Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
24 FEBRUARY 2005
MR JONATHAN
BAUME, MR
CHARLES COCHRANE
OBE, MR PAUL
NOON AND
MR MARK
SERWOTKA
Q100 Mr Prentice: What are the figures
for turnover?
Mr Cochrane: We can certainly
provide you with those figures; you could also get them from the
departments. The issues around the DWP are issues that have been
developed by your colleagues on that select committee as well.
In other places the Civil Service is a significant employer and
there is not the dynamic labour market in parts of the northwest
or northeast that we have in London. We are often talking here
about people who have considerable periods of service in the Civil
Service and whilst none of us here would claim that the Civil
Service is the greatest job in the world, it is still a job worth
having, it is a job worth doing and one that people do not give
up lightly. However, there is growing evidence that this combination
of uncertainty about the futures of departments, uncertainties
about pay, uncertainties about pensions now are causing people
to think, "Is my long term future in the Civil Service or
should I start looking elsewhere?" It is a lot easier to
look elsewhere in some parts of the country than others, as we
are all aware.
Q101 Mr Prentice: You were talking earlier
about structural change, devolution and so on. Do you think it
is far too easy for the government of the day to make huge changes
in the configuration of the Civil Service without reference to
Parliament? William Hague, when he was before us about a year
ago, said that Parliamentary approval should be sought for such
things as dissolving a department and creating a new department.
What is your view on that?
Mr Cochrane: One of the tasks
that Jonathan and I have to do in the next two or three days is
to draft our response to the government consultation on the Civil
Service Bill (which I promise we will do before the closing date)
and I think there is an important issue to be made in that. That
attempts to define what a civil servant is and tries to list what
are those bits which make up the Civil Service, which is quite
helpful stuff. However, what it does not do is say anything about
how a government can almost arbitrarily decide some huge function
of the state could suddenly be done by Tesco supermarket. I totally
agree with you. I think it is a point that you as a Committee
have made before. A government's powers to suddenly make totally
arbitrary decisions about what is done by the state, what is done
by the Civil Service and what is not is really quite wrong and
we do need some statutory structure to deal with that.
Mr Baume: I think there are two
different issues, one of which may be, right, we are just going
to send all this outside the state sector, for example; the other
one being, we have now decided this morning that we are going
to merge, for example, education and employment departments (which
was a Conservative decision). My view personally is that that
is not a matter necessarily for Parliament because I think each
government will want to configure the functions in a way that
seems to make sense and I think realistically I cannot see any
government in the end giving that authority away. However, if
you are looking at efficient government the tendency has been
to have these kinds of almost over-night political fixes that
then have a big effect on the effectiveness for a period of a
particular government department. As I say, in education and employment
in 1995 or 1996 the permanent secretaries had about six hours'
notice and other senior staff in the departments had an hour's
notice before an announcement was made in Parliament at three
o'clock in the afternoon. If you are going to do these things
I think it makes a lot of sense for government to actually plan
ahead. Again, the Labour Government pre- the 2001 election (about
four or five months before the election) said, "We are going
to transfer functions of environment over into what was MAFF and
bring them together". A lot of very good work was done planning
that but lo and behold, the morning after the general election
a much more substantial re-organisation was announced which threw
all of that planning into a degree of chaos because by that time
we had the foot and mouth crisis. It is simply not good government
and we saw that 18 months ago with the announcement of the creation
of the DCA. That was all caught up in a lot of internal ministerial
politicking which meant that the Government got a very bad press
for what may well have been a fairly sensible decision because
a lot of the implications were not being thought through. It can
take a year to two years in the end to merge and integrate functions
when you have shifted departments, partly because of the problems
that Mark highlighted about completely different pay and terms
and conditions, but also about trying to bring the things together.
