Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MR DAVID
BELL AND
MR JONATHAN
THOMPSON
14 JUNE 2006
Q1 Chairman: Good morning everyone. I
do not know who is trying to confuse who in this Committee but
here you are, both in new roles; last time we saw you you were
part of one gang and now you are part of another. I am not saying
which is more notorious than the other. Welcome to your first
meeting with the Committee in your new roles. We are very happy
to see you. It is an important week for education. We have a new
successor to you, David, so we look forward to meeting her in
due course. You have suggested you would like two or three minutes
to give us an opening statement and we welcome that.
Mr Bell: Thank you very much.
As you suggested I am no stranger to your Committee but nonetheless
it is a real pleasure to be in front of you in my new role as
Permanent Secretary at the DfES and I am sure I speak likewise
for Jon as the Director General for Finance at the Department.
The Department is small by Whitehall standards but has a huge
reach as our Departmental Report demonstrates. To put that in
context, we employ directly around three and a half thousand staff
against a total workforce across all of the sectors we have responsibility
for of over four million. Of course we also have responsibilities
to parents, students, employers and the like. In other words,
almost no-one is unaffected by what we do. Thus in providing leadership
to the education, training and children's services system we have
to work with and through others. Ensuring that we are clear about
our role and responsibilities it is vital if we are going to be
an effective Department of state. It is unarguable that our education
system has made huge strides in recent years as the data in the
Departmental Report demonstrates. However it is also clear that
much remains to be done in areas such as closing the attainment
gap between different groups of students or ensuring that the
workforce has the skills required in an era of fierce international
competition. It is also fair to say that we have to deal with
some of our more intractable social and educational difficulties
such as teenage pregnancies or attainment of looked after children.
If there were quick and easy solutions to these problems I guess
you would not have me here in front of you this morning. We need
to look critically at what we do and, where we are not on course,
think again. At the same time though I never want us to lose sight
of the much that is both good and outstanding in education, training
and children's services. In that context may I say how grateful
I am that your Committee in its Reports always goes out of its
way to highlight what is effective as well as what can be improved.
On my first day in the Department in January this year I told
the staff that I was a product of the Robins Report that led to
the expansion of higher education in the 1960s. I was the first
of my family to attend university and I said to my colleagues
that I could not think of a greater privilege than being the permanent
head of a government department responsible and charged with creating
opportunities for this and coming generations. Robins said in
the 1960s—the early 60s were part of his justification for
expansion—that there is in our society a reservoir of untapped
talent. We have come a long way since then but the potential within
our nation seems to me to remain unlimited. Helping to unleash
that potential in all sections of our society would be my moral
compass in this post in the coming months and years and I look
forward to sharing both the ups and the occasional downs with
you and your Committee.
Q2 Chairman: You referred to Robins
who was a professor at the London School of Economics; he never
talked to me in my first years as an undergraduate because you
had to tip-toe past his room. There was a sign which said "Quiet—man
working on commission". So we share that but from a different
perspective. You touched a little bit on the change in your role.
What is the real difference between suddenly being inside looking
out rather than outside looking into the Department?
Mr Bell: I described my previous
role as having something of a ring side seat and now I am in the
ring, as it were, as the Permanent Secretary. I think many aspects
of the job are similar on the management and leadership side,
as you would expect, having the kind of chief executive responsibilities
in the Department that I had at Ofsted. Of course the most striking
difference is the relationship that I need to strike up with the
Secretary of State and Ministers and that is quite different from
what I had to do at Ofsted. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Ofsted
and I felt very privileged to be the chief inspector for nearly
four years. As I suggested in my opening remarks it seems to me
to be a fantastic privilege to be helping to influence the shape
of education and children's services and the like in the current
years. So there has been great enjoyment in the past but I am
really pleased that I made the move to the Department.
Q3 Chairman: What did you make of
it when you first arrived in the office? You had just got to know
your ministerial team and the Schools Minister goes and there
is all change again. As Chair of this Committee over five years
I have seen five secretaries of state. Is this any way to run
the Education Department, to have a constantly changing group
of ministers?
