Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR PETER
HOUSDEN
14 NOVEMBER 2005
Q20 Sir Paul Beresford: Why is it
then, that when they come to a plan and get it all organised,
it has to go back to be ratified by central government, by the
officials?
Mr Housden: There is always a
dialogue, is there not, because quite a lot of—
Q21 Sir Paul Beresford: It has to
go back to be ratified before they can go ahead. Your words were,
"removing burdens and bureaucracy and allowing more influence
and flexibility". It is a sham.
Mr Housden: One of the ways in
which Ministers reflect their priorities and lever them into local
level is often through policy specification and sometimes funding
grants, so that they are used as a way to get policies in.
Q22 Anne Main: Did you say a funding
grant would be used as a lever against an authority to get something
in place?
Mr Housden: Yes, as the incentive,
as you like.
Chair: Can you give an example? Part
of this difficulty is that if you do not use examples, you may
have in your mind one thing and we have all got a different thing
in mind.
Anne Main: That is why I am trying to
get a degree of clarity.
Q23 Chair: Can you give a concrete
example—it does not have to be a real one—make it
up, if you like—of the kind of thing you are talking about,
rather than a concept?
Mr Housden: Take the provision
of parks in disadvantaged areas: A grant may be made available
to the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods to enable the councils
to ensure that there are good-quality green spaces available to
the community. That is an example of the kind of thing that you
might encourage through the provision of a grant. In my previous
work in DfES, all sorts of grants were paid to enable schools
to improve their attendance and standards. All across Government
grants will be going out to encourage local authorities in particular
ways.
Q24 Mr Betts: I was interested in
your reference to the education White Paper. I was not quite sure
whether you thought it was a good model of co-operation between
departments, or something that needed to be learned from.
Mr Housden: I think overwhelmingly
it was a good one.
Q25 Mr Betts: Can you tell me precisely
where the reference to sustainable communities appears in the
education White Paper as a key matter?
Mr Housden: I have not done a
word search, but in terms of the issues that concern ODPM there
was a good and sustained dialogue around those issues.
Q26 Mr Betts: It is not only dialogue,
it is listening. I attended a meeting in Sheffield last night
with 50 colleagues. One of their key concerns was that, given
Sheffield's whole educational approach is built round the school
as part of the sustained community, a place where people can go
to learn, not merely children but adults, with community facilities
and youth provision, now under the White Paper any school that
is successful can apply to expand. Children can then be bussed
across the city from more deprived areas into those schools, leaving
the schools that might be struggling behind, maybe with the fear
of closure, which would not merely close the school but also the
community, youth and adult learning facilities. There is no reference
to that problem in the whole of the White Paper. You have had
no impact, have you?
Mr Housden: The Government as
a whole reached a view about the pattern of the White Paper that
it wished to adopt. We could talk about the specific policies
if that would help.
Mr Betts: Please! What is in the White
Paper does not seem to relate to your objective of sustainable
communities in ODPM. It does not appear that the two come together
in any form in all the discussions you have had.
Q27 Chair: What were the key issues
for ODPM that have been incorporated into the White Paper? That
might be a more useful way of pursuing it—or were taken
account of.
Mr Housden: The principal focus
of the discussion was about the duties and responsibilities of
local authorities as commissioners of school provision—what
that meant, how it would be supported and what the impact of that
would be on matters like school admissions and strategic planning.
Q28 Chair: Were you satisfied that
the White Paper in its final form took proper account of this?
Mr Housden: The Government as
a whole reached a view about the pattern of the White Paper after
a discussion. Had I been Permanent Secretary at the time, it would
have been my responsibility to ensure that there was a good, frank
exchange between officials and Ministers in support of that policy.
I could see from where I was in DfES that that was actually taking
place.
Q29 Mr Betts: Some of us have sat
in this room and had discussions in the past about local government
and the lack of apparent input from other departments into what
was clearly an ODPM flagship in terms of where transport powers
were involved; and now we see the police reorganising their own
structures; we see Health doing the same; and we see Learning
and Skills doing the same. There does not appear to be anything
joined up about it, yet a lot of these are in fact making up structures
of local government, and there is a relationship between these
services and local government. It does not appear there is much
joined-up government!
Mr Housden: This is a very important
issue, and that is around, in the jargon, "co-terminosity"
and the way in which changes in boundaries defined by national
government can make a local authority's job harder or tougher.
We are certainly in those discussions with the Home Office and
with Health currently as they move towards their decision.
Q30 Mr Betts: I sat in on one of
the meetings on city regions that David Milliband and Phil Hope
held in Sheffield. Phil Hope announced that he hoped everyone
was co-operating with this new policy for learning and skills,
particularly the regional strategy. Everybody around the room—and
there were a lot of council leaders and chief executives there—looked
at each other. It was one of those moments when everybody was
thinking, "perhaps we ought to know about this and cannot
remember it"—but it very soon became apparent that
none of them had actually heard of it. Again, that is not a wonderful
example!
Mr Housden: It is interesting
because it goes back to your earlier point about discussions between
the DfES and ODPM, because the role of local authorities in skills
planning has been an important passage of discussion for a couple
of years now. Officials from Sheffield have been powerful advocates
of making the case that, in developing their local economy, they
need to be able to take an overall view, from the development
of vocational and academic skills at school level, all the way
through to adult skills and tackling the issues in the workplace.