It actually makes sense for government to plan these things and
give notice. I understand that no prime minister is going to say
three months before a general election that so and so will be
the secretary of state for whatever after the election. That would
be arrogant and politically very unwise, but I do not see anything
wrong with a government saying, "If we are re-elected we
plan to merge these two particular departments or create a new
department of X". That seems to me no different to any other
policy initiative. My advice to ministers—if I could be
so bold—would be: "If you are going to make these kinds
of changes, give notice, allow people to plan them and that way
you will get a much more effective outcome for the decision that
is being taken".
Q102 Mr Hopkins: We recently interviewed
Sir Peter Gershon and if I may say I was surprised he was much
more sympathetic than I had imagined and he did not play up the
job cuts; he did play up economies of scale in procurement for
example and other ways of making efficiencies. I must say that
I have great sympathy for what you say about civil servants. As
members of Parliament we deal with them all the time through our
offices and my impression is that they are very dedicated but
there are not enough of them. Just to confirm what Mark has said,
my office recently telephoned the pension helpline and was told
by a recorded voice that they were number 83 in the queue. Would
you agree that in many areas—immigration, Inland Revenue
and tax credits, DWP and specifically pensions—that actually
there is a case for either more civil servants or re-organising
what we have slightly better so that we can do the job better?
Mr Serwotka: I would agree with
that; I think it is a lovely question. I am glad that Sir Peter
was a bit more positive, but the difficulty we have is that the
TUC produced research that actually showed that what the Government
is proposing on the back of the Gershon review is to reduce the
Civil Service as a proportion of public sector employment to a
historical low. Its research shows that the Civil Service has
genuinely gone at a level of around 10 or 11% of public sector
employment through peaks and through troughs. When public sector
employment has gone down, it has gone down but the proportion
has remained. Under the Gershon proposals as the Government envisages
it would be reduced to around 8% which is not only a historical
low but the research went on to show that the job cuts themselves
amount to less than 10% of delivering the money that the Chancellor
promised Parliament—the £21 billion that he wanted
to find—and yet it has dominated the coverage, the political
input in the debates in Parliament and all the media. In other
words, for a very small amount of money it was dominating the
headlines which we think was proving the point that the politics
of it is to get the staff levels down and why I think that is
such a difficulty is that it has done two things. It has introduced
what I think is a dreadful term into our common language which
is: "back office bad, front line good". I think that
comes from the Gershon report and has a fundamental misunderstanding
of delivering public services. You cannot deliver any front line
services without a dedicated team of people who are considered
back office. When we went to Parliament about that—I will
not say who the cabinet minister was—and we asked the question
did they believe that the people who draft the answers to the
Parliamentary questions are front line or back office staff it
was made clear that probably you would say they were back office
but they could not do without them. That was a little way of making
a very important point. Is it just the person who visits the pensioner
in their home who is front line, or the people who answer the
telephone, assess the benefit claim or make sure the computers
work? Our view is that it is a seamless whole and concentrating
on "back office bad" is a negative. That has meant that
it is hard now to have a real dialogue about what staffing is
required. The Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise in the new
department want to shed 16,500 posts (12,500 net) and yet everyone
believes there is up to a £25 billion tax evasion issue in
the UK. Logic tells us that to cut 12,000 people from revenue
gathering departments at a time of such a massive amount of tax
evasion seems slightly odd. In the DWP where we are going for
these telephone number job cuts I think if a proper analysis was
done at the moment the DWP are struggling to deliver all aspects
of their business and in many cases staff are being told to prioritise
certain things rather than look at the whole. Questions must be
asked whether this approach is the correct one. The difficulty
I think we have is what I personally resent. We now spend our
time touring the country and our starting point has to be to lift
the morale of people whom the Government relies on to deliver
front line services because everything they read about themselves
is negative. Whether that is the politician who says, "Back
office is bad", whether that becomes The Daily Mail
editorial which talks about desk jockeys and what do they bring
and what does the tax payer get, it is extremely demoralising.