Mr Bell: I suppose you know better
than I do that it is a fact of our political system. I think what
has struck me, certainly after what happened to me, is just how
quickly you move from one secretary of state to another and how
quickly the individuals concerned grasp what it is they need to
do. I think one of the virtues of having a permanent civil service
is that you do provide some kind of continuity, recognising that
every secretary of state and every ministerial team may want to
put out different emphasis on the work that it does. I think there
is a real responsibility on the permanent civil service to help
to ensure that those transitions—and they do happen, sometimes
fairly frequently—are managed effectively and there is not
a great disjuncture from one secretary of state to another.
Q4 Chairman: You know as well as
I do that if you had a private sector corporation out there your
share price would plummet if you kept changing the chief executives
with the regularity that we change secretaries of state.
Mr Bell: I think it is important
to make the point that for any government they will have a set
of policies and priorities that will continue over a period of
time. Yes, every secretary of state will give a certain emphasis
to taking forward those policies. I do not think the parallel
is absolutely right with a private sector company, not least because
if you have a permanent cadre of civil servants you can provide
some kind of continuity. I acknowledge that the Department's senior
leadership team on the official side has undergone quite a bit
of change recently but generally speaking I think the permanent
civil service provides that continuity which is required and helps
to mitigate some of the effects of political change.
Q5 Chairman: Can I just push you
on that permanent civil service side? We have been impressed over
recent years with the high quality of civil servants coming to
give evidence to this Committee, particularly the group who came
to give evidence recently on special educational needs. The fact
of the matter is that we still have a very high rate of turnover
in your Department. You have seen someone in a senior position
in your Department who seems to have a real grasp of the subject;
they may been there three years and suddenly they disappear and
we ask what has happened to that very good person who seemed to
be very knowledgeable and we are told they have to be moved on
because of their career development. It does seem that you have
a rate of churn in the civil servants and if you combine that
with the ever changing group of ministers that leads to some sort
of instability.
Mr Bell: I think it is a fair
question and certainly coming in from a local government background
that is quite unusual. It is more likely to be the case in local
government that people will have a particular post and will stay
in that post for a longer period of time. I think it is something
we have to look at because just at the point where people are
getting on top of their subject area there is something of an
expectation across the civil service system that people will move
on for career development. That is all very well but I do think
there is a need to balance the proper career aspirations of civil
servants with the continuity of government. That is an issue I
want to look at.
Q6 Chairman: Perhaps one day we can
have a look at that with you, what the churn is in senior positions
in the Department. Today the Committee will be drilling down on
the expenditure of your Department. This Committee have looked
at expenditure and have predicted that expenditure on education
was plateauing and was going to decline in relation to expenditure
on health and there were less promising years for education to
come. Then we heard the Chancellor's budget statement and there
was quite a feeling of euphoria amongst some of us that perhaps
we got it wrong, that the good times were going to continue. However,
what we have seen recently in terms of comments, comparing what
the Chancellor said and what it actually means in expenditure
on education over the coming years it still looks rather depressing,
does it not?
Mr Bell: It is going to be tighter;
I do not think there is any secret about that because the Chancellor
has made it very clear. I think we will have to wait and see what
is going to happen in the medium term in the light of the comprehensive
spending review. I think there are two comments I would make,
however. The first is this, that education has benefited enormously
from significant investment over the last nine or 10 years and
therefore I think it is absolutely right that we push hard and
ask what has been achieved as a result of that expenditure. I
think we just need to keep reminding not just those who work in
the system but parents and others that there has been that investment.
The second point I would make is this, we have to scrutinise very
carefully the efficiencies we can generate within the system and
that may well be a subject that you will turn to this morning.
I think it is entirely reasonable on the facts of not just the
financial investment but in the reforms that we have seen for
example to the workforce, that we do ask if we can do a more effective
job in a period where resources might be tighter. It will not
necessarily be as it is and has been over the last nine or 10
years, but I think we should not underestimate the significant
investment that has gone in and the proper requirement on the
system to be as efficient as possible in spending that money.
Q7 Chairman: Was the Chancellor wrong
then? Was the Chancellor misleading us in any sense when he made
these budget statements in terms of education when he talked about
raising the average spend on the average state pupil to the level
of the average pupil in the private sector? Was he misleading
us?
Mr Bell: The Chancellor laid out
an aspiration but, as I said, the comprehensive spending review
will be concluded for 2007 obviously next year and we will have
to wait and see what happens. I do not think I can really comment
on that because I do not know what the outcomes of that comprehensive
settlement will be.
Q8 Chairman: You must have listened
to it and then gone on to talk to the Treasury about what it really
means.
