Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
DAME MAVIS
MCDONALD
DCB, MR PETER
UNWIN AND
MR NEIL
KINGHAN
12 OCTOBER 2004
Q120 Mr Betts: Or even work out whether
it is feasible before you make an announcement.
Mr Kinghan: I think they are confident
that it is feasible.
Q121 Chairman: Are you confident that
it is feasible?
Mr Kinghan: Of course, yes.
Q122 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you not feel
it is rather difficult that a department that sees itself responsible
for local government does suddenly find all these other departments
going their own way?
Mr Kinghan: I do not think they
are going the wrong way. I think what has changed in the last
few years is that a number of departments have developed much
stronger relationships with local authorities and front line services
in their areas so the Department for Education and Skills has
developed a stronger relationship with local authorities and with
schools than it had with parts of the Department of Health. It
has developed a stronger relationship with the social care services
than existed in the past.
Q123 Sir Paul Beresford: And local government
feels that is in one direction, centralising.
Mr Kinghan: Some people in local
government think that; some people in local government welcome
having much closer contact with government departments. Many people
in local government do.
Q124 Mr Sanders: The ODPM section in
the Spending Review document talks of many new funding streams.
How much of this is new money to the Office and how much is simply
recycled from other funding streams?
Dame Mavis McDonald: I will ask
Peter to answer in detail but basically the Community Infrastructure
fund is new money and it is a new programme that is about transport
and ourselves working together to choose where that money should
go in relation to supporting the growth area programmes. The safer
communities funding programme is about pulling existing streams
together across our boundaries and the Home Office boundaries.
I am trying to bring a bigger pot there and working alongside
our proposals for Local Area Agreements to give local government
more flexibility and more choice about its priorities than the
streams that have gone into that single pot.
Q125 Mr Sanders: Could you explain what
you just said about the Community Infrastructure Fund. Who accesses
that?
Dame Mavis McDonald: Ourselves
and the Department for Transport. It is in the Department for
Transport's baseline but the decision to release funding from
that fund is for transport Ministers and our Ministers together.
Q126 Mr Sanders: So it is a fund for
the civil service. It is a civil service internal fund.
Dame Mavis McDonald: No, it is
a fund for investment in transport infrastructure in the growth
areas, for particular kinds of projects which help unlock the
growth areas which would not necessarily feature in the main national
programmes of some of the Department for Transport's mainline
service provisions.
Q127 Chairman: How much is it?
Mr Unwin: £50 million in
the second year of the spending review and £150 million in
the third year—so £200 million in total over the period
of the spending review.
Q128 Chairman: It would just about pay
for the interchange that is needed at Ashford to make that housing
possible, is that right?
Mr Unwin: The interchange at Ashford
is mostly being paid for within the Highways Agency's budget.
Q129 Chairman: The roundabout, that is
in the Highways Agency's budget?
Mr Unwin: The major part of it,
yes. There is still some money to be got from developers, but
. . .
Q130 Chairman: Could you give us one
or two "for instances" where this money might go?
Mr Unwin: The purpose of the fund
is to provide additional transport infrastructure that is beyond
the main transport infrastructure system which will unlock housing
growth. The sort of thing one might be talking about would not
necessarily be the interchange at Ashford but the spur road from
that interchange to wherever the development might take place.
Q131 Chairman: How much would that spur
road cost? I am just trying to get some idea. Is this a significant
amount of money or not?
Mr Unwin: It is a significant
amount of money for what one would expect to see in the growth
areas over the next two years. It is additional to mainstream
transport expenditure and mainstream transport expenditure in
the Thames Gateway and other growth areas is of the order of about
£2 billion. So it is to unlock additional schemes to that
which will bring in and enable new housing growth.
Q132 Christine Russell: I would like
to seek some clarification on the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund.
I believe the Chancellor in the 2004 spending review rolled forward
£525 million.
Mr Unwin: Yes.
Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes.
Q133 Christine Russell: Yet you said
a few moments ago that the one budget that was going to be hit
was the Neighbourhood Renewal budget.