We are the ones—I know this will sound a bit over the top—who
say that Britain's civil and public servants are the unsung heroes
and heroines. Everybody likes teachers and nurses; they do not
like tax collectors, benefit administrators and customs officers
yet they provide essential services to the fabric of the UK but
they are the easily denigrated part of the public sector. I think
the great shame of Gershon is that it has taken something we could
all have worked on about how more efficiently to run an organisation
of over half a million of people delivering services from cradle
to grave and it has become a political thing that is just focussing
on one aspect and I think that does a disservice to many things
that we could have worked jointly on. The headlines are about
the first national Civil Service strike for eleven years because
people are protesting about the way they are being treated and
a run down of jobs that in some cases they can see will make the
situation a whole lot worse.
Mr Baume: The single most important
public service in this country is actually the Inland Revenue
and Customs. Every other aspect of government—local and
national—is delivered from the money collected by the Inland
Revenue and Customs but when do you ever hear a minister praise
the Inland Revenue?
Q103 Mr Hopkins: The Government would
perhaps do better to look at the £37 billion tax gap of uncollected
tax and say we need more tax collectors rather than fewer. However,
that is not the question. Sir Peter Gershon also said—and
he volunteered this—that he thought that public service
and public administration—Civil Service—was different
in the nature of its work than manufacturing widgets, working
at Tesco, selling burgers or whatever. There is something different
about public service involving human beings, the public service
ethos and making judgments about people when they are ill, when
they are being educated or whatever, and you could not simply
privatise services like that because there was a different set
of values at work in these two different sectors. Would you have
some sympathy with Sir Peter's view?
Mr Noon: I certainly have some
sympathy for it but my union also represents, for instance, professional
engineers in the electricity supply industry which is in the private
sector and they have a strong commitment to public service as
well. We have never taken the view that we have a monopoly of
virtue in the Civil Service but we do take the view that many
of our members—for example HSE—are people who have
a strong vocational commitment to the work that they do and a
strong sense of public service in delivering it which we think
is undermined on many occasions by proposals for privatisation
and the thought that there must always be a commercial solution
to it. You can forgive the staff involved for thinking that if
there is going to be a commercial solution they will take their
own views about their market worth and maybe sometimes take their
own decisions about where they see their careers. We represent
engineers and scientists and there has been a disproportionate
reduction in the number of engineers and scientists in government
which we think has compromised the ability of government to act
as an intelligent customer in some ways and carry out some of
the points that Gershon wanted to see and also because so many
of the organisations which have been transferred out of the Civil
Service to the private sector are those which were predominantly
engineer or science based organisations then in the heart of government
in what is a knowledge driven society now there is a knowledge
gap. There are fewer scientists and engineers at senior levels
in the Civil Service than there have ever been proportionately
and we think that is a huge problem too.
Q104 Mrs Campbell: Can I just take you
up on this point about intelligent customers because there has
been some fairly devastating criticism from the Institute of Electrical
Engineers which has made just the point that you have just made
in fact. What impact does the lack of scientists and engineers
have on, for instance, the IT projects? The most spectacular failure
I suppose in recent years has been the CSA project. Is that entirely
due to the commercial company or is there some failing within
the Civil Service itself which is failing to manage these projects
properly?
Mr Noon: I would say there is
insufficient appreciation at the top of the long-term importance
of having that professional specialist input. I certainly would
not accuse the private sector of trying to hoodwink the Civil
Service on that contract, but there is a long record of difficulties
of public procurement where government is not able to act as an
intelligent customer in the way that it needs to be. That means
not only being able to read the brochures that are sent, but to
understand what the fundamental need is in the Civil Service and
to be able to test in an effective way what potential suppliers
are saying about what can be provided and not to believe the hype
that comes with it. I think it may be on a number of occasions
there has been insufficient advice or insufficient professional
input to the decision making process which has not allowed the
bits to be tested as effectively as possible. If you see the sorts
of reductions that there have been in the number of engineers
and scientists in central government that we have seen, then we
think that is bound to compromise the position.
