Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
DAME MAVIS
MCDONALD
DCB, MR PETER
UNWIN AND
MR NEIL
KINGHAN
12 OCTOBER 2004
Q140 Mr Cummings: If I am confused, goodness
only knows what the members of the public are.
Dame Mavis McDonald: I am sorry,
this is because we have been back to the bodies we are dealing
with and collected much better data on a much more consistent
basis. We can provide you with some examples of that. Some of
it is on our Neighbourhood Renewal website now, but we can give
you examples of where the gap is closing in certain areas against
the national average: in neighbourhood renewal areas, on robberies
but not on burglary; and where it is improving on education but
it is not improving significantly on health. In most of these,
it is against a general improvement in standards, but we are now
tracking where the gap is closing. We have started to be able
to collect and have available that data, tracking over time what
is happening on that PSA. There are various other indicators we
have against the other PSAs, where we can show that we have improved
and are on track to meet our targets.
Mr Kinghan: On the target to do
with fire deaths, my information is that actually we are on track
to reach the target. The average number of deaths in the base
period, the period we were comparing, was 349 per year. We have
said we want to reduce by 20% in the period up to 2010. For the
period 1999 to 2003 the average was 294, so we are on track to
achieve that target.
Q141 Mr Cummings: On track with the revised
figures?
Mr Unwin: I think you are referring
to the previous target which was reported at the back of the report.
Q142 Mr Cummings: I am just referring
to targets, because, quite frankly, if you keep moving targets,
on what basis do we move forward? What credence can you put on
the information obtained in the 2004 Annual Report? Will you qualify
this, with perhaps a note attached to the 2004 report?
Mr Unwin: Could I just say, the
original target you are referring to, which is in the report,
is the only one of our previous targets which is recorded as not
met, and that target has been inherited from the Home Office.
Q143 Mr Cummings: Looking at the list
I have here, we have: "Not yet assessed"; "Slippage";
Not met"; "Not known/not met"; "Not yet assessed"
and then a string of slippages. Do we put any credence upon this
at all now?
Mr Unwin: As I said, the Annual
Report target that was not met was the fire target to which you
referred, which sometime ago was revised, and, as Neil has said,
against the revised target we are on track.
Q144 Chairman: As far as the fire service
is concerned, then, what about the employment of women and people
from the ethnic minorities? The target is not met, is that right?
Mr Kinghan: I think that is right.
We have been very committed to increased diversity in the Fire
Service. We are not making as much progress as we would like,
but we do remain committed to that objective.
Q145 Chairman: Could I take you on to
the Public Service Agreement as far as local government is concerned.
You have changed the target, have you not? You have moved it forward
and changed it. The original target had two% of improvement in
the efficiency of local government, and two%, I think it was,
coming from the Comprehensive Performance Assessments. Why did
you change the target?
Mr Kinghan: We have changed the
target mainly to simplify it. We did so in consultation with local
government. In relation to the cost effectiveness aspect of the
target, of the SRO2 target, that has proved very difficult to
assess, to assess the progress on it, and we decided to replace—
Q146 Chairman: Why would you set a target
that is difficult to assess? Surely, if you are going to set a
target that is worthwhile, you want people to know what they are
aiming at and have a clear understanding of what has to be done
to achieve it. You are saying that you set a target that was virtually
impossible to assess.
Mr Kinghan: I said it was difficult.
We learn as we go along. The fact that we have changed the target—we
have changed the way we express it—is because we think we
have a more sensible way of expressing it now. We are now expressing
it in terms of the efficiency savings that we aim to achieve in
local government—which we talked about earlier—and
we think that is a more sensible target. As far as the Comprehensive
Performance Assessment is concerned, I think the target was to
secure improvements across the board, and that we are doing—or
rather local authorities are doing with our help and the help
of other bodies.
Q147 Chairman: You had a target which
involved cost-efficiency and I would have thought that was relatively
easy to measure. You have replaced it with one which is based
on the Comprehensive Performance Assessment, which is pretty subjective,
is it not?