This has been an important message, and the Learning & Skills
Council has in several respects recently looked to make its arrangements
more flexible. Within the Schools White Paper indeed there was
a further commitment to explore ways in which you could enable,
particularly larger cities, to have a greater leverage on their
skills agenda as a whole. That was one of the things that came
out of the discussion because it was one of the issues that David
Milliband particularly and ODPM were keen to press.
Q31 Sir Paul Beresford: Can I go
back to parks? Suppose a local authority up in the North, where
the bulldozers are busy bulldozing houses down, decides it wants
to put in a park: so it applies to put in a park, and your Department
says "yes"; what happens then? Do they just go ahead
and do it, or do they have to fill in a multitude of forms to
justify it and then it has got to go back to the Department to
be cleared; or do they have the flexibility to get on with it?
Mr Housden: I cannot speak about
the specific grant regime because I took a hypothetical example
to illustrate the point. As a department we need to ensure that
when we have grant regimes they are as flexible as possible. The
local area agreement with authorities that is being piloted at
the moment is designed to make as many funding streams as we can
from ODPM and other Government departments to come into a flexible
pot that the local authority can use and report upon in an effective
way. The example I was drawing was to illustrate the importance
of moving away from separate funding streams.
Q32 Sir Paul Beresford: How long
ago did you leave local government?
Mr Housden: In 2001.
Q33 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you think
the restrictions and difficulties that local government is working
under have increased or decreased since then, from your Department?
Mr Housden: Decreased significantly.
Sir Paul Beresford: That is interesting:
everyone in local government tells me exactly the opposite.
Anne Main: Can I return to my question
about enforcing rules consistently and swiftly. This tells me
about policing, but how much liaison are you having with the police?
As you know, there are—
Chair: I think that is the Home Office's
responsibility.
Anne Main: Well just how much talking
is there between departments? If we are going to go to nine super
regions for police, will you be able to enforce these neighbourhood
level enforcement rules consistently and swiftly?
Chair: I do think we are getting into
the work of another department, because that is about how neighbourhood
policing will relate to the new police authorities, which, to
my understanding, is largely the responsibility of the Home Office.
Q34 Anne Main: It was a priority
for policy development sent to this Committee, so I just wondered
how you are going to deliver it.
Mr Housden: Our discussions about
those issues are with the Home Office, and they set the frameworks
within which local police forces work. In relation to your earlier
point, if you take, for example, the question of antisocial behaviour
and itinerants, this is a key issue for everybody in the community.
We are able, in ODPM, through the regulation of registered social
landlords and our contacts with housing associations and local
authorities, to have a serious conversation about how those issues
are best managed. They come up, for example, in questions about
policies on evictions and the criteria that should govern those,
what you do with people who are evicted and how you seek to reintegrate
them into the community, and how you seek to re-house them. All
those types of things are very important at neighbourhood level.
Bodies like housing associations have a significant influence,
so we seek to talk with them regularly and understand their position,
to make people's lives better at the local level.
Chair: I think the discussion we have
been having points out how much of the high-level aims of the
ODPM have to be delivered through other departments. That is obviously
a difficulty for us as a committee, as well as for you as a department.
Q35 John Cummings: The Committee
in the past has expressed concerns about the frequent changes
in the Department's reporting formats, its benchmarks and targets.
We believe that such changes make it extremely difficult to review
progress from one year to the next. What current guarantees can
you give to the Committee that in the future the audit trail will
be transparent on a year-by-year basis?
Mr Housden: I would want to give
you that assurance. This issue will not be particular to ODPM.
With the Government's pattern of spending reviews, you will find
that you have changes. It is important that we provide you with
that clear line of sight. I understand we have recently provided
some information that relates our PSA targets to the strategic
objectives set out in the two five-year plans and those in the
stock-take. It is important for us, in being clear with staff
and stakeholders about what the Department's priorities are, just
as it would be important for you in measuring success. I would
certainly want to commit myself to doing that on your behalf.
Q36 Mr Olner: In the note that you
kindly sent to the Clerk of the Committee that is on page 3 you
talked about "continue to investigate incentives such as
hard charging to achieve better utilisation of assets". What
is hard charging?
Mr Housden: Literally charging
the people who are using the asset for its use, so charging a
rent for a building, charging for particular services provided.
Mr Olner: How does that become hard charging?
If we are going to have clarity of understanding, then we have
to be very careful about the terminology we use.
Q37 Chair: Can I ask: as opposed
to what? If you do not do hard charging, what do you do, or what
has been done?
Mr Housden: Bearing in mind that
this is being reviewed—so it is not exactly a hard commitment—but
you can provide assets free. The whole drift of resource accounting
was to make Government expenditure more transparent and clear,
by helping organisations understand the totality of the resources
they were consuming. There is, within that general movement, a
desire to make it clear and explicit.
Q38 Mr Olner: Does that mean you
are going to take away from local authorities powers to assist
voluntary organisations and bodies?
Mr Housden: Not at all.
Q39 Chair: I understand what hard charging
means and the advantages to it, but what is the situation at present?
Mr Housden: I would need to let
you have a note on that.
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