Mrs Campbell: Sir Peter told us that
the picture on IT projects is not as bleak as is sometimes presented,
that about 30% of IT projects within government are problematic.
That seems to me quite a high percentage actually.
Mr Heyes: It is the same in the private
sector.
Q105 Mrs Campbell: It may be similar
in the private sector, but these failures very often do have quite
devastating effects on people's lives and as members of Parliament
we certainly see the effects that the CSA failure has had on people
and the disruption to family life that that has caused. What do
you feel is the solution to this particular problem? Do you think
government is just not concentrating on the skills it needs? There
is now the idea of a skills council to ensure that Civil Service
capacity is improved. Is that the way to do it or is that some
people should be sacked and people with the right skills should
be recruited?
Mr Noon: I would never suggest
sacking FDA members and recruiting engineers and scientists but
I think in the development of the Civil Service having people
at senior level with a scientific and technical background and
expertise, not who are brought in because over recent times there
has been some acknowledgement that this is an issue, but sometimes
it is thought that we can buy in the expertise. We see a lot of
difficulties in doing that because of the need to have people
who work in the organisation long term who have that background
not just simply to expect that it can be on tap in the way you
want it at all times. I think it comes down to numbers. I think
there is a problem because of the number of science based organisations
which have been transferred out of the Civil Service so that the
scientific/technical expertise is not bubbling up through departments
like the DTI as once may have been the case. Also, it is a recognition
that this is an important facet of a modern senior Civil Service
to have that expertise which, in my experience, applies more generally
in the private sector and in the many successful private companies
where you see a much higher proportion of people with scientific
and technical background at senior management level in those organisations.
Mr Cochrane: I do very much agree
with the point which was made by one of your colleagues about
private sectors and IT failures as well. I am conscious in this
debate that there was a massive IT failure in the Stock Exchange
a few years ago. Referring back to your first question about effectiveness
and so forth of the Civil Service, I think what we are very effective
at in the Civil Service is exposing our failures whereas the private
sector are very effective indeed at hiding their failures. I think
also the sheer scale of some of these Civil Service IT projects
is not always appreciated. Commentators who perhaps ought to know
better but do not seem to equate IT in the public sector—whether
it is the Civil Service, the NHS or whatever—as something
akin to going into PC World and buying a bit of software and a
lap top. It is not; these are absolutely massive projects. I think
the computerisation of PAYE a few years ago was the biggest ever
IT project in Europe, with huge timescales built into it, timescales
which often do not fit at all with government's own timescales
for policy changes. You can have a project that is being designed
for policies now but by the time it comes on line, even if everything
goes right, you could have had a change of government, a change
of policy and a change of department. I think that is often forgotten.
Just a final point, you mentioned sector skills councils which
is something we are all hugely interested in. I think it is a
bit unfortunate at this time when everyone recognises the importance
of modernising skills, improving skill levels everywhere—including
the Civil Service—there is a whole host of sector skills
councils up and running in the private sector and the public sector
and doing some really good work, but the one that we have not
got up and running (and is still some way off) is the one for
central government. I think that is sad and is quite relevant
to this debate. If there is a skills issue in the Civil Service
it would be nice to see the central government sector skills council
being the first up rather than the last one up.
Mr Baume: Just to add, in the
CSA which you were referring to, ministers had insisted that the
in-house IT and business analysis capacity be outsourced and the
ministers had also insisted on an extremely complex process which
meant that in the end the CSA was no longer an intelligent customer
because ministers—not the Civil Service—insisted that
certain functions be removed from within the organisation. There
is that problem of an overlay of political intervention in the
way that the Civil Service procures this type of work that makes
it very difficult for the Civil Service to actually deliver. A
lot of very good work has been done by the Office of Government
Commerce over the past few years in improving this. I know other
select committees have been looking at these issues in detail,
but I think the political overlay to the decisions that are taken
sometimes in some of these complex IT issues and procurement exercises
in central government add a whole additional dimension to the
kinds of problems that similarly emerge in the private sector.
