Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witness (Questions 260-279)

7 JULY 2004

RT HON CHARLES CLARKE MP

  Q260 Mr Chaytor: Secretary of State, your Department spends a quarter of a billion pounds on administration and employs 4,500 people. How many are you going to get rid of in the next four years?

  Mr Clarke: What we have announced is a 31% reduction in staff over the period to 2008. We are phasing that and there are a series of different stages of that approach which we are going through.

  Q261 Mr Chaytor: That is about a thousand?

  Mr Clarke: It is of that order.

  Q262 Mr Chaytor: In the report it says you are getting rid of 1,460, is that exactly 31%?

  Mr Clarke: I do not know.

  Q263 Mr Chaytor: You are the mathematician, Secretary of State.

  Mr Clarke: One of the things I learnt in mathematics was not to try any clever immediate tricks on numbers. I have enough problems doing this job when television interviewers shove the microphone in your mouth and ask for a particular mathematical sum to be solved, and I am not going to do it. It is of the order of 31%.

  Q264 Mr Chaytor: In your report the text did say it will be 800 by the year 2006 but in the total it says only 400 by the year 2006. It would be very helpful if you could write to us to clarify exactly what the scale of the numbers is.

  Mr Clarke: I am very happy to do that.[4] We have had a very substantial process in the Department, including consultation with trade unions and colleagues, to establish the best way of going through this. We have taken a number of decisions so far about where we are going. If it would be helpful to the Committee I would be happy to set out very fully what the exact process is since the report was published.

  Q265 Mr Chaytor: Of the savings that accrue as a result of the reduction in staff by 2006 and by 2008, will all of that saving go into front line services in education?

  Mr Clarke: Yes, but with one important qualification which is the total amount of resource that we spent on our administration is a very small percentage indeed of the total amount of resource that is spent on education because the overwhelming bulk of what we spend goes to schools, colleges, universities and so on very directly.

  Q266 Mr Chaytor: The staffing savings will be ring fenced to education?

  Mr Clarke: Absolutely.

  Q267 Mr Chaytor: Given that you are taking on huge new responsibilities for children's services then presumably the bulk of that ring fencing will be allocated to finance the expansion of children's services?

  Mr Clarke: Yes, but I emphasise the point again that the actual saving that we make from the efficiencies that we achieve by 2008 is a pretty small number compared with the amount of money we are spending on children's services or schools or whatever it may happen to be.

  Q268 Mr Chaytor: As part of the Chancellor's guidance to departments to reduce their staffing, he wants to see devolution from London to the regions. Do you have any plans to further devolved staffing to the regions?

  Mr Clarke: Yes, following the Lyons Committee we have been discussing precisely what we should do and where we should do it. We have been discussing, also, how we can work more closely with the Government Offices in terms of education services and how we can do that. We are developing approaches on that as we speak. We have not taken final decisions on it and it is part of the overall process that we are describing.

  Q269 Mr Chaytor: Broadly, what kind of functions will be devolved to regions?

  Mr Clarke: At the moment we are amongst the most devolved departments of Government. I am speaking off the cuff so please do not hold me to this figure but I think I am right in saying that 70% of our staff work outside London already in this position. The question what then further is devolved is a matter that we are discussing particularly but the central organising principle is that policy based staff should mainly be based in London and administrative staff based outside London.

  Q270 Mr Chaytor: If it was the case that following the referenda on regional assemblies in the three Northern regions regional assemblies were established and those assemblies wanted to have a strong involvement in the skills sector or even the post-14 sector, how would that change the work of the Department down here? Would you be supportive of the greater responsibilities for elected regional assemblies in the 14-plus sector?

  Mr Clarke: They are two different questions, I will take the second first. We have agreed a concordat with the Department of Trade and Industry, the Regional Development Agencies, including those regions, and the Learning and Skills Council as to how we should divide the responsibility for the skills between those agencies. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and myself had a meeting with all the chairs of the RDAs about six weeks ago, something of that kind, to clarify exactly where we were going and how we were dealing with it. I think we have got a satisfactory solution which everybody is satisfied with and feels we have right. We will implement that, as it were, in all circumstances. That should be implemented in any circumstance whether you have an elected regional assembly or not in a given area. An elected regional assembly would give a bit more of a pull towards that, if I can put it like that, but we think that the regional aspect of the skills agenda should in any case be delivered in the regions through the regional skills partnerships whether or not there is a regional assembly. What we are ready to do, and I have discussed with colleagues in Government who are making proposals in this area, is if there is an elected regional assembly giving the elected regional assembly certain rights in relation to the delivery structures in those regions which at the moment are held by the RDA's Government Office or LSC in terms of nomination, for example, and so on, to get a better relationship as to what takes place. We feel we have a good structure, as I say we have called it the concordat, between the main agencies to work together. What is the implication of all that for the DfES? Not a great deal because a very large amount of DfES work on skills is handled by the Learning and Skills Council itself in its own structure and DfES staff in this is a relatively small number.

  Q271 Mr Chaytor: Finally, what are the implications for the role of the Secretary of State itself with all this slimming down and decentralisation and devolution? Do you see your role or your successor's role as changing significantly? Will you no longer be held responsible and accountable for any operational measures? Will you be able to come to this Committee and say it is purely broad strategy and policy?

