Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
SIR GUS
O'DONNELL KCB
11 OCTOBER 2005
Q20 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I move
on to e-gov. E-gov has been an interesting bone of contention
which we seem to re-visit on a periodic basis. Directgov, which
is your web site, seems to be getting worse. Do you think that
that is right or wrong? Every time I check on it it seems to get
a little bit worse. You have put massive resources into this but
it does not seem to be getting anywhere. I have two questions.
Is it because departments are not playing ball on e-gov or that
they do not understand e-gov, and also, is there a will in government
to push e-gov which comes out in everything you have said, including
this document here?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: Indeed. I am
a big fan of Directgov and e-gov and strongly urge all those taxpayers
to do their self-assessments on line. I am all for us using these
facilities because they seem to me to provide a win/win situation
where if somebody comes into government via an on-line network
it can be incredibly efficient both for them and for government
to handle that process. Andrew brought in Ian Watmore to look
at this and I have to say Ian is doing a first-class job in my
view. I disagree with you about Directgov. Last time I went in
I thought it was rather better. It is more comprehensive. There
is much more you can do so I imagine it is becoming a bit more
complex.
Q21 Mr Liddell-Grainger: What is
the cost of running the e-gov department?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: That is a number
that I do not have.
Q22 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Are you
using outside consultants to advise you on e-gov or are you doing
it internally?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: Ian himself
comes from outside, remember.
Q23 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Forget him.
Generally.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: The honest
answer is I do not know but I would be surprised if they did not
use outside consultants for some of their work.
Q24 Mr Liddell-Grainger: To whom
does Ian report, to you or the Cabinet Office?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: To me, through
Colin Balmer at the minute.
Q25 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That will
then be broken up and there will be two separate bodies? Is he
still called the e-Envoy?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: No, I think
he has quietly dropped the e-Envoy route in that the idea that
we have to go out there and explain to people about the Internet
is a bit behind the times. I think what he is saying is everybody
is used to this; we need to make the most use of it. He is working
on a key strategy document which should be out quite soon.
Q26 Mr Liddell-Grainger: What do
you mean by a key strategy document? That will be to take e-gov
forward?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: Yes, what Ian
has been doing is bringing together what he calls the CIOs, chief
information officers, that are around government in the big departments
and turning them into a cohesive, professional group of people
who are IT experts and saying to them, "Can we formulate
an overall Government strategy for looking at the way in which
we should be using IT to undertake our business?"
Q27 Mr Liddell-Grainger: One of the
things you said is that you want to clamp down on the casual approach
to decision making. E-government seems to be a casual approach
to decision-making. You have so many things you are trying to
achieve and I think you are missing an enormous amount of targets
that you could achieve. I come back to the question are the departments
co-operating with each other within e-government?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: To the best
of my knowledge they are. Ian has not come to me and said can
I knock heads together and that there is an issue about departments.
I think there are some issues about information sharing across
departments relating to the fact that sometimes there are statutory
bars to information sharing and you have to go through various
gateways and there are some technical issues that make it quite
difficult.
Chairman: Thank you, Ian. Gordon Prentice?
Q28 Mr Prentice: I want to pick up
on some of the points that Tony made about Michael Bichard but
can I get back to the Strategy Unit, because the former Head of
the Strategy Unit, Geoff Mulgan, said that diary-keeping by people
at the centre of government is damaging trust, and he went on
to say that the fact that people like Alastair Campbell kept a
diary—and people knew that Alastair Campbell was keeping
a diary—probably coloured key decisions. Do you believe,
as he does, that all this diary-keeping is threatening the quality
of decision-making?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: There is some
very clear guidance in paragraph 4.25 of our Code of Conduct which
says: "Civil servants must not publish or broadcast personal
memoirs reflecting their experience in government, or enter into
commitments to do so while in Crown employment. The permission
of their head of department and the Head of the Home Civil Service
must be sought before entering into commitments to publish such
memoirs after leaving the Civil Service." So I am fairly
clear that this is not part of what we should be doing. I have,
I suppose, a moral position that I have been lucky in my career
to be at the centre of government working in Number 10, the Treasury
and now the Cabinet Office, and it would never cross my mind that
I should sell the information which I obtain as a civil servant
and publish memoirs. I just think it is wrong and I am strongly
against that idea.
Q29 Mr Prentice: But the system is
not working, is it, because Geoff Mulgan says that he wants contracts
to be amended so that provisions would stop them exploiting detailed,
decision-making discussions for their own gain in the future,
and that is Geoff Mulgan, the man running the Strategy Unit.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: And I agree
with him. I have asked people to explore on my behalf, in the
light of what has happened recently, what we could do about this.
Now, it is quite difficult. There is a balance here because some
ministers will want to publish their memoirs after they have left
office and I can see from a point of view of history and of what
has gone on in government that Prime Ministers publishing their
memoirs seems to me a perfectly straightforward thing to do, and
there are the Radcliffe Rules that govern that process as well.
However, people actually making money out of private conversations
when they have only been in government for a short time, can we
do something about that? One of the things I am exploring is whether
we can classify the material that they use as Crown copyright
which would mean we would then get the profits from the books.
Q30 Mr Prentice: That is a wheeze!
Sir Gus O'Donnell: It certainly
changes the incentive structure, as they say! I do not know that
I can do that but I have asked people to explore it.
Chairman: Retrospectively!
Q31 Mr Prentice: I do not want to
labour the point but this is interesting stuff, is it not? For
example, the tell-all Lance Price, I am not going to go through
all the stuff in his book but he said the Prime Minister made
up policies on the hoof, that he spin-doctors something minutes
before appearing on television. He was very, very critical of
our Prime Minister and he worked with him for five years. The
book was handed over to your predecessor and perhaps to you to
be filleted, to take out those passages that would be seen as
being undesirable in a published book. I was therefore astonished
to read in the newspapers when the Lance Price book was published
that there was the "unexpurgated" version and the "expurgated"
version, two columns alongside one other, so what on earth is
the point of going through the exercise?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: It is a very
good question.
Q32 Chairman: That was what is called
a "ghost" bell which signifies nothing except it is
a noise that may happen randomly[2]
If it goes on again we will have to try and ignore it. I am sure
there is some good anti-terrorist reason for doing it but let's
just carry on. You were saying that Gordon had a good point.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: Could you repeat
the question?
Q33 Mr Prentice: What is the point
of calling in, let's say, Lance Price's book and taking out those
sections that were a threat to national security or which would
offend the Prime Minister or whatever and then, days after publication,
the