Q106 Mrs Campbell: It seems to me that
a distinction is not being made between the people who can manage
the projects and actually have the expertise and the skills in
order to understand the complexity of the problem, and the people
who do the technical stuff. Would you agree with that? Surely
some of the technical stuff could be outsourced but it is terribly
important that the Civil Service retains that expertise to manage
with sufficient skill in-house to know when it is actually going
wrong.
Mr Baume: Absolutely. I have no
disagreement at all with that and we are very supportive of the
steps that have been taken in the last few years to vastly improve
project management skills as well as picking up some of the technical
skills. As Paul has said, we need to pull back into the Civil
Service some of those other specialist skills over and above IT
to make sure that government in the round is an intelligent customer
of other private sector services and at the same time has sufficient
in-house capacity on a range of skills to make intelligent policy
which in turn translates into other sectors.
Q107 Mrs Campbell: There may be a problem
in some cases where technical work is outsourced to an outside
organisation, the contractor fails and then there is not enough
expertise within the Civil Service in order to pick it up. What
is the solution to that? Is the solution to keep everything in-house
or is there a prospect of being able to outsource some of the
technical work without any catastrophic consequences?
Mr Serwotka: Can I just offer
one solution to that which we called for at one point, which was
that there probably should be some inquiry or some commission
to actually look at IT across the whole of government. If ever
there was a case for coherence in the Civil Service this is probably
a pretty good one because a lot of these systems are not compatible
between the different departments. Even though the interchange
now between the Inland Revenue and the DWP as the revenue becomes
more sort of tax credits, the systems are not compatible. I think
there is evidence that the contracts negotiated are probably not
great. There seems to be quite a lot of loopholes in them. It
would seem to me that rather than do it every single time in each
department there should be a central IT strategy. Much as I personally
would like to see all of this done within the state the reality
is that the Government seems to have taken a decision which says
that all things IT must be outsourced. If we started from where
we are now and looked across the whole I think probably there
would be an argument for a mixed approach. You are probably now
in a situation where you do rely on some of these big multi-nationals
in terms of providing the equipment and all the rest of it, but
there is a case for state employees who have the expertise to
be able to help out and at the moment that does appear to be lacking.
I think the effect of that is not just the publicity. I hold my
hands up; we played our part in ensuring that a lot of this does
get into the public domain because a lot of the job cuts strategy
is based on computers replacing people. Part of our concern is
that that is an enormous gamble, particularly when you are cutting
the jobs before the systems are proved to work and the CSA is
a very good example of that and they are now freezing the job
cuts which is obviously very welcome. The DWP's 30,000 are based
on the fact that IT can do the job. I think there should be a
look right across central government services and we would be
very willing partners in that to try to move us onto something
more effective. At the end of the day when a computer crashes,
although the company is embarrassed and the Government does not
like it, the thing that is often neglected is the effect on staff
who are then in an office with the public in front of them or
on the phone who cannot help them.
Q108 Mrs Campbell: Did there used to
be a central unit based at Norwich which was dismantled by the
last government.
Mr Cochrane: Yes, that is right,
the CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency) of which
a mere shadow now remains.
Q109 Mr Prentice: If the Civil Service
loses its capacity to do something because the function has been
outsourced, what evidence is there that private sector companies
just bump up the cost because they have the state over a barrel?
Mr Noon: There were some examples
of this which I remember the House of Commons Defence Committee
looked at in terms of defence services of areas that had been
privatised, but I do not have the precise details in front of
me.
Q110 Mr Prentice: So there are examples
out there.
Mr Noon: Yes.
