Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-90)

OFFICE OF GOVERNMENT COMMERCE, DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS, HOME OFFICE, HM PRISON SERVICE, AND DRIVER AND VEHICLE LICENSING AGENCY

WEDNESDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2004

Q80 Chairman: Actually, you have had enough, I would have thought. Let your colleagues have a go now. Mr Spurr wants to have a word.

  Mr Spurr: The programme and project management support unit in the Home Office, which we work closely with and have been working closely with in terms of the OASys project, has been in position now for some while. We think it is beneficial, and it gives additional support in terms of skills development that we can turn to.

Q81 Mr Jenkins: So your centre of excellence is doing very well then?

  Mr Spurr: I am very happy. In terms of the links we have had from the OASys project, which is what I can speak about because that is what I am SRO for, then, yes, I have no complaint at all. I think it was helpful to have that.

  Ms Baker: I am happy to say that I would say that my centre of excellence is doing a good job because it is within my own directorate, but in fact I do not allow the expression "centre of excellence" to be used, so we do not call it that within the Agency.

Q82 Mr Jenkins: The Cabinet said there were centres of excellence but you are not going to use it.

  Ms Baker: No. I am not saying that at all. We provide all those functions that a centre of excellence provides within my directorate; so we have a programme management office with benefits management processes in place, we have project programme assurance, we have responsibility for all the gate reviewers; we have accredited gate reviewers: we have everything there. We have the toolkit in place, but I do not call it a centre of excellence.

  Mr Oughton: It is just a label.

Q83 Mr Jenkins: You have a central team.

  Ms Baker: It is within my directorate, and it is made up of several teams, so it is a virtual centre of excellence—but I just choose not to call it a centre of excellence.

Q84 Mr Jenkins: Some people have to be different!

  Mr Bone: We have centres of excellence throughout the department; there is one in each of the businesses. They work very well with all the projects that are going on in the businesses. There is also a central co-ordination point to make sure we co-ordinate the activities of those centres of excellence and take forward constant improvement processes.

Q85 Mr Jenkins: So yours are excellent as well?

  Mr Bone: Yes, they are, excellent.

  Mr Calvard: I will be talking about the same centre of excellence as Mr Spurr because I am also a part of the Home Office. We use the centre of excellence to do health checks on our projects, to decide jointly whether we are ready to do Gateway reviews as well as discussing with OGC. I would say there is more work to do on improving the centre of excellence, and I think it behoves us in the units in the Home Office to work with the centre of excellence to make improvements.

Q86 Mr Jenkins: Mr Oughton, the Report says only 25% are good. How are we going to get the rest? We have got the good ones here. The ones that are not here must be those that are not good. How will you drive those up to the standard?

  Mr Oughton: I was going to say, Chairman, that I have nothing to add to these excellent answers; but you ask a different question, Mr Jenkins. The answer is, constantly working with them. In the Report I sent to the Prime Minister at the end of September I was able to say that there had been a significant shift in the last six months. This was hard to get started, and the Cabinet decided that centres of excellence should be created. It was from a standing start. We had to define what they were, what their role was going to be. It was very important to establish their functions and how they were going to interact both with the main management boards of departments and with the individual projects. We have had to work through that. We have also extended the scope, as again Figure 25 makes clear.

Q87 Mr Jenkins: I accept that. It is progress I want.

  Mr Oughton: All of that is happening. What do we do next? We either change the nature of the relationship we have with the centres of excellence, because I was very conscious that the OGC role was too distant a role. We were turning up once every couple of months to see how the centre of excellence was doing. That rather leaves the centre of excellence to find its own way. It is a responsibility of ours to help the centres of excellence develop the capability more quickly. Therefore I invested in a team of liaison managers. I now have 14 liaison managers working within the Office of Government and Commerce, who are there not just to pop in once a month to see what is happening; but to spend serious time, between one and two days a week with the centres of excellence, working on these best practice issues and helping them develop capability. As that capability develops, I can withdraw from that, and the centre of excellence will be capable of flying solo in more cases. We are putting effort into helping them now, in the hope that we can pull back in due course. I have invested capacity in helping them.

Q88 Chairman: Mr Spurr, why did your project team participate in the success of the delivery skills programme?

  Mr Spurr: When the project started we had a range of skills. We worked with OGC and through OGC we appointed a specific consultant supporter who advised the project throughout. Through that individual and through her specific support, we developed the skills that we needed. We bought in the additional skills that we needed, and delivered a successful project.

Q89 Chairman: Mr Oughton, you know all the work that this Committee has done over the years on IT projects, and the disasters that we have had to look at. Are you telling the Committee now that IT is going to seriously contribute towards efficiency in government, and how will it do so, do you think?

  Mr Oughton: I think there have been some very misleading reports, if I may say so.

Q90 Chairman: By us?

  Mr Oughton: No, not at all, in the published media about the role of IT in delivering efficiency. As we take forward the implementation of the Government's efficiency programme, I am looking at the areas where maximum benefit can be secured most quickly. Frankly, they are not around the areas where a lot of noise has been evident, or around the areas where we have been offered lots of interesting ideas and suggestions from people external to government. They are in areas where I know we can make progress quickly around procurement, where we expect to secure over £7 billion of the £21.5 billion we expect to gain over this three-year period; around productive time, changing the working practices to get maximum output in front-line service of delivery in the Health Service, over £4 billion in education, over £2 billion in the police and other parts of the wider public sector. The contribution towards the £21.5 billion efficiency challenge that we have been set that will come from modernising our corporate services, the back office stuff that people talk about, is relatively modest, frankly; it is something like £1 billion. The benefit that will come from modernising our transactions channels in terms of pure cash is relatively modest—we estimate about £1 billion. The issues there are much more about effectiveness and not about cost-cutting and efficiency. I am not betting my store on IT being the solution to these problems. In a letter I wrote to the Guardian Society three weeks ago I tried to put that clearly on the record, in the face of some very misleading comments about the central role of IT and delivering efficiency.

  Chairman: On that hopeful note, we will end it there. Thank you very much, Mr Oughton, and your colleagues, for coming here today. I think you can expect our report to look at, amongst other things, why Gateway reviews should not be published, and particularly following on from Mr Bacon's excellent questions and the campaign he has been wielding; and of course the excellent questions from other colleagues—and also by giving more teeth to your department. Thank you very much.





 
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