Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
Monday 15 March 2004
Mr Leigh Lewis CB, Mr Vince Gaskell, Mr Bernard Herdan,
and Mr Paul Pindar
Q60 Mr Field: Mr Lewis, is there any
work being carried out on the numbers of people who are refused
jobs because of the information the Agency is studying today comes
up with?
Mr Lewis: We know that about one
in five employers who we have surveyed as a result of recent work
say that the results of CRB disclosures have materially influenced
their recruitment decisions and we know that around 70% say that
the information is helpful to them.
Q61 Mr Field: We know from the Report
that the Agency has been concentrating on those who may abuse
young people and not weighting equally those who care for elderly
people. Did you give them those instructions?
Mr Lewis: I think it was always
the case that we saw the role of the Bureau to help employers
take better informed recruitment decisions and protect all of
those who might be vulnerable.
Q62 Mr Field: Mr Lewis, our time is,
unfortunately, limited. Did you give any instructions on this
or not?
Mr Lewis: There were no specific
instructions given to the Agency to focus on one group or another.
Q63 Mr Field: How did you find out that
the work was being weighted in that way?
Mr Lewis: I think I need to be
able to answer this question in my own words. It is not a question
of the work being weighted in this way.
Q64 Mr Field: You are answering all the
questions in your own words.
Mr Lewis: It is a fact that when
the Bureau ran into difficulties then the decision was taken that
before it took on new work and new roles and new disclosures it
was necessary, first of all, to get it operating properly and
effectively in respect of its original groups, but, as you will
know, it is now undertaking additional checks on new care home
staff, on domiciliary care agency staff and so on and it is gradually
extending its reach to cover other potentially vulnerable groups
and people who work for them and with them.
Q65 Mr Field: Let me come back to the
contract. I am not terribly good at making judgments about people
but I am wonderfully supported by many of my constituents who
are pretty hard nosed and if they were sitting here looking at
a contract which was placed at this level in which the Report
says the Home Office did not seriously consider the other applicants
once the prices were known, that the cost of that contract has
escalated by £150 million and we still do not know where
it is going to land, they would say there was a fix on and that
money would have changed hands. Given that that is a charge I
now put to you and your Department and given the Department loves
having consultants even if they do not know what the price of
these consultants is, what moves do you make to make sure that
such a fix did not occur in this or any of the other contracts?
Mr Lewis: First of all, I would
like, since you have put it in those terms, to place on the record
that there is no evidence whatsoever of any impropriety of any
kind.
Q66 Mr Field: I am asking you what steps
you took to check that there was not any impropriety?
Mr Lewis: What steps were taken
actually were pretty rigorous. When those best and final offers
were received a great deal of due diligence and a great deal of
investigation went into analysing those bits and those figures,
including a specially commissioned one of examination of the Capita
bid precisely because it was at a significant lower cost than
the other bids.
Q67 Mr Field: Given that with the result
the findings were spectacularly out, have any of those people
lost their jobs for losing taxpayers so much money?
Mr Lewis: No, they have not. I
think one of the difficulties which we face, and I absolutely
understand the line of questioning which you are pursuing, is
that we are now applying what we know now to the decision that
was taken then. At that point we had three bids.
Q68 Mr Field: That is the nature of our
inquiry.
Mr Lewis: It is, but I think it
is important to go back to what was facing the decision-makers
at the time that the decision to let that contract was taken.
What we were facing then was three bids with a difference in price
between the cheapest and most expensive of over £100 million
over 10 years. A great deal of due diligence was undertaken and
a special examination was undertaken of those bids, the results
of which suggested that the proper course was to accept the Capita
bid, as was done. Had a different decision been taken at the time
I think it might have been extraordinarily difficult to justify
it to this Committee.
Q69 Mr Field: We now know the outcome
despite your due diligence enquiries. You mentioned to Mr Bacon
that the cost was going to rise to something like £400 million.
In what year is that going to be the cost?
Mr Lewis: That will be over the
lifetime of the contract.
Q70 Mr Field: Which is?
Mr Lewis: Ten years.
Mr Field: Will you be prepared to put
your salary on the fact that it will not rise and that taxpayers
will not be called upon to double the sum again?
Chairman: I do not think that is a fair
question to put to the Permanent Secretary.
Q71 Mr Field: Let me put it another way.