Mr Cochrane: An interesting potential
problem relates to the Lyons proposals on relocation. From our
point of view that has a huge people dimension but equally has
a property dimension. When you look at the three or four major
government departments in terms of property they have all handed
over the responsibility and ownership of their property to private
sector companies. I think that link has not yet been made. If
the Government has a policy, whether I agree with it or not, about
re-locating government work they have already handed over the
ownership and running of its estate to private contractors under
very long-term contracts, how do you actually marry those two
things up?
Mr Serwotka: I do not have the
evidence of the costs being bumped up but where I think there
is evidence is that there is a feeling that they are over a barrel
and there is nothing the Government can do. During the tax credits
fiasco which should have been an unadulterated good news story
for the Government, it all went wrong because the computers did
not work and we had some people getting three payments, some people
getting no payments, systems disappearing on the computer screen.
I went to the Belfast Inland Revenue call centre and spoke to
a member of staff who had worked in the private sector (I think
it was Tesco). He said to me (and I thought this was quite telling):
"If this happened in Tesco, then Tesco would get the computer
people in and tell them they had 10 days or they were off".
With government it seems the problem is that half way through
a contract it would be Armageddon to chuck them off the contract,
what would you do then and there was a feeling that there was
very little sanction. Somebody could turn round and say that at
the end of the day EDS lost the Inland Revenue contract but that
contract was coming to its natural end. If it happens at the beginning
or in the middle the real feeling is what can we do when the promises
made are not delivered. That is where there is the feeling that
we are over a barrel.
Mr Heyes: Continuing with this same theme,
I just wonder whether the conspiracy theory might help to cast
some light on the reasons for these things happenings. We all
shy away from it; we do not want to display paranoia. You talk
about the CBI's board of public sector contractors; I guess their
interest is in protecting and promoting their business interests
and the diminished ability of the Civil Service to behave as intelligent
customers really might help that if you apply a conspiracy theory
to it. Paul Noon said he would not accuse the private sector of
trying to hoodwink government but the evidence very often points
to it being precisely that that is going on. I just wondered to
what extent the political actions are motivated by the private
sector biased advisors that are so dominant in government nowadays.
Is ideology winning out over logic?
Q111 Chairman: Can you tell us fairly
briefly if there is a conspiracy going on here?
Mr Noon: I would not say that
there is a conspiracy going on but I do think sometimes the Government
has a fascination with the private sector as being an instant
solution to the problems. Not only does my union not think that
that is valid, there are plenty of occasions where it has not
been. There is a perception amongst my members and I think Civil
Service generally that at the heart of government there is a greater
faith in the private sector to deliver than the public service
to deliver. We have been pressing very strongly for a greater
demonstration of commitment to the values of public service. It
is not just as was said earlier in teaching and nursing, but in
public administration that that is a worthy cause of itself and
for the Government to say so more effectively and more consistently—or
say so at all sometimes—rather than the language you get
and the image that is given perhaps because of the political issues
that are there about who can compete for the biggest cuts in the
bureaucrats it would vastly improve things if the Government made
it clear that it supported effective public administration in
the Civil Service.
Q112 Chairman: You have members working
in both the public and private sectors as specialists and experts
and you have talked about the specialist bits of government which
have been moved off into the private sector, what judgment can
you make about the effect of that on the services themselves because
you are able to look across the two sectors?
Mr Noon: It varies depending on
the bits of the organisation that have been transferred out. As
I mentioned, the electricity supply industry—and I think
this is a culture that goes back to the CEGB—has a commitment
to keep the lights on. The way that it has been operated has been
quite effective. However, if you look at something like the demise
of the Property Services Agency which, going back historically,
was quite a large department of state and of the Department of
the Environment then the fact that that was transferred out of
central government on a regional basis and facilities management
has been fragmented and evolved and there have been secondary
contracts and so on, I do not think it has been historically cost
effective or effective in operation.
Q113 Chairman: Can you think of instances
where having stuff moved out has been more effective?