  Mr Clarke: It is a happier life for me because I believe that one of the consequences of reducing what we do is to reduce a lot of interactions that take place which do not necessarily need to take place which are often called bureaucracy. I think that getting the DfES into a strategic role in the way that we are doing will make the life of the Secretary of State easier in terms of being more strategic and carrying things through. Will it reduce operational responsibility for any aspect of what is happening? No, I think it will increase it because it will make it much more transparent what we are doing and we will get greater clarity. The biggest intellectual problem we have to achieve in going down the course that you have asked me about is how do we limit our ambitions to fill the space available? There is a tendency to say "Well, we have got a project, we will have an initiative, we will have a unit, off we go". We have to say that the reduction in numbers of people is not about making them work harder but about us being more candid about what we can do and what we cannot do and sharing our responsibilities with others more effectively. So, for example, with a particular non departmental public body, do we have the non departmental public body there and then also, side by side, have a group of officials who are watching what the non departmental public body is doing? Actually that is a crazy way to proceed. You have to get to a state of affairs where you give the body the responsibility and you get the clarity but what happens, that can lead to political issues as people say: "We did not realise the non departmental public body was going to do this, that or the other" whether it is a HEFCE, QCA, Learning and Skills Council or CAFCASS or whatever it may happen to be, and that is a big challenge for us.

  Q272 Chairman: Secretary of State, that is one of the concerns and worries, is it not? I am not accusing you of kidding or misleading this Committee at all but the fact is there are certain elements in what we presume the Prime Minister will be saying today, and you may be saying tomorrow, which enlarges the Department's responsibilities, or might potentially, and certainly in terms of the Children's Act there will be a very big responsibility added to the Department. It is not a big department compared with other departments, what bits of activity that you do now are you not going to do in the future?

  Mr Clarke: Second guessing of the kind I mentioned to Mr Chaytor, some aspects of our analytical work we do not need to do in quite the same degree but the main point here is we only operate in partnership with a range of other bodies, non departmental public bodies, local authorities and so on. One of the issues for us—which is why I reject entirely the idea that we were talking about earlier that I am trying to devalue the role of local government—we have to work in much better partnership with local authorities on children's trusts and so on and to do the various issues that go through and I think it would be a better situation where the responsibility is more clearly defined across the system within a framework which is a clearer one.

  Q273 Chairman: Secretary of State, no-one is going to be fooled, are they, if at the same time as you have got a Department that you say you are cutting by 1,400 people—first of all we would be very concerned if that meant a poorer service, and just having a 31% cut does not really impress us if that reduces the efficiency of the Department because that is a Treasury view, is it not—on the other hand, if it is all back office, none of us is fooled by the fact that HEFCE is out there, it is not part of the Department, the Learning and Skills Council is not a part of the Department, and Ofsted, growing exponentially will be bigger than your Department the way we are going, will it not?

  Mr Clarke: No, I do not think so.

  Q274 Chairman: It is 3,000 and growing, the last figures that we have.

  Mr Clarke: We will see how it goes.

  Q275 Chairman: You are 4,500 and shrinking. Ofsted will pass you.

  Mr Clarke: On inspection itself, we have a review of inspection, as you know, which we have carried through and come to conclusions, a new inspection regime and so on which we think will be more efficient all ways round and better for schools and other people who are inspected by Ofsted, some of whom have complained about the overall process. It is true I have not studied the relative size of the organisations though it is true, certainly, that many of the organisations we are talking about are larger than the Department.

  Q276 Chairman: Yes.

  Mr Clarke: That is true not just of Ofsted but of other agencies too. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I do not think it is a bad thing at all.

  Q277 Chairman: Our role is scrutiny of the Executive and sometimes when your responsibilities have spun off to these quangoes or non departmental public bodies it makes it slightly more difficult. Take the e-university, the inspiration of David Blunkett, it is set up under the auspices of HEFCE so when HEFCE arrives here I have not got the ability to say to you "It is your responsibility". You can say: "Well that was HEFCE, they were in charge, that is an arm's length authority". That can go on and on. Our parliamentary responsibility of scrutiny becomes more difficult, does it not?

  Mr Clarke: This is an absolutely fundamental issue which I think I need to join with you on. The issue of accountability and parliamentary accountability—which is central to the way we run the country—does that create a system where we have a direct line of command from a Secretary of State to every aspect of the delivery of education in Britain? Do we say what happens, for example, in a given school on school uniforms is the responsibility of the Secretary of State in every respect and, therefore, we create a mechanism that happens. Now this is not a million miles from reality because if you look at health, for example, the model of health has traditionally been on that kind of direct accountability model in precisely that kind of way. Education has never been in that way, it has been a partnership between local government and national government in the way that schools are run. In the case of universities, the idea that I am accountable for what an individual university does, despite the fact that most of the money is provided by the Government, is again not an issue that has been at the core of where we are for the reason that academic freedom and all the rest of it means you have a whole set of bodies at an arm's length distance. I do not accept the proposition that accountability means I run everything.

  Q278 Chairman: No, that is right.

  Mr Clarke: I think if we were to go down that path we would be on a very dangerous course.

  Q279 Chairman: You are right, Secretary of State, I could not agree with you more but sometimes we have had discussions about how accountable these other organisations are to Parliament through this Committee.

  Mr Clarke: Quite so.


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