Examination of Witness (Questions 40-59)
3 FEBRUARY 2005
SIR PETER
GERSHON, CBE
Q40 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is that not
exactly the same thing? Let us just take one example. The Department
of Education and Skills is suggesting that there should be a reduction
between 1,900 and 1,400 civil servants. You are saying that they
should be made redundant, are you not? You are saying they should
be got rid of.
Sir Peter Gershon: If it is not
possible to re-deploy them across the public sector, then yes
unfortunately it becomes necessary to have redundancy programmes
to deal with the consequences.
Q41 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Then you said
that you could only relocate about 800 possibly elsewhere in London
and the south-east so presumably the other 600 are on the scrap
heap of life. They are the redundancies; that is your gap between
the two. Is that what you are saying? You are saying, "Get
rid of them".
Sir Peter Gershon: Clearly, a
number of departments now as a result of the review have implemented
programmes to reduce their civil service workforce, ideally through
voluntary severance but that is not always possible. Certainly
some have recognised that it may unfortunately be necessary in
the end to have compulsory redundancy programmes.
Q42 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you approve
of compulsory redundancy programmes? Do you think they are a necessary
part of what you are trying to do to review government and make
it more efficient?
Sir Peter Gershon: I think the
first thing to do is to find ways in which it is possible to re-deploy
potentially redundant people. You should also have voluntary redundancy
programmes so that those who could go have the choice of going,
but in the final analysis then yes, I do believe it is necessary
to have compulsory redundancies. For example, if you shut a particular
facility in a given location—you shut a call centre, for
example—then you cannot re-deploy everyone and you have
to make people compulsorily redundant. I think this is a difference
in approach to the alternative approach which has been proposed
which says that even bigger job reductions can be achieved without
any compulsory redundancies. I find that a very interesting approach.
Q43 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is that not
the crux of the whole matter? You came from private industry where
downsizing is not necessarily normal but it is an understood and
acceptable part of business.
Sir Peter Gershon: Wherever possible
you try to do it in as a humane way as possible by seeking re-deployment,
re-skilling opportunities, voluntary redundancy and using compulsory
redundancy only in the final resort.
Q44 Mr Liddell-Grainger: At 1.7 you say,
"What is efficiency?" The reduction of "numbers
of inputs, (eg people or assets), whilst maintaining the same
level of service provision". You are saying compulsory redundancy
are you not?
Sir Peter Gershon: Potentially
surplus people, yes.
Q45 Mr Liddell-Grainger: The reason I
am interested is because there is the suggestion that a lot of
people should be moved out of central London and transferred elsewhere
in the United Kingdom. Surely looking at the long term efficiency
of the civil service it can only be maintained by streamlining
the system and to do that you have to be able to say to the unions
and everyone, "I am terribly sorry, we are going to make
possibly many thousands of your members redundant". That
is just part of the system, is it not?
Sir Peter Gershon: At this scale
of reduction regrettably yes.
Q46 Mr Liddell-Grainger: The Chief Constable
of Avon and Somerset recently came to see Somerset MPs of all
parties and he told us he was 10 and a half million pounds short
to do his job. The efficiency savings in government demand that
he has to save 10 and a half million pounds. He is losing 150
officers this year through natural wastage et cetera, but he cannot
do his job. He came up here to ask us to go to the then Home Secretary,
David Blunkett, to try to put his case across. Is it not the case
that the Government have decided that it is easier to put the
onus on local government, to make them raise local taxes, to create
the shortfall than do it from the centre. To get round your report
they are putting the onus of local government to do the dirty
work as opposed to central government.
Sir Peter Gershon: I cannot see
the evidence of that. Some of the pain that central government
is taking is every bit as severe as what is happening in parts
of the wider public sector.
Q47 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Avon and Somerset
County have had to put up local taxation by about 70% over the
last five or six years to try to make up the shortfall from what
they are not getting from central government, which has meant
they have had to streamline a lot of provision which you would
approve of I suspect. However, it has meant that things like policing
et cetera have found it harder and harder to maintain the level
of input simply because of this, because the onus has been put
on local government as opposed to national. Do you think that
is the right way to go?
Sir Peter Gershon: How the Government
distributes resources between central government and the wider
sector is a political decision.
Q48 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you approve
of the basis of that? Do you think you can put more emphasis on
local government and you can push it down to them and tell them
to raise local taxation to try to make it more streamlined and
more effective?
Sir Peter Gershon: I am not going
to get into the merits of central and local government.
Q49 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is it more efficient
to do it that way?
Sir Peter Gershon: To change the
basis of the boundary between central and local government is
clearly a matter which is being subject to on-going political
consideration for a long period of time. I did not regard making
recommendations which were dependent on the resolution of that
as helping my remit that I had to find things that were deliverable
by March 2008.
Q50 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Basically what
you are saying is that you do not really mind how it is done provided
it is done by 2008.
Sir Peter Gershon: I went to great
lengths in the time available to have as broad a dialogue as possible.
