Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-339)
30 NOVEMBER 2004
LORD WHITTY,
MS OONA
MUIRHEAD AND
MR ROBIN
MORTIMER
Q320 Mr Jack: But on Thursday of this
week, I think the Chancellor may be talking to us about more efficient
government and he will want the savings back, so has he specifically
given you enough of your savings to be realised to be the up-front
money for the new Agency?
Lord Whitty: The Chancellor only
deals with one Spending Round at a time, whatever he may say for
the longer term more broadly. The cost of us making these changes
in this Spending Round are covered by Defra's allocation as of
last July, so there are no additional costs which are going to
fall for the Chancellor or anyone else. Some additional money
was given us for various aspects of the change in SR2004, but
also some assumptions about improved efficiency were built into
a trajectory for 2004-08. The position after that is that of course
we do not have the Spending Round and we do not know how the Chancellor
in the Spending Round 2006 will operate, but we are assuming or
we believe that we will have done well enough on the efficiency
targets, and possibly better than the efficiency targets, for
this Spending Round to justify any additional expenditure on further
rationalisation beyond that and that we will be in a positive
situation on this particular part of the reorganisation by 2009-10.
Q321 Chairman: There are up-front costs
of change and those are built into the budget and there are savings
later on. Perhaps you could let us have a note about that to begin
with. Perhaps you could also let us have a note about the variation
between the Haskins' savings, which I think were bullish, and
your projections as it would be interesting for the Committee
to see how the two work together. Would you be able to let us
have that?
Lord Whitty: We can certainly
give you some of that in relation to the expected costs of reorganisation
in the immediate period. One of the problems is that the £29
million and the £20 million are not quite analogous because
I think Lord Haskins himself said that his assumptions were fairly
broad-brush and his assumptions may not be precisely the same
as ours, so I am not sure we can entirely explain that away.
Q322 Chairman: But perhaps you would
use your best endeavours.
Lord Whitty: We will give you
what we can, Chairman.
Q323 Chairman: Can I just mention the
question of buildings because you threatened us with diagrams
right at the beginning of the session and I understand there are
loads of working rooms going on and I think you are involved with
them, Ms Muirhead, 57, and the rest of it. Are English Nature
going to own their own buildings and is the Forestry Commission
going to keep its own estate or, because of Gershon, are they
going to be held centrally and belong to the Defra family? What
is the present thinking on this?
Lord Whitty: I cannot give you
the long-term answer. The Forestry Commission's assets are not
touched by the proposed legislation, although we are not yet finalising
the drafting of it, and the assets of English Nature would come
to Defra to start with and then we may hand them back. In terms
of the present position of English Nature, they rent most of their
buildings so they are not actually owned as such.
Q324 Chairman: All the evidence we have
heard is that this Integrated Agency should be separate and different
and independent, and there is a long history about that. It would
be a curious situation if they did not manage their own affairs
and property.
Lord Whitty: It depends what you
mean by "manage their own affairs and property", clearly
they would take their own decisions on how they run their offices,
how they run their activities and so forth, and they are independent,
but there may be benefits to both of us—which Gershon points
out more broadly—of having some centralised estate management
and people buying in the services. But they would be responsible
for the management of that.
Q325 Chairman: This is clearly a management
issue but I just think there is some sensitivity around this subject
in that English Nature have been threatened with disbandment twice
and that has been fought off. You will remember the scare stories
that English Nature was being disestablished because they dared
take a different view from Defra about GM, and I think the more
you can make it clear that this is an independent body which runs
its own affairs, the happier the stakeholders will be.
Lord Whitty: Certainly we make
it clear that they are an independent body. I understand the reaction
to the proposals on a certain level but I do not think it was
very rational, because we were enhancing the role of English Nature
in the broader Integrated Agency. As to how they choose to turn
their affairs, there is the broader Gershon agenda where there
may be some centralisation of various functions but then they
would have to decide whether to buy back into that or to use the
private sector to manage their buildings or manage them themselves.
In that sense they would be independent managers as they are now,
so we are not implying any change of status by saying, "Let
us look at all these options including the Gershon based options."
