 months later. We are now running them on
a quarterly basis.
Q5 Chairman: You are able to compare
2002 with 2004? Is that right?
Mr Burchell: In relation to a
core set of questions, yes.
Q6 Chairman: What kind of core questions
have you been asking the staff?
Sir Brian Bender: Are you proud
to work for the Department? Do you feel you are in a blame culture?
Q7 Chairman: How many of them were proud
to work for Defra two years ago and how many are now?
Sir Brian Bender: 49% in the most
recent one, which is 13 up on the previous survey.
Q8 David Taylor: Were they not different
groups of people? You just talked about churning so you are comparing
cows with sheep.
Sir Brian Bender: It is a dipstick
into the staff we have. Surely the measure of morale and motivation
is the staff we have.
Q9 Joan Ruddock: Are the returns anonymous?
Sir Brian Bender: Yes.
Q10 Chairman: What is the sample of staff
who participated in these exercises?
Sir Brian Bender: About 60%.
Q11 Chairman: In both of them?
Sir Brian Bender: We may have
hit 70% in the first one and 65% in the second one.
Q12 David Taylor: Collected electronically?
Sir Brian Bender: Yes.
Q13 Chairman: The reason I am asking
these questions is that when you go through the voluminous report
it is quite difficult to find any of this information. I will
put my hand up and say I have not read every single page and I
am sorry. I know my more assiduous colleagues have visited every
single page so they will be able to tell me where this mystery
Scorecard scoring is, but is this the kind of thing you think
you ought to be putting in your annual report?
Sir Brian Bender: It is an interesting
question and the Freedom of Information Act may take it away from
us but we want a very frank assessment of some of these measures
in the Scorecard. We want to know if things are getting worse
and we want to know how we tackle them. That is an interesting
question for any organisation, if you are trying to find out frankly
what people think. Is the best thing to do to put that in the
public domain and then you end up with a risk of people not telling
you the blunt truth?
Q14 Chairman: The reason I am probing
this is that you put a lot of emphasis on the Developing Defra
programme. You, in your own presentation at the beginning, talked
about the Balance Scorecard. I am searching around for something
to show me that in X number of measures seven out of 10 are better
than they were two years ago and I cannot find it.
Mr Hudson: Can I pick up on the
staff survey? Two things: one, the staff survey is taken seriously
by everybody. We have discussions about not only what are the
results but what is the thinking behind the results. One reason
why we went for quarterly is that we want to be seen to be held
to account for the kind of feedback we get from our own staff
and for the staff themselves to comment on that as we go on through
the year, not just wait to the end of the year. I think the Balance
Scorecard helps influence the mind set of myself and my managers
to take into account the things that we should be looking out
for, not least stakeholder customer satisfaction. Whether or not
we have the measurements in place yet and we can judge what those
measurements are, it is influencing how we go about doing our
job.
Q15 Chairman: You mentioned the word
"customer" and customers are in the section in the Balance
Scorecard under the heading "The Classic Quadrant."
Are your customers two years on happier or not in the service
that Defra is offering?
Sir Brian Bender: I have some
data on customer satisfaction. All our major delivery bodies do
customer satisfaction surveys. The aggregated data is, for what
it is worth, 83% What I do not have is detail of how that relates
to a year or two previously.
Chairman: I think it would be quite useful
because you are a deliverer of services and the report reflects
on the things you have been doing. In the classic scorecard, customers
are one of the four key areas and the Committee would find it
interesting to know in the various ways you deliver services whether
you are doing better or worse.
Q16 Mr Lepper: Could I clarify something
that was said a while ago about data protection and freedom of
information? I do not think I quite followed what you were arguing
there. The Chairman was asking about providing some of the information
that we have just been discussing in the report. You have told
us that the returns from staff are anonymous. I do not quite see
therefore why there might be some inhibition about using that
information.
Sir Brian Bender: I was making
a slightly different point. Certainly I am very ready to share
with the Committee—and maybe we can discuss this with the
clerk afterwards—exactly what you would like to have. We
can provide information from the staff survey, information from
previous tracking of customer attitudes in different parts of
the organisation compared with the present. I was making a rather
broader point, which is the impact of the Freedom of Information
Act on any document produced for an organisation to tell it fairly
frankly what it thinks about itself and how it is doing and whether
that necessary internal frankness would risk being diluted in
a way that may be unhelpful to running the organisation. I was
not making a value judgment one way or another. It is a much broader
point.
Q17 David Burnside: Can you prove over
the last 12 months that one of your customers, the farming community,
by qualitative and quantitative market research terminology, are
getting better delivery from your Department now than they had
12 months ago?
Sir Brian Bender: The Rural Payments
Agency who have the main relationship with farmers do track customer
attitudes. I believe I am right in saying the figures have improved.
The other key point about the Rural Payments Agency is that their
performance in paying subsidies on time in 2003 was the best they
have had. 2003 had excellent payment performance on arable area
payments. 96.1% were met within the deadline. I can provide quite
a lot of data on that. It was the year before when the situation
was bad. 2002 was bad on the bovine schemes.
Q18 Chairman: I think what the line of
questioning perhaps indicates is that what we lack are, for the
laymen—and we are keen observers of your Department's activity—some
simple, easy to understand measures, year on year, of how you
are doing in the areas which you yourself outline. Page 29 of
the annual report deals with the One Stop Shop pilot project.
This box tells me that the project delivers diverse appraisal
requirements in a unified way by providing practical support,
guidance and assistance to policy divisions. It contributes, it
says here, to Defra's commitment to better policy making by improving
the quality of policy appraisal. Can you explain what all that
means? What has it been doing and has it had any measurable effect?
Sir Brian Bender: What it has
been trying to do is ensure that the evaluation of a policy proposal
before it is put forward properly brings together the different
legs of sustainable development, the economic, the social and
the environmental. We set up teams as described here, primarily
led by economists, to work in each policy area to provide that
underpinning support. Over the year described here, they provided
advice to 45 policy teams. The evaluation that we have done so
far indicates that it was a valued service by the policy maker.
The world has moved on slightly because the Cabinet Office has
now agreed that the regulatory impact appraisal, which has looked
hitherto only at economic costs and benefits, is now going to
be broadened to include the other legs of sustainable development,
which is important particularly for Defra in spreading sustainable
development across Whitehall. This work is now going to be continued
in the Department, looking at sustainable development and regulatory
impact together in policy areas.
Q19 Chairman: You read these little boxes
and think it sounds interesting. Can I have a tangible example
of the before and after effect of this? All I get is a general
description. You have amplified that by telling the Committee
that you had economists advising in policy areas and that somehow
in sustainability things have improved. I think it would be useful,
if you are going to talk about the practical way in which the
Department operates, to have some tangible example of what this
actually means.
Sir Brian Bender: Unless any of
my colleagues can give you one now, I am not in a position to
do so but I absolutely take the point.
2 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs,
Departmental Report 2004, CM 6219, April 2004.http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/deprep/2004/index.htm Back
3
The Committee heard a briefing from the Permanent Secretary at
Defra on 7 June. Back
4
Ev 2 Back
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