Mr Unwin: Neighbourhood renewal,
first of all, was due to come to an end in 2006 and, in the sense
that it has been rolled forward, it is additional money. But the
reason we were talking about it reducing over the period is because
it is £525 million in cash for the three years of the Spending
Review. If you look at that in real terms over the period of the
Spending Review, as the other figures we have been quoting to
you are real increases, then, clearly, if you have the same cash
budget over three years, that is a small "real terms"
decrease over that period.
Q134 Christine Russell: What grains of
comfort would you give to the existing successful programmes that
are benefiting from that funding, like the Neighbourhood Community
Warden Schemes, where there is a reluctance or inability on the
part of local authorities to mainstream those services?
Mr Unwin: I think they all have
welcomed, first of all, that the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund has
been extended for the period of the Spending Review, because,
as I say, the original proposal was for it to finish in 2005-06,
and you have to see it alongside the other funding streams we
have talked about, the regional development agencies and other
bodies that are available for regeneration. Taking that picture
as whole, I would hope they would welcome it.
Dame Mavis McDonald: I referred
to the new Safer Communities Fund which has pooled together some
of our existing funding streams which were not in the Neighbourhood
Renewal Fund but could be spent on wardens, which has been pooled
with some of the Home Office funding which—
Q135 Christine Russell: What exactly
will happen with the existing schemes that will come to an end
in 2006? They have proved immensely popular with local people.
Where you have a local authority which says, "Our budgets
are so hard-pressed, we do not have the resources to continue
the funding," what will happen to those schemes?
Dame Mavis McDonald: Ministers
have yet to take a decision about how they are going to allocate
the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund in years two and three of the Spending
Review. They have already announced resources to those authorities
who receive Neighbourhood Renewal Fund up to the end of 2005-06.
Some authorities have already said they will mainstream warden
services and some have accessed some of the Home Office funding
streams, so there will be some authorities which will continue
to have access to Neighbourhood Renewal Funding and there will
be some who want to try and access the Safer Communities Fund,
possibly through the Local Area Agreements that we are piloting,
but possibly through the current local Public Service Agreements'
programmes as well. So there are alternative routes potentially
to take a choice to give priority to that activity.
Mr Kinghan: Some of the anxieties
you have heard were probably about the fact that people thought
the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund was going to come to an end in
2005-06. Because the Chancellor has announced that it will go
forward for another two years, I think that will actually reduce
some of those anxieties.
Q136 Christine Russell: But no assurance
has been given that there will be an automatic continuation of
the money.
Mr Unwin: No.
Mr Kinghan: Not for every organisation,
no.
Q137 Mr Cummings: Could I take you on
to the PSA targets. Would you not agree that the Office's overall
performance against all extant targets up to the date of the 2004
Annual Report was generally poor? For instance, progress has slipped
on the majority of the 2000 SDA targets; the 2002 SDA target on
fire-related deaths and arson has had to be revised as the original
deadlines could not be met; and performance against the majority
of the 2002 PSA targets cannot yet be assessed or indeed show
slippage. Have you not really got to grips with this particular
issue at the present time?
Dame Mavis McDonald: If I may
answer the general point and then perhaps pick up on fire. I do
not recognise that we have significantly slipped against all the
targets. I think it is fair to say that when we published the
annual report, particularly on PSA 1, we did not have readily
accessible data that would show and track progress. We now have
really very much better data about performance against PSA 1,
performance against the floor targets, and improvement and inclusion—
Q138 Chairman: This is not answering
the question, is it? You were asked why the performance was so
bad. You are telling us that, since you had such a bad performance
last year, you have done things to get better measurement. Why
was the performance so bad last year?
Dame Mavis McDonald: I did not
acknowledge, I think, that we recognised that our performance
had been so bad against all the targets. I said that with some
we had better data which showed now that the performance was improving
significantly in some of the poorest neighbourhoods against the
floor targets.
Q139 Mr Cummings: Are you saying that
the information in the data and the targets up to the date of
the 2004 Annual Report is not correct?
Dame Mavis McDonald: No, I am
saying that it was correct at the time but since we published
the report we have had data that will enable us to track over
time, at local area level, changes which we were not able to track
in that same detail when we published the report. And that is
just on PSA1.
| 