This was not just an interaction between the review team and central
government. The report sets out very clearly how we actively sought
to involve police forces, local government, NHS chief executives
and people like that as a way in which they could both help in
the formulation of some of these recommendations and test out
their viability and potential acceptability. We also sought in
the review to put pressure on the system to begin a process of
change on this whole area of what I called delivery chains and
trying to reduce some of the burden that front line organisations
experience by having to deal with multiple parts of the system
above them to get funding or the burden of regulation and inspection
and things like that, which, if it could be reduced, would free
up resources in those front line delivery bodies, whether they
be police forces, hospitals or schools.
Q51 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You lay down
very clearly in Annex A of the consultation document, but again
in that what you are saying is reduce a burden faced by front
line professionals to free them up to meet the criteria. Again
you are talking about local to national government. Are you not
saying that it is freeing up the ability of the national Government
and putting the onus on others to try to do the job?
Sir Peter Gershon: No, I am trying
to reduce the burden of the bureaucracy in its collective sense
on the front line delivery units.
Q52 Mr Liddell-Grainger: In this you
go through various things—transactional services, et cetera—and
what you are saying is that in the area of ICT and all others
you can make efficiencies by using technology. On the likes of
the policing et cetera you talked about TETRA Airwave. Is it called
TETRA?
Sir Peter Gershon: That is the
technology. Airwave is the system.
Q53 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is a local
government function where it was a national system put in for
chief constables throughout the United Kingdom. The Chief Constable
in my area has a problem with it because across a lot of the area
it does not work simply because it is Exmoor and places like that.
He went back to national government and asked for more to do more.
In other words, he needed extra masts. They are still waiting.
That was local government trying to get national government to
move but it did not work. Surely with that sort of thing there
is not the interface between national and local government anyway
to try to improve that sort of system. Could that be made more
efficient because it should be run from a local level or a national
level?
Sir Peter Gershon: If you have
different systems running on different standards you have interoperability
problems. Is it important in the 21st century that you have a
system which is basically a common system across all police forces
so you do not have some of the interoperability difficulties that
have existed in the past? That was clearly a political decision
and it was supported by a degree of national funding.
Q54 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you feel
that the Head of the Home Civil Service should now come from private
industry to make a lot of this happen? We did ask Sir Andrew Turnbull,
but I am not going to tell you what his answer was. What do you
think? Because it is central and so complicated and is becoming
a very big machine indeed with technology, could it be run by
someone from the outside?
Sir Peter Gershon: I personally
do not think so.
Q55 Mr Liddell-Grainger: What about permanent
secretaries?
Sir Peter Gershon: I have doubts
about that as well. Clearly I was a second permanent secretary
and I think there is a difference bringing people in from a very
senior level from the private sector to do that. From what I saw
about parts of the role of the departmental permanent secretary
and the head of the Home Civil Service is that there is an aspect
about the interface with the politicians which I think would make
it very difficult for somebody from the private sector who is
used to a much simpler command and control environment, and the
nature of the relationship between the Head of the Home Civil
Service and the Prime Minister is not the relationship of a chief
executive to his non-executive chairman. My observation is that
it is a very different, more subtle, more complex relationship.
Q56 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I do not think
Alistair Campbell would agree with that.
Sir Peter Gershon: He is entitled
to his views and I am entitled to mine.
Q57 Mr Liddell-Grainger: If you have
a permanent secretary do you think there should be—I hesitate
to say sidekick—somebody who is there to say, "Hang
on, that action can make a difference in that area", a sort
of procurement officer or efficiency officer?
Sir Peter Gershon: As I have said,
I think there is scope still to bring in people at the very senior
levels but not at the level that you have suggested. I want to
emphasise that that is a personal opinion.
Chairman: It is, however, one that we
have been interested to hear.
Q58 Iain Wright: I want to follow on
something that Ian was mentioning which is about the compulsory
redundancies. Do you not think that there is a huge risk that
your review might compromise the deliverability of public services
on the ground precisely because of the huge scale of these redundancies?
In my experience of both the public and private sectors when there
is a re-structure going on, when there is rationalisation or whatever
people take their eye off the ball, just naval gaze and just comment
around the water cooler about whether or not they are going to
keep their job or what changes there are going to be. It is very
important that public services are delivered at the highest quality
they possibly can, but that is going to be compromised.
Sir Peter Gershon: It was with
regard to that point you raise that I did include the reference
in my report that to go further or faster than what I recommended
would put public service delivery at risk. Many of the surplus
jobs that arise as a result of this are not in the front line;
they are jobs which support front line delivery. Yes, there is
a risk that if these things are not well managed, what you have
identified could come to pass. It cannot be denied that there
is always that risk and it depends on how well that situation
is managed but it also depends to some extent on the speed with
which job reduction actions are implemented. I know some departments
have made the decision basically to try to do this as fast as
possible because experience has said that it is better to do this
as quickly as you can than to drag it out. Clearly in some cases
it is not possible to do that because a whole raft of underpinning
actions have to be implemented first. I am not going to sit here
and deny that the risk is there and it has to be managed.
Q59 Iain Wright: Can I just take up your
point about the speed of this. Shock treatment has been mentioned;
big bang implementation has been mentioned. Do you think your
review is a big bang?
Sir Peter Gershon: No.
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