Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-124)
24 FEBRUARY 2005
MR JONATHAN
BAUME, MR
CHARLES COCHRANE
OBE, MR PAUL
NOON AND
MR MARK
SERWOTKA
Q120 Chairman: All I am asking you is
that if it looked as though it was probably better to put it out
you should put it out.
Mr Cochrane: The question we would
always ask ourselves is, "What does better mean?" Does
it mean better services? Does it mean better in terms of cost?
Does it mean better for the staff as people? There is still a
great deal of work that needs to be done, particularly in the
Civil Service, to protect these people.
Chairman: If you are saying that it can
never be the case that it is better to do it, that is simply as
ideological as the claim that those people who want to do it are
ideological.
Mr Prentice: What is wrong with ideology?
Q121 Chairman: All I am establishing
is that we have it on both sides.
Mr Baume: I will give you a straight
answer and say that I agree with you. For me this is not a particularly
ideological thing but it is about what is the most effective way
within your policy objectives of making something happen. I am
not going to talk about any particular service on that level but
of course the private sector can do things very efficiently. I
will give you a very simple example. I lost my Oyster card a couple
of weeks ago. I rang Transport for London and discovered I was
actually talking to a private company within Transport for London.
My Oyster card was immediately cancelled and there was a new one
with me the following morning. It was seamless; I have absolutely
no complaint. I realised that it was one of the big ticket agencies
that was actually doing that particular job. I do not know much
about the Transport for London operation but there seems to be
no reason why that is not an effective way of doing it. There
are also certain areas where I actually think that it is not appropriate.
I think the armed forces should be a state body; I do not think
personally that you should have a private police force. However,
you can argue about certain security functions or parking wardens
or whatever else. There are certain areas where I think there
it is appropriate that something must always be in the public
sector and there are certain things where I cannot see a particular
argument one way or the other. There are a lot of other areas
where I think you could have a rational and intelligent debate
about what makes sense.
Chairman: These are very deep waters
and I do not think we need get too deeply into them at the moment.
Q122 Iain Wright: Do you think that the
quality of leadership and direction at the top of the Civil Service
is poor? By that I mean the chief executives, directors of NDPBs
and executive agencies, not permanent secretaries.
Mr Noon: I think it varies. I
have mentioned the Met Office; we have a very close working relationship
with the former chief executive of the Met Office (nothing sinister
should be read into that; he simply retired) and he led the organisation
well and effectively through a period of time. We have seen other
examples where there has been too much change or people have come
into organisations where they were not sufficiently rooted in
those organisations and it has not worked as well.
Q123 Iain Wright: That is an interesting
point. At the start of all this Charles mentioned about how the
Civil Service implements the policies set by the Government and
I would have thought there is a bit of a gap here between ministers
who have the vision and are more or less clear as to what they
want to achieve. The workers at the bottom seem, in my opinion
both as a citizen and also as an MP working on constituency casework,
to be floundering around; they are doing the best of a bad job
at the moment because of a lack of direction, a lack of leadership
and a lack of clarity. Is the point that in the middle bit, as
it were, between ministers and operational staff, there is no
clear strategic leadership from the chief executives and the directors
of these various bodies? Can I just mention the point that Mark
and Jonathan raised later which was ministers meddling and maybe
a bias towards the private sector, is there a reflection perhaps
that there is an absence of good quality leadership and direction
in these agencies?
Mr Noon: In some cases chief executives
say to us privately—and in some cases they have said it
more publicly to their staff—that they feel that they do
not have enough freedom to manage because although we talk about
delegation on some of the key issues (or what would be seen as
key in a business sense) they are not free to do what they would
like to do. We have numerous examples of areas where, for instance,
on pay and conditions there is supposed to be delegation but it
is only delegation as long as they do not pay more than 3.49%
in a year. In situations where there are key business drivers
towards better reward or more structured reward in some areas,
where those cases have been put up through the Cabinet Office
and Treasury and so on the chief executives would agree with us
that their business needs are to have better reward packages but
they are told that they cannot do it. I would say that in some
cases that is a problem, that freedom is an illusion.
Mr Cochrane: I think there is
also a continuing problem about executive agencies and about the
message that goes out. When executive agencies were set up—in
some ways this is partly last week's story—with the freedom
to get on with it, it was quite difficult to make that fit with
the idea of government being in total control of the government
machine and that being responsive to changes in policy and changes
in direction. I think there is a contradiction there which needs
to be explored. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot set up
all these so-called autonomous units in government to get on with
something and also want something that is very, very responsive.
I commute quite a long way so I end up reading the business pages
in some of the newspapers and you can certainly get the flavour
from that that there are some leadership problems in parts of
the private sector as well, certainly the way they seem to keep
churning through senior managers. I think there was a survey published
in a newspaper today about unpaid overtime being worked. One of
the groups that came extremely high in that were civil servants
and certainly senior civil servants. I think there is a real issue
about workload at all levels of the Civil Service but certainly
at management levels. Many of them will come back to us and say,
"If only we were given the time and space to get on with
managing we could do it, but we just get more and more put on
us". What they are unfortunately given is the responsibility
of so many cases and not given the powers to actually deal with
it. I think there are some deep issues in here somewhere.