Q326 David Taylor: Is it not the case
that senior civil servants and professional politicians are peculiarly
susceptible to the blandishments of the modern day snake oil salesmen
that are the IT outsourcers and the package promoters? The Defra
track record on IT is not that great, is it?
Lord Whitty: I do not know that
senior civil servants and politicians are any more susceptible
than the private sector to the blandishments of such people, and
there are elements of inappropriate systems being proposed and
failures of management in systems in the private sector as much
as there are in the public sector, so I think it is a phenomenon
of the age. But we do actually take a pretty systematic approach
to how we change our IT. We have taken time over it in terms of
the recent and still-being-delivered outsourcing of our basic
IT requirements. We have a number of very complicated systems,
including for example the RPA, which is a very difficult new system
to bring in, which was originally planned before the CAP reform
and it had to adapt to changes in the CAP, and there have been
hairy points in that process and it is not fully delivered yet.
I am reasonably confident that we have both the management and
the risk management and the back-up mechanisms to ensure it is
delivered and a reasonable relationship with the private sector
deliverer in that respect. I cannot give a 100% guarantee but
I do think we are putting all the recommended positions in place
and we are not rushing it so much that we are adopting a system
before we have seen whether it can deliver and it can adapt to
the degree of flexibility we require. So we have taken all the
sensible professional steps in regard to that one, and are also
in relation to Genesis and to the other IT systems which would
impinge in part on the process we are talking about today. So
there are risks, there are pitfalls, but I think we have been
pretty professional about it.
Q327 David Taylor: One of the problems
it seems to me, having worked a long time in the industry, is
that those responsible for acquisitions of such systems often
utterly fail to understand the potential limitations, the resource
implications, of all of this, and they tend to diminish the role
of their existing professional IT staff. Can you understand a
submission we have received that the lack of detail for staff
about future availability and location of jobs is causing insecurity
and damaging morale? Does that ring a bell? Does that sound as
if it could be true?
Lord Whitty: I do not know from
what agency or part of the Department that came from—
Q328 David Taylor: It was the joint submission
of the PCS and Prospect.
Lord Whitty: The biggest area
where there is a serious change and reduction in jobs is the RPA
rather than any of the agencies involved in this process, and,
yes, there has been serious concern about the implications.
Q329 David Taylor: Have you collected
the staff together, or someone on your behalf, and told them what
is happening to their jobs, how disruption is being minimised?
Having gone through this process twice in my own career in local
government—
Lord Whitty: There have been frequent
meetings with staff and with the unions there and not everybody
is happy with the situation by any means but it is now clear what
the intentions are in changing staffing levels in the RPA over
time. In other areas, we would be going through the same process,
although it is a considerably less large scale operation to that
of the RPA, so anything which arises out of this or is underpinning
some of this already in the pipeline is smaller scale than the
RPA.
Q330 David Taylor: Are you happy?
Lord Whitty: Alun Michael actually
dealt with both the RPA side and the outsourcing of IT generally,
and he has also been to the Countryside Agency to meet staff on
general future issues, not entirely IT related, because obviously
they are faced with the biggest problem—
Q331 David Taylor: Sorry to interrupt,
but are you happy that your timetable, the departmental timetable
for change, allows adequate time for those who are most seriously
affected by some of the changes which are being mooted?
Lord Whitty: I think we are doing
our best. As in all industrial relation situations, people really
want to know what happens to their particular job and that tends
to be down the line from where you have taken the overall decision
and explained that and even got some acceptance of that. People
are still inevitably anxious and say, "Yes, that is all very
well, I recognise there are not going to be so many jobs but what
about mine, what about my department, what about my location",
because in this particular context of course there are some locational
issues as well as the number of jobs. So I am not pretending it
is not a difficult human resources/industrial relations issue.
Q332 David Taylor: So there is no risk
then as the drum beat of change speeds up, this cool, planned
approach will degenerate into some Gaderene rush blended with
a coalescing of posts which are left?
Lord Whitty: I think it extremely
unlikely. We have taken our time over this and we have involved
people. I am not saying there will not be some hiccups on the
way, but I do not think the catastrophe scenario is likely.