Mr Bell: The Treasury, properly,
is considering along with departments a whole range of issues
in advance of the comprehensive spending review and Government
will have to weigh up its different pressures and priorities and
that is the point, of course, of having a comprehensive spending
system, that you can assess what your needs are, what your demands
are, what your priorities are and therefore there is a lot of
conversation at the moment—as you would expect—between
our Department and the Treasury and all departments and the Treasury
about where it is going to go but clearly I cannot tell you because
I just do not know what it is going to look like.
Q9 Chairman: This is a Government
selected on the main theme of its greatest priority being to education—three
elections—and now we can see the figures that the increases
for education and skills is fourth in the league table after health,
after criminal justice and after transport.
Mr Bell: As I suggested earlier
I think you have to set that against the huge investment that
education has received and in some ways will continue to receive.
If you take, for example, longer term capital investment under
Building Schools for the Future, we are not talking about a period
of a comprehensive spending review as such, we are talking about
a period of 15 or so years.
Q10 Chairman: A lot of that is going
to come from PFI.
Mr Bell: But it is still significant
public money investment in buildings and the school estate. I
think it is really important not to just look at the figures as
of now but look at the huge investment there has been in education
since 1997 and ask what we have achieved on the back of that and
how do we become more efficient. I think that message of making
best use of what we have is one that we need to get out in the
system more widely.
Chairman: We will be drilling down on
many of those aspects in a moment.
Q11 Paul Holmes: The Chairman has
already alluded to the difference in your roles. As head of Ofsted
you were a high profile public figure; you were able to make criticisms
of schools, colleges or, indeed, of government policy. Now, as
Permanent Secretary, you are supposed to be fairly anonymous and
defend the Government. Is that a fair summary?
Mr Bell: I certainly had a more
high profile public role, that is true. That is part of the territory
of being the chief inspector and your characterisation of me as
Permanent Secretary I suppose is what is expected of a permanent
secretary. It is true, these are different roles. The role of
the chief inspector was to report independently on what he or
she sees. The role of a permanent secretary is to lead the permanent
civil service and to support ministers in the execution of the
Government's policies, and that is absolutely clear.
Q12 Paul Holmes: Do you carry over
into the new job any clear priority from the weaknesses of government
policy that you saw as head of Ofsted? Do you have a batting order?
What are the first two things you would like to try to get the
DfES to change?
Mr Bell: It is for ministers to
decide where the priorities lie.
Q13 Paul Holmes: You are supposed
to be the most senior adviser.
Mr Bell: Absolutely. What I would
say is that where the Ofsted experience is useful is giving me
quite a good understanding of particular areas where we need to
make further improvement. I think we can see that already. I am
not taking any credit for that, I hasten to add, but we can see
that for example in relation to further education and proposals
in the Further Education White Paper about other reforms to the
system. You can see that, for example, in proposals on schools.
I think there is a lot I could draw upon in terms of my knowledge
of the system, but there is one point I would like to make, however.
I have been very careful not to make assumptions about the DfES
and what it does simply based on what I did when I was at Ofsted.
I think it is really important to be very clear that these are
very different jobs. I do think one of the benefits of having
done what I have done previously is having a good insight. I will
also say this, that the scope of the Department's responsibilities—in
a sense what I am expected to know and what my team is expected
to know—is not actually going to be far greater than what
Ofsted had to know and do. That goes without saying. Of course
there are aspects of the Department's remit that were not any
part of Ofsted's remit, for example higher education.
Q14 Paul Holmes: While you were at
Ofsted there were significant changes in staffing and the way
Ofsted operated (the short inspections announced at very short
notice and so on). Are there any organisational or operational
changes that you can draw on from that experience to bring into
the DfES?
Mr Bell: If I was thinking about
leading the management of the DfES I guess that I would not just
draw upon the experience of Ofsted, useful and valuable though
that was. I guess you would try to draw upon the things you have
done well and the things you have not done so well over your career.
One thing that I think is important is that the permanent secretaries,
as you rightly suggest, have that role as a principal policy adviser,
but the permanent secretary is also the chief executive of a department
and therefore for me it is really important to keep those two
roles in balance at the same time as ensuring that I and my colleagues
provide good policy advice to ministers and also to be very clear
about what we need to do, for example understanding our role in
relation to the rest of the system because almost all of what
we do, as it were, we have to do through others. I think I bring
a strong focus on the leadership and management of the Department
in the role of the permanent secretary. That is not to suggest
that has not been the case but I think, to answer your question
directly, that is something I am very focussed on as the permanent
secretary as well as my policy advice.