Mr Baume: Just adding to that,
I think there is a difference perhaps between the executive agencies,
some of which are very uncontroversial and just get on delivering
very effectively and you never hear anything publicly or in the
news from one year to the next, and some of the others which are
very sensitive. I was reminded recently about the Michael Howard/Derek
Lewis affair and the fact that whatever the pretences in these
very sensitive areas ministers do not step very far away but we
have a pretty clear understanding these days—particularly
through experiences like that—of where the accountability
lines are. For NDPBs, I think there are some very genuine issues
about the accountability lines which I know this Committee has
at times started to address but I think is still something that
warrants a lot more explanation (who is actually responsible for
the several thousand NDPBs, some of which are pretty critical
now, to core public services including education and health, et
cetera) as to where the buck stop? Who actually determines policy,
et cetera? That is something the Committee may wish to look at
in due course. There is a difference I think there and those political
accountability lines are actually very important in understanding
the way in which the organisation delivers and the way the individuals
within those organisations see their role.
Mr Serwotka: I have to be very
careful in what I say here, but I think there is a problem. The
question is identifying with whom the responsibility lies I think
because there is some evidence that some major government departments
have essentially sought to import from the private sector captains
of industry who are seeking to impose a private sector model without
trying to take their own management with them. That has resulted
in some very profile embarrassments for the Government. The question
I then ask is, "What is the role of the secretary of state?"
I will give you a recent example from the DWP where I think in
terms of the senior management has been a disaster. It is not
often that 97.1% of the workforce in a secret ballot vote say
they have no confidence in the senior executive team. Part of
the problem it seemed was that firstly there was a secretary of
state who stood back and said that management of his department
was not a matter for him. We now have a secretary of state who,
I am glad to say, has been prepared to say he is ultimately the
one who takes the flack when it is all exposed to the outside
world. He has been much more hands-on and in the last six months
I think we have seen the beginning of turning the ship around.
In a department that employs 140,000 people that is in the newspapers
because senior managers one year told the staff that all Christmas
trees must be removed because the baubles could be used as offensive
weapons, that then sees it impose a barmy performance appraisal
system; it also saw it impose a dress code that lost legally and
made the senior management team look silly. Therefore, I think
there is a question about who is making the decisions and why.
When a senior civil servant at the DWP publicly says the problem
is that his middle management are the problem then that is a strange
way to motivate anyone. My own experience, having been in this
department for donkeys' years, is that there is a high quality
of management there who have been career civil servants for many
a long time who begin to feel that what they have to bring is
being ignored. Therefore that does manifest itself in terms of
small things being blown out of all proportion. There is a feeling
of who has a grip of this department's business and where it is
going, where the minister comes in and what the role of the executive
team is. Just balancing that up, there are other examples where
I think that the management we have seen in some parts of Civil
Service has been excellent and the starting point has been to
bring around change but to be quite inclusive, to seek to try
to bring their own workforce with them and be seen to want to
listen to them. That does not mean that everything has been agreed
but I think invariably people agree that that approach has made
people feel they have been through a process that is the Civil
Service way, which is an attempt to try to convince and look at
the expertise that exists and that has to be there. Dramatic imposition
of what are often seen as alien methods without any attempt to
try convince people that this is the right way can be politically
embarrassing for ministers.
Mr Baume: Can I just say that
I fundamentally disagree with Mark's analysis of the DWP but Mark
and I have discussed this elsewhere.
Q124 Iain Wright: It seems that there
is a very clear role which is to be commended of a career civil
servant who has gone through the ranks and knows the organisation.
However, there is a point made that moving quite freely between
the public, the private and the voluntary sectors helps increase
and enhance the management qualities. Are you disagreeing with
that then?
Mr Serwotka: I am personally not.
I think the best way to start that is to have that type of mobility
within the Civil Service which at the moment does not exist properly.
I think before we have aspirations to then include the wider public
sector and the voluntary sector and the private sector we should
be able to start at something where we do have control. I think
the problem at the moment is actually rather that it being incentives
or even a level playing field to move your expertise around, to
many people it is a negative because of the different terms and
conditions and pay rates and everything else. I can see a lot
of attraction and not just for senior managers; a lot of the skills
of the bulk of the Civil Service in terms of numbers—administrative
and executive grades—would also benefit from being able
to have mobility to go into different departments. We currently
have a situation that because of the Gershon stuff some departments
are declaring people surplus to requirements in the same location
as other departments are advertising jobs externally. To me that
is lunacy. Why we have 300 people surplus in Sutton Disability
Benefits Centre when the Home Office employs 8,000 people in Croydon
(not that many miles away) and the ability does not seem to be
there to believe there can be some movement around is bizarre.
You could have one department paying redundancy payments to staff
while another is recruiting off the streets. Some of these skills
are common to whichever department you work in. I do not disagree
with your question but I think we should start in the Civil Service
and then seek to build on that.
Mr Noon: More widely we have always
supported interchange as long as it is genuine interchange and
not seeing the private sector as somehow rescuing the Civil Service.
We have always been behind moves in both directions for career
development purposes and we would like to see it more.
Chairman: Thank you for that. Mark, I
think you said earlier on about the evidence on the impact of
the Gershon process on service quality and delivery was anecdotal.
I think the Committee would like to think that between you you
could do something more systematic on that and I think we would
like to know about any evidence that you have, not because we
might not think that it is not proper for the state to try to
be as efficient as it can, but there are consequences of doing
things and we would like to know about those from your own direct
experience. Thank you very much indeed for coming along this morning.
We have had a very wide-ranging discussion, probably not doing
justice to any particular topic but I think it has been refreshing
and very useful for the Committee and a very good way to start
this inquiry that we are doing.
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