I think lots of my constituents, who have to pay these bills,
when nobody is sacked, when the sums escalate in this fashion,
when they would have got sacked for tiny sums compared with this,
would have thought that was a fair one. What action is the Home
Office going to take to ensure that our constituents are not going
to pay more, and what redress will our constituents have if you
get it wrong again?
Mr Lewis: Can I try and address
a number of elements of that? First of all, your constituents
and you as their representative are entirely entitled to look
at matters in that way. Equally, it is the case that, as far as
one can tell at this distance in time, the decisions that were
taken at that point in relation to the letting of that contract
were not only proper, they were the only rational decisions that
those who were at that point taking them could on the facts available
to them have taken. Secondly, we do not know what would have happened
had one of the other bids been accepted. What we do know is there
was a fundamental difference introduced in the Channel mix strategy.
Q72 Mr Field: There has been this mega
dipping into our constituents' pockets and nobody has lost their
job. If the contract becomes £600, £700, £800 million
in this timespan would anyone lose their job?
Mr Lewis: What we have just done
is to renegotiate the contract with Capita and that has led to
a reduction in its total estimated price over the lifetime of
the contract with more rigorous clauses in terms of performance
and in terms of the costing of the contract.
Q73 Mr Field: So what would it have been
if you had not done those re-negotiations?
Mr Lewis: It would be more expensive.
Q74 Mr Field: We know that. What were
they asking for that you managed to bring them down from?
Mr Lewis: It was not a question
of what they were asking for. What we needed to do was to take
account of the changes that had been introduced since the original
contract.
Q75 Mr Field: But you were suggesting
the price had been reduced. We know it is now £400 million.
What was it going to be if you had not intervened so decisively?
Mr Lewis: We reduced the unit
price, starting in October of this year, by just under £1
for each disclosure. So if you understand that there are something
like 2.5 million disclosures per year than the mathematics can
simply be worked out. Can I answer one part of your question which
I have so far failed to answer and that is that if we were to
find over the remainder of this contract that public servants—and
I have spent 30 years in the public service and I believe profoundly
in the ethics of the public service—had negligently abused
the trust that the public put in them for spending public money
then I would indeed expect them to pay for that penalty with their
jobs.
Mr Field: Could we have a note on what
the sum would have been without these negotiations?
Q76 Chairman: Can you help us with that?
Mr Lewis: We will attempt to provide
that for you.[2]
Q77 Mr Jenkins: Mr Lewis, were you pleased
with this Report when you read it or disappointed with it?
Mr Lewis: I think it is a fair
Report. There is nothing in the Report with which I would want
to take issue or quarrel. I think the Report does two things:
the Report illustrates the problems that the Bureau ran into and
it sets out very fairly why those came about, some of the steps
that were taken and some of the steps that were not taken. It
also illustrates what we concentrated on very understandably thus
far on the steps that led up to the contract and the problems
but it also sets out equally the very considerable success that
the Bureau has had in the period since those problems occurred
in not only righting them but now providing a more effective service.
Q78 Mr Jenkins: That is funny because
this Committee get this Report through the post, we do not come
together to discuss the Report, we do it as individuals and we
have all had our attention drawn in the Report to the way that
the contract was allocated. I will not repeat the questions that
other members have asked but I had concerns when I read this Report.
I am surprised you did not say, "yes, there were things which
concerned me, particularly about the allocation". On 3.5
at the end it says one of the bidders, now part of the IBM Group
said, "the Agency did not clarify assumptions underpinning
their bid with them or ask for alternative prices based on different
assumptions". Why is it that if you have people coming in
with three different bids, with different sets of assumptions,
when some match the criteria you have set out, others have raised
problems regarding the time scale and the assumptions, why did
you not go back and negotiate with each one what the price would
be if they were on the same set of assumptions?
Mr Lewis: I think the difficulty
that those who were responsible for the contract negotiations
at that stage had was that we had reached the stage of best and
final offers, and as is suggested by that best and final offer
means precisely that. That is the point at which it is necessary
to reach a judgment as to which contract, which bid is putting
forward the best overall response to the contract.
Q79 Mr Jenkins: You made your mind up
that Capita was the way to go.
Mr Lewis: We had not. That was
the point at which—just to repeat, I am sorry if I am in
danger of taking the patience of the Committee too far—not
only was all of the normal due diligence and very exhaustive examination
of those best and final offers taken forward it was also the point
at which there was a special one-off examination of the Capita
bid to identify whether there were any obvious reasons why it
should be rejected notwithstanding the fact it was very substantially
achievable.
2 Ev 23 Back
| 