Q333 Mr Jack: I want to look at paragraphs
23 and 22 of the evidence you kindly sent to us on the subject
of the new Countryside Agency and rural proofing. The reason I
put paragraph 23 before 22 is that within that paragraph you tell
us the new agency, ". . . will build on its strengths to
report on the rural proofing performance of Government and those
who deliver public policy", but in paragraph 22 we learn
that in the context at a regional level, rural proofing appears
now to have been the responsibility of the Government Office for
the Regions. I quote, "Each Government Office for the Regions
has been asked to take the lead in their region to develop arrangements
to prioritise and co-ordinate activity, funding and delivery,
leading to a plan that sets out the priorities for action to ensure
these are targeted where needed at local level across the region
. . .". There is lots and lots more and it is all to do with
rural proofing. I am not quite certain who therefore is in charge
of reporting and dealing with rural proofing given there appear
to be two separate streams of developing policy in this area.
Lord Whitty: Rural proofing is
the responsibility of all government departments in their major
areas of policy, so carrying out the rural proofing of a particular
policy, whether Defra policy or anybody else's, is the responsibility
of the national level of the Government department. What the Countryside
Agency now does, and will continue to do, is assess the effectiveness
of that rural proofing; they are a quality control mechanism if
you like. As you know, they have done reports on that already
and will continue to do so and will strengthen that role. It has
not operated in quite the same way at the regional level, partly
because the regional bodies have not been drawn all that effectively
together in the rural dimension, and partly because the Countryside
Agency does not in that sense have a regional structure to do
it, so the Government Office is taking the lead in making sure
that within the rural delivery programme and in government at
regional level generally rural proofing is carried out. The new
Countryside Agency would have the ability to then check on those
regional reports. Sorry, just correcting something I said just
now, the old Countryside Agency did have some regional structure
but the new Countryside Agency will not have the regional structure,
and the regional structure of the existing Countryside Agency
is primarily an executive delivery role and not a rural proofing
role. But the new Countryside Agency would look at both the performance
of the national government departments and at what the Government
Offices have delivered in the rural delivery framework regionally,
or they will have the ability to do so.
Q334 Mr Jack: We have had RDAs, we have
had a session earlier with local authorities and now we have the
Government Offices having a finger in this pie. The sentence I
read out says, "Each Government Office for the Regions has
been asked to take the lead in their region to develop arrangements
to prioritise and co-ordinate activity, funding and delivery,
leading to a plan that sets out the priorities for action to ensure
these are targeted where needed at local level . . ." and
effectively are secured. Who is going to approve the plan? What
will this plan contain?
Lord Whitty: On one of the diagrams
I will be putting to you, the regional delivery framework includes
all the bodies you have referred to but they are led by the Government
Office, and the Government Office is responsible for the rural
proofing of all their activities.
Q335 Mr Jack: When you say they lead,
is that on the total rural package or just rural proofing?
Lord Whitty: It is the total rural
delivery package which will involve both the Government Offices,
which as you know are the regional arms of the national departments,
the RDAs—
Q336 Mr Jack: Okay, they produce the
master plan. Who says it is a good plan or not?
Ms Muirhead: If I may, the Government
Office will broker this and will provide leadership for this process.
Q337 Mr Jack: Who are the partners who
are going to be part of this process of brokering?
Ms Muirhead: Many of the partners
exist already but they do not come together in the way we want
them to to look at rural issues on a regional basis. The RDAs
clearly already exist—
Q338 Mr Jack: Are they a partner in the
Government Office?
Ms Muirhead: Exactly so.
Q339 Mr Jack: So the RDA sets its own
rural regeneration framework, so the RDA at the moment is a free-standing
body but it is plugged into the Government rural edifice in some
way, is it?
Ms Muirhead: It is not quite that
simple, would that it were. At the moment, the RDAs already deal
with partners at the regional level and together they produce
a set of strategies and plans. That does not really in our view
cover the rural as much as it should do. So what we are doing
here is saying, "You have your regional spatial strategy
to which all the partners have signed up, go away and do your
bit", and we really must have that on the rural side, and
by bringing together the RDAs and others who are looking at the
urban it means you are not looking at rural in isolation, which
you clearly want to avoid as well. What the Government Office
will be doing is looking right across the piece and making sure
that happens and that the right people are there.
| 
