Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
MR PETER
EWINS
23 MAY 2006
Q160 Mr Jones: Who was it then?
Mr Ewins: Roger Hunt, Paul Hardaker
and Phillip Mabe.
Q161 Mr Jones: They were nominees
from the Met Office, so the relationship broke down.
Mr Ewins: I was not a nominee
of the Met Office.
Mr Jones: I appreciate that, I have clarified
that. I do find your position very strange personally. So relationships
broke down. What was the reason for the relationship between the
Met Office and Cindy Dawes breaking down? What was the thing that
broke that relationship?
Q162 Chairman: Do you have personal
knowledge of this?
Mr Ewins: Only in my role as Chairman
of weatherXchange but not as an employee of the Met Office.
Chairman: But in your role as Chairman
of weatherXchange?
Mr Jones: But he was Chairman of the
Board.
Q163 Chairman: In your role as Chairman
of the Board, do you have a view as to why those relationships
broke down?
Mr Ewins: I do have a view as
to why it broke down. In order for that joint venture to work
it required all the players to want it to succeed and to want
to co-operate and that is what they had been doing. After I left
the Met Office there was, in my view, not the champion of that
relationship that was so necessary to its success. At the same
time—and I need to be very careful here how I express it—my
successor did not give it the kind of support that I believe was
necessary for it to succeed.
Q164 Mr Jones: Can I put another
scenario to you which is this: the reason why the relationship
broke down was the fact that the Met Office realised how lucrative
this venture was and was selling information directly to the market
rather than going through weatherXchange?
Mr Ewins: You have pre-empted
by about 10 seconds what I was going to go on to say.
Q165 Mr Jones: Is that true?
Mr Ewins: I believe, yes, it was
true.
Mr Hancock: But did you not have an agreement—
Chairman: Hold on.
Q166 Mr Jones: I need to clarify
this. So the Met Office was in the joint venture. Surely if the
Met Office was selling its own information into this lucrative
market, it was at the same time undermining this joint venture
that it was also involved in?
Mr Ewins: I could not have put
it better myself.
Q167 Mr Lancaster: You may have hinted
at the answer but I am intrigued. Given that you were not being
paid in your role as Chairman, what was your motivation for taking
on the role?
Mr Ewins: Because I believed very
strongly in what the joint venture was trying to achieve. I believed
that it would be lucrative to the Met Office and of great benefit
to people who wanted to protect themselves from the vagaries of
the weather. It seemed to me to be something that was exactly
where the Met Office was going and I was very keen to be part
of it.
Q168 Linda Gilroy: I would be interested
to try and unbundle what you mean by "co-operate" and
the comparative lack of co-operation and whether what that entailed
was, in fact, a requirement to recover the full cost of any staff
time and resources which came from the Met Office for the commercial
activity of weatherXchange. To put that more simply, did the focus
of the breakdown in the relationship rotate around a requirement
for there to be cost recovery of any resources which the Met Office
put into the commercial activity?
Mr Ewins: I believe that that
was a side issue. I believe the main issue surrounding the demise
of weatherXchange was the one put by Mr Jones. After I left the
Met Office, my view as Chairman was that my successor and others
at the Met Office were keen to use weatherXchange as a means of
getting to the marketplace and to do it even more widely than
the original concept of weatherXchange. Within months that was
no longer the situation and I believe—and this is my view
when I was Chairman of weatherXchange, looking inwards at the
organisation—that the Met Office did indeed start to plough
its own furrow, to go into the marketplace on its own when perhaps
it should have gone in through weatherXchange, or would have been
better advised or had a requirement to do so, and bit by bit the
relationship broke down.
Q169 Mr Hancock: It is not surprising
that it broke down, is it, when you portray it the way you have?
If I had been one of the other three partners, surely when this
was set up as a joint venture one of the things that you had to
agree with the Met Office, who was the only supplier of the information,
was that this would only come through weatherXchange? Was there
that arrangement in place when this was set up, that the Met Office,
which was putting money into a joint venture in which they would
be the major player, signed an agreement with the other partners
to say, "We will only supply this information for this market
through this medium"?
Mr Ewins: I believe that there
was an agreement and that agreement was broken.
Q170 Mr Hancock: Then in your position
as Chairman, what is your recollection of the actions you took
when you became aware that the Met Office were not honouring something
they had signed up to when you were in charge of it so that the
information that was being sold in the marketplace was going directly
rather than through weatherXchange? There seems to me a specific
role for you as Chairman of the Board of a company which had public
money put into it which goes down the tubes where the public purse
bows out and writes off the debt. You must have been making serious
representations to your former colleagues at the Met Office and
if not them to the MoD.
