Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
DAME MAVIS
MCDONALD
DCB, MR PETER
UNWIN AND
MR NEIL
KINGHAN
12 OCTOBER 2004
Q40 Mr Sanders: Are any of the relocation
efficiency savings to come from transferring the Office at 26
Whitehall to within alternative ODPM London accommodation?
Dame Mavis McDonald: That is not
a plan at the moment.
Q41 Mr Sanders: So you are not proposing
to move from 26 Whitehall?
Dame Mavis McDonald: No.
Q42 Christine Russell: Can I ask you
why you appear to have failed to meet your internal targets for
the recruitment of women and people from ethnic minorities?
Dame Mavis McDonald: I am not
too sure that I recognise we have failed to meet our targets.
Mr Unwin: Our SCS targets have
been met.
Q43 Christine Russell: According to the
briefing papers we have, you have not.
Mr Unwin: We are slightly below
our targets for the disabled, but for women and ethnic minorities
we have met our Senior Civil Service targets.
Q44 Chairman: How many people did you
recruit in the last twelve months from the ethnic minorities?
Mr Unwin: I have not got the figure
to hand. We can let you know.
Q45 Chairman: But you are confident that
you met the targets, so it just seems odd that you do not know
what the target was.
Mr Unwin: The target is not a
flow target but a stock target, and we at the moment are meeting
our target on the SCS. You may be thinking of the NDPB appointments
where we are slightly below target on that, and we are doing all
we can to get up to target.
Q46 Chairman: I think it would help if
you spelt out in full, rather than use initials.
Mr Unwin: Non Departmental Public
Bodies.
Q47 Christine Russell: Again, it would
be helpful if you could come up with an explanation why you feel,
with those public governmental bodies, you did not meet the target.
It would be useful.
Dame Mavis McDonald: We will.
Q48 Mr Betts: Temporary staff. Do you
recruit them to save money or does it cost money?
Dame Mavis McDonald: We recruit
them to fill immediate gaps that we need to fill while it takes
time to recruit and bring in permanent staff.
Q49 Mr Betts: How much more does it cost
per month to employ someone on a temporary basis? Presumably you
use agencies, do you?
Mr Unwin: We use agencies which
costs more but we use them in areas particularly where we need
flexibility.
Q50 Mr Betts: How much more does it cost
to employ somebody from an agency rather than direct?
Mr Unwin: I do not know the precise
figure. We can let you have it but it obviously costs more so
it is a question of balancing that against short-term flexibility.
For example, in areas like human resources, as part of the back
office savings we were talking about we are looking at restructuring
that and sharing services with Cabinet Office and Treasury, and
for the moment we are not taking permanent staff into that area
because it would not make sense until we have concluded what the
shape of the organisation is going to be, so we will take temporary
staff even though, as you imply in the short term, it is more
expensive per month but in the longer term it is more efficient.
Q51 Mr Betts: Given the size of the Civil
Service overall is there no attempt by departments to think about
having a pool of staff who could fill temporary needs rather than
agencies? It would be very interesting to see what the extra costs
of the agencies are. I bet the agencies charge nearly double what
you could get people for by employing them directly.
Mr Unwin: We are looking at that
collectively across Whitehall.
Q52 Chairman: How long have you been
looking at it for?
Mr Unwin: Cabinet Office have
been looking at it for about two months now as part of the follow-up
to the efficiency review looking at whether we can reduce these
temporary staff by taking on, on a temporary basis, staff whose
posts are becoming surplus in other departments.
Dame Mavis McDonald: There is
one group of temporary staff which is inward secondees who come
in for a short period largely because of their particular expertise
or because we have arrangements, particularly with local government,
to have an exchange secondment programme to broaden each other's
knowledge of the two sectors.
Q53 Mr Betts: But presumably they are
paid on the appropriate rates rather than paying extra to an agency?
Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes.
Q54 Mr Sanders: I want to come back to
accommodation. The costs of 26 Whitehall are published at something
like £2.6 million. Would you not get a better deal elsewhere
in the capital? You could certainly get a better deal in my constituency
if you moved down there and probably do more to regenerate the
economy than anything the department is doing otherwise.
Dame Mavis McDonald: As you probably
know, we effectively rent 26 Whitehall from the Cabinet Office
and we pay them an agreed fee for most of the services, so we
are paying the rate which the Cabinet Office pays across the whole
of its estate for 26 Whitehall. It does not compare unfavourably
with our costs for our other accommodation.
Q55 Chairman: How much extra work is
created just because the department in some areas is pretty inefficient?
Dame Mavis McDonald: There are
some areas where we have acknowledged our own capacity to improve,
like our procurement activities, for example, where we have a
system which have a lot of delegation out to a lot of centres
across the Office, whereas we have the capacity with our electronic
system to actually do that much more effectively centrally. We
change the rules, pull that back in, and will save a lot of cash
both through the management of that and also through a more effective
professional procurement expertise in terms of the people who
are bargaining for our purchases, if I can put it like that.
Q56 Sir Paul Beresford: What do you mean
by "a lot of cash"? What do you mean? What is the percentage
of the savings you need?
Mr Unwin: We save about £2.7
million on procurement. That is one example. We are looking at
rationalising our library services, for example, as people move
more on to the use of e-library services rather than physical
library services, so we are moving down to one central library.
I mentioned the human resource transformation where we are looking
to share human resource services with Cabinet Office and Treasury,
so there is a range of areas particularly in back office services
where we are aiming to rationalise and become more efficient.
Q57 Mr Betts: Is not there a slight degree
of scepticism which creeps into these discussions when a lot of
it seems to be going in fads? A few years ago everybody seemed
to be making efficiency savings by devolving purchasing, and now
we are making more efficiency savings by centralising it back
again. Are both lots of efficiency savings true?
Dame Mavis McDonald: We have much
more powerful tools now to support a centralised system and we
have much speedier capacity because we are all working electronically
to have that link between a central system and the line specifying
the requirement that just speeds the whole process up. Peter quoted
the savings; they are quite significant.
Q58 Mr Betts: How much?
Dame Mavis McDonald: £2.7
million.
Q59 Chairman: Are you hoping to see some
improvements in the parliamentary unit which you have which liaises
obviously with our staff?
Dame Mavis McDonald: We have seen
improvements as we manage to introduce a system so that everything
went out from the parliamentary team electronically to the staff
around the office who provide the advice back to Ministers. If
we have more electronic interchange on some of our correspondence
then we would get benefits from that, but we have run a system
where everything is scanned in basically, and we are also running,
with parliamentary, an experiment to look at the way we handle
correspondence and see whether running a central core team to
deal with the volumes we have rather than passing all that out
to line is more efficient in terms of speed whilst keeping up
the quality of the answers, and we will decide whether to roll
that out later this year.
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