Mr Cochrane: This is probably
a slightly facetious point but I cannot resist it about the merits
and demerits of the de-nationalisation of the Carlisle State Brewery
in the 1970s.
Mr Noon: Certainly what has happened
in many cases is the organisations that have been transferred
out of central government have been those where the amount of
funding for them has been reduced in the longer term. If you look
at the government dockyards at Devonport and Rosyth that were
transferred out and the naval base at Portsmouth the problem has
been that not only were they transferred out of the Ministry of
Defence in those cases but the amount of work that was given to
them was funded so the private sector was handed the problem of
making the reductions in the private sector.
Q114 Chairman: Can you think of any instance
where the efficiency and effectiveness of a service has been improved
by it being moved out in the areas that you know about?
Mr Noon: It is difficult to judge.
Q115 Chairman: You are able to summon
up readily examples where it goes the other way; I just wanted
to know if you could think of any example on the other side of
the account.
Mr Noon: No.
Mr Cochrane: No.
Mr Baume: Probably not, but there
is always going to be a debate about where the boundaries of the
state should lie. In the early 1950s there was a very big political
row about whether the sugar industry should be nationalised. Thomas
Cooke, if I recall rightly, was at one point a part of government.
If you look over a slightly longer time frame there is always
going to be an argument about exactly where the boundaries of
the state should lie. To an extent the rights or wrongs of that
will depend on the particular political and economic circumstances
you are in. What you do need to ensure is that within government
in the round you retain a capacity to undertake your stated objectives.
So it is not necessarily about: is something more or less efficient
outside or inside the state sector in the round, but if a function
is removed from the state sector does that leave the state sector
an ability to make other decisions and deliver what it is attempting
to do in an effective way? This goes back to Paul's comment about
the lack of science and technology capacity currently within the
Civil Service. That does not necessarily come down to one organisation
or the other, but in taking those political decisions—most
of which were under the Conservative administration—did
we in doing so leave sufficient capacity back within central government
to allow central government to undertake its broader functions
effectively? I think it is that argument rather than specifically
one organisation or one small body or the other that I think we
should be looking at.
Mr Serwotka: Going back to the
conspiracy point, I would not describe it as a conspiracy. What
I think is the difficulty now is that we are told the ideology
that there is not an ideology, what matters is what works. That
is what the Government says. It is not public/private; it is what
matters is what works. However we have a deeply held suspicion
that actually the ideology is a bias to the private sector. The
reason we say that is because we have many examples of putting
together and constructing at great expense and great resource
alternatives, for example, to privatisation or outsourcing that
have been dismissed. In one case there was a letter that was barely
over a page long where the readiness to dismiss the alternative
public sector proposals could only lead you to the conclusion
that it was not really seriously considered. I could make a strong
ideological point about the fact that I do not think it is right
that there should be profits made in the justice sector, that
I do not think that benefit administration should be attracting
profits, but we do not base our opposition on that. That is my
personal view but a lot of our opposition is based on the proof
that it has done better in the public sector but that seems very
easily dismissed. I think that if we were convinced that this
was a level playing field and what really mattered is what worked
best then a lot of decisions would be different.
Q116 Brian White: That is what the Civil
Service does with hundreds of people in various departments day
in day out. They just dismiss things coming in from the outside
and that is what departments do all the time and you are just
suffering the same thing.
Mr Serwotka: My point is that
it is the political pressure in order to dismiss a lot of this.
That is what is concerning me rather than it being a genuine dialogue
of what is the best way to do it. One thing I could cite as evidence
of what happens when it goes wrong is the Criminal Records Bureau
because when the Criminal Records Bureau had its problem with
clearing teachers a year or two back- we have 30,000 members in
the private sector in PCS—we had members, some in the Home
Office as civil servants and some worked for Capita in the Criminal
Records Bureau and what we got from the minister down to the management
of the Civil Service and the private company almost down to the
working level of junior administrators was that what went up was
that it was the blame game. The private sector and the state,
from minister right down, and you could not make any progress
to try to sort out the problem. We felt that that was a classic
example that the issues of sorting through the delivery—the
issue of how do we get out of the mess—seemed to be the
last thing on people's minds. It was: who is copping the blame?