Mr Ewins: I will answer that question
but can I just go back one stage. The agreement to which we have
referred was the agreement that was made after I left the Met
Office because when Zions Bank came on board the arrangements
were reagreed or renegotiated.
Mr Hancock: So when you first set this
up, let us go back so we are absolutely straight—
Chairman: I want to move on.
Q171 Mr Hancock: — when this
was set up was there an agreement that the Met Office would only
supply information to the specific market through this organisation?
Mr Ewins: Yes.
Q172 Mr Hancock: And when it was
renegotiated was that same stipulation in the agreement with the
partners?
Mr Ewins: I believe the answer
is yes to that.
Q173 Mr Hancock: What did you do
as Chairman when you realised that they were reneging on that
agreed commitment?
Mr Ewins: I did the best I could
to ensure that that was honoured by the Met Office and more particularly
I used my skills, such as they are, to try and get the two parties
back together again, but it did not work out that way.
Chairman: I want now to move on.
Q174 Mr Hancock: I think it gets
murkier as it goes on unfortunately, Chairman. Do you think the
experience then of the weatherXchange set-up and the way in which
the Met Office has carried on since then will make them cautious
about exploiting other commercial opportunities?
Mr Ewins: I think it might do
but it would be very unfortunate if it did because the basic concept
of weatherXchange, what it was trying to do, how it was trying
to do it was probably the right model. There were clearly errors
that we made, with hindsight, but I would hope very strongly that
it does not stop.
Q175 Mr Hancock: Would you not think
that the Met Office would not only have a problem with the psyche
of doing that but would also have a problem in getting partners,
having signed up with one lot of partners and then stabbed them
in the back by going down another line?
Mr Ewins: Again my answer to you
is, yes, I agree with you.
Mr Hancock: If it is public knowledge
that if these were the actions of the Met Office, that they were
not to be trusted, and that if you signed a deal with them that
they might go off and sell it elsewhere once they knew they could?
Chairman: I think you are characterising
what Mr Ewins has not personally said.
Mr Jones: I think he has.
Q176 Mr Hancock: I am asking for
his opinion as Chairman of the Board of the company which had
an agreement which said they were going to be the sole distributors
of the information and then the Met Office go and sell it on their
own accord to the same clients that this company was set up to
go after. I am asking him does he think from his experience and
knowledge that the wider marketplace might not be as trustful
this time of the Met Office?
Mr Ewins: I am agreeing with you
absolutely but I am saying one other thing. That was not the sole
cause of the problems with weatherXchange. It may have been the
primary cause or one of the causes. I agree with your analysis
and I agree with your conclusion but it is not the only cause
of problems in weatherXchange.
Q177 Mr Hancock: My final question
might be a little difficult for you to answer because I myself
had problems with it. It was going to be: do you think that the
Met Office has to be more entrepreneurial? I would suggest if
they wanted to they might find it difficult. They are more like
car dealers and maybe that is disrespectful to car dealers in
the way they have acted.
Mr Ewins: I think it might be
slightly naughty with regard to the Met Office. I hope it does
not put the Met Office off forming these relationships because
I believe that they are a proper, legitimate and good way of exploiting
the commercial business which the Met Office is encouraged to
do as a trading fund. I hope and I believe that the Met Office
has learned from this experience and my guess is that they will
move on. I think it would be very unfortunate indeed that because
we tried one joint venture and it failed that the conclusion was
that all joint ventures will fail so let us not do any of them.
Clay Brendish, when he was Chairman of the Met Office Board, himself
made the point that we should not be judging this by this one-off
experience. If we did that then nobody would invest in anything
at all. It is unfortunate that this failed. It would have been
equally wrong had it succeeded to draw the conclusion that we
should do lots of them, because they might fail.
Q178 Chairman: You say you hope and
you believe that the Met Office will move on and do more. You
are not aware of any other joint ventures being undertaken by
the Met Office, are you?
Mr Ewins: No, I am not.
Q179 Chairman: So wherein lies your
belief?
Mr Ewins: My belief is that they
should be encouraged to do this, to go into further ventures,
and not to take the difficult experience of weatherXchange as
being necessarily the way that it will turn out. I really do think
that if a trading fund means anything at all it means going out
and getting commercial business and doing that in a number of
different ways and a joint venture is one of the good ways of
doing it. I would be very sorry myself if the Met Office's conclusion
from weatherXchange was that they should stop doing it. I hope
that they do not lose confidence and they do not lose courage
and that they do form more joint ventures.
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