Q15 Paul Holmes: In 1979 select committees
were considerably strengthened and reformed to improve the way
that that parliament could scrutinise what government were doing.
In the 1980s, specifically as a result of that, departmental reports
were produced to allow select committees to ease that process
so they could see what departments were doing from year to year.
Some departmental reports keep a consistent format year after
year after year: the Department of Health, the Treasury's Public
Expenditure Statistical Analysis. They are pretty constant. Your
Department's reports seem to change every year. They have different
chapters, different headings, different formats, different tables,
starting points for statistical tables of expenditure and so forth
(some start in 1999, some in 2001); it is just constant change
all the time. Is this cock-up or is it conspiracy? Are you doing
it on purpose so we cannot make those comparisons?
Mr Bell: I will answer that a
bit more specifically in a moment because I know the Chairman
has raised this directly with the Secretary of State. I think
in retrospect not providing explanation about some of the changes
that the Chairman highlighted in his letter was a mistake and
I take full responsibility for that. I think we should have provided
some context and good reasons why some of those tables changed.
It would have been helpful for the sake of clarity to have explained
why some of the baselines have changed. I do not know whether
you want me to make one or two references to some of the specific
points that you raised or if you want to wait for the Secretary
of State's response to them. Jon could make some general points.
Mr Thompson: I agree with David;
we need to offer you an apology for the fact that there have been
some changes. There were some reasons why we decided to change
the departmental report and those revolve around consistency between
our report and the public expenditure tables. For example, in
one of the issues you rightly raised, we discovered this year
that there was a difference in terms of the data we were providing
as opposed to the data Treasury was providing. We had to make
sure we got that right. What I would say at this point is that
we can answer all six of the questions and provide all of that
data to you and we would be very happy to do that. If you want
to go through those six areas we can attempt to do that today,
but we would be very happy to give you a written response. [1]
Q16 Paul Holmes: One specific example
is that in last year's report there was a table—Table 12.3—which
was entitled "Education Expenditure by Central and Local
Government by Sector in Real Terms" and that is not there
this year. Surely a simple, clear set of statistics on that year
by year to allow for comparisons is absolutely crucial. The Select
Committee, the public, the media or anybody is going to evaluate
how you are doing as a Department over a period of time.
Mr Thompson: We agree with you.
We offer you our apology and we will provide you with that data.
If this revolves around some of the questions in relation to Annex
A, for example, in the departmental report, then we can get further
into that if you want some kind of a technical explanation about
why we did it. In relation to some of the questions which we were
given in advance there is some misunderstanding in the questions
which we could try to explain now if you want us to.
Q17 Chairman: We do not want to get
into the minutiae, but Paul is quite right; is it a conspiracy?
You must know that this Committee wants to be able to compare
year on year and if you suddenly start changing the statistics
so we cannot compare year on year it looks to us as though you
are trying to obscure rather than be transparent.
Mr Bell: It certainly was not
a conspiracy, I can assure you of that. As Jon said, there are
some technical explanations that we can provide and I think the
lesson for me on this one is that if you are going to have to
make those changes for technical reasons it is important to put
some clarification notes so that we do not get into a conversation
of trying to understand why the Department has changed its tables
from one year to the other.
Q18 Paul Holmes: Is there a commitment
from the new team at the top that in future years there will be
a consistent format to enable comparisons and perhaps you might
talk to the Select Committee about what that format is going to
be.
Mr Bell: I am more than happy
to talk to you. I am just conscious that the letter from the Chairman
was directed to the Secretary of State and I am sure the secretary
of state would want to reply. All of the detailed questions raised
by the Chairman will be answered in the letter back to you, Mr
Chairman.
Q19 Chairman: Why would you change
your methodology but not the Department of Health?
Mr Bell: There were some changes
in the presentation of information as Jon said in relation to
the consistency between the Treasury requirements and what the
Department had put so we thought in those cases it would be better
to have a single and consistent format. It was not in any sense
intended to be misleading; it was just to try to clarify areas.
It could actually, for another reason, by seen as misleading and
open up a whole set of other questions as to why our numbers are
different to the Treasury's numbers and that is why we have done
it in some of those answers.
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