That threw up problems in our union because our members in the
private sector felt that politically it was easier for us to say
that the private company had got it all wrong and we had to deal
with the real issues about valuing people whether they were PCS
members in Capita or in the Home Office. I was told it was actually
getting in the way of finding solutions and examining where the
problem was. That was after the privatisation. Our concern is
that that often starts before privatisation because an ideological
decision is taken where something is going regardless of the circumstances.
When I look at the effectiveness of the Civil Service it is clear
we could be far more effective in many ways but a lot of our problems
come from the politics behind where the decisions are made and
it is filtering down and getting in the way of logical operational
decisions. It could be more effective.
Q117 Mr Heyes: Using that example, I
guess you have recognition agreements or facilities agreements
of some kind now with Capita and other private sector providers.
That must seriously inhibit your ability to criticise some of
these inefficiencies that come about from this ideological approach.
You are criticising but exempting from criticism the bit where
it affects your members in the private sector.
Mr Serwotka: Essentially that
is a point we have had to deal with. We have had some stormy waters
and essentially the point that we will now always make is that
we do not criticise the workers in a private company who themselves
are doing a very difficult job often without proper resources.
What we look at is the strategic decisions that have led to the
difficulty and our criticism would usually be pointed at the person
who decided to privatise or the promises made by the heads of
the company. I think what it really brings me back to is that
that was one example of how it is quite difficult in the eye of
the storm often to have a logical dialogue about how to get through
things when people often have to justify the decision taken in
the first instance. The other thing I would say is that as a union
I think we took a very brave step because we, as a public sector
union predominantly, clearly generally oppose privatisation. When
the Inland Revenue computer contract came up for renewal—this
contract represented 5% of EDS's global turnover, it was the biggest
IT contract in Europe at that point and we had many, many members
working in EDS as well as in the Inland Revenue—the easiest
thing for us to have done come the rebid was to say renationalise.
Actually the decision we took was to talk to our members who worked
in the company and said, well, it is easy for us to sit back and
make an ideological decision but we wanted to know the effects.
As a result of that, having talked to all of our members, their
view at that point was that they did not feel renationalisation
was an option. On the back of what people said working in the
front line we took the view that the thing to do was to put into
the tender specification specific demands on how the company would
treat the workforce and respond to certain things. That led us
ultimately to a view that we did not intervene and say, bring
this all back. One of the reasons we did not do that—and
I think this is important—is that our members recognised
that the Inland Revenue as a body and the Government did not have
the expertise to make renationalisation at that point. It was
not possible, therefore we felt that making an ideological point
would have been meaningless. I think that told us some interesting
things. People who deliver the business knew that for the Inland
Revenue to take over the running of everything may be something
they should seek to do in the next 20 years but it was not possible
at that point. We are having to make some rather pragmatic decisions
which sometimes are not comfortable but are the best thing. I
suppose what I am appealing for is a bit of pragmatism everywhere.
We are always told to be pragmatic. If that was taken, the other
side of the coin before some of these big decisions are taken,
I think we would have very different outcomes.
Q118 Chairman: But if it were believed
that putting stuff out into the private sector was both more efficient
and more effective, you should do it, should you not?
Mr Serwotka: If it were seen to
be more efficient and more effective.
Q119 Chairman: Yes, if the analysis was
done and it looked that it was going to be more efficient and
more effective to put an activity in the private sector you should
do it. Not to do it would similarly only be ideology, would it
not?
Mr Serwotka: That is why I made
the point that I think you can make an ideological argument why
you should not do it, but that is not the case of the unions;
the case for the unions is that when you actually do the type
of examination that you are talking about invariably it is better
to keep it in the public sector.
| 