Mr Kinghan: There are two points
there, I think. One is that we have replaced the cost-effectiveness
aspect of the target with the efficiency target—which is
the one we discussed earlier, which is £6.45 billion over
three years. That is where we replaced that. As far as the CPA
is concerned, I think the CPA has generally been regarded as a
good way both of assessing local authorities—
Q148 Chairman: It has been seen as a
good process but it is not something where it is easy to look
at a target, is it?
Mr Kinghan: No, but we have said
that in the new Spending Review 04 target we will set ourselves
the objective that none of the authorities that were rated as
"poor" in 2002, the year CPA started, should still be
poor by 2008. I think that is quite an ambitious target and a
very specific one.
Q149 Chairman: That is concentrating
on the poor ones. Why concentrate just on the poor ones? Surely,
if you are trying to improve performance, you should try to do
that across all of them.
Mr Kinghan: Absolutely. Indeed,
that is another part of the target; that we should see performance
improve across the board. And it has been improving. The figures
show that the number of "good" and "excellent"
authorities (as assessed by the Audit Commission) has increased
from just over 50% in 2002 to 56% now; the number of "fair"
authorities has remained much the same, although the authorities
within that group have changed; and the number of "poor"
and "weak" have been reduced. So we are on course to
see improvement across the board, but I think it is also important
that we focus on those authorities that give most cause for concern.
I think it was right that both the Government and the Audit Commission,
and indeed local government, put a lot of effort into helping
the authorities that were rated as "poor", because in
those cases the authorities needed help in order to improve the
services they were providing for local people.
Q150 Sir Paul Beresford: Some local authorities
. . . perhaps I can look at Torbay, since we have an MP with an
interest there. I think everyone accepts that it is inefficient,
incompetent and so forth, but you have landed it with, I think,
15 extra CPAs. These all cost money for the local authorities,
they take time and are likely to reduce the efficiency of the
service of that particular authority.
Mr Kinghan: I think in Torbay's
case it has already been re-assessed as "weak"—which
is not where they would like to get to but is an improvement.
Q151 Sir Paul Beresford: It is an improvement.
Mr Kinghan: If you have these
categories, then "weak" is better than "poor"
in these terms. Of course they want to do better.
Q152 Sir Paul Beresford: But landing
them with all these inspections is going to impinge on their ability
to be efficient.
Mr Kinghan: There is always a
tension between providing inspections as a way of identifying
things to do to improve and making sure that you are not imposing
too much of a burden on the authority. I think, as the Chairman
recognised a minute ago, the CPA has been seen, on the whole,
as a process which has been delivering improvement, and that includes
some of the work that has been done on inspecting and re-inspecting
individual authorities.
Q153 Sir Paul Beresford: I think it has
been seen as a process. How big is the CPA unit within your department
and what is it costing?
Mr Kinghan: The CPA unit within
ODPM is very small—because most of the work is done in the
Audit Commission, of course.
Q154 Sir Paul Beresford: Which has gone
up four-fold—the Audit Commission.
Mr Kinghan: The costs of the Audit
Commission? I do not recognise that figure.
Sir Paul Beresford: I looked at their
figures and their starting level has certainly gone up four-fold.
Q155 Mr Cummings: Do you believe the
Office's performance against its targets affected its 2004 Spending
Review allocations?
Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes. I think
that is why we got 3.3% real increase on the Spending Review,
because we—
Q156 Chairman: You would have got a lot
more money if you had met all your targets, would you not?
Dame Mavis McDonald: —were
able to demonstrate that we were making progress against our PSA
targets and that we had plans in place to take them forward. We
worked closely with colleagues in the Treasury during the Spending
Review to try to minimise the number of changes there were in
the targets and to ensure that we had consistent underpinning,
so that, as we measure, we are tracking against the same performance
indicators as we move into the next spending review period.
Q157 Mr Cummings: Would you have received
a larger slice of the pie if you had been on course to achieve
the desired performance outcomes more often?
Dame Mavis McDonald: This is a
judgment on our part: we feel our success in securing new resources
for this agenda for Ministers recognises that the Treasury recognise
we could deliver against targets. If you look across Whitehall,
we did relatively well.
Q158 Mr Cummings: Would you have received
a larger slice of the pie?
Dame Mavis McDonald: No, I think
it is on—
Q159 Chairman: You must get better rewards
for more success, must you not?
Dame Mavis McDonald: Yes, but
I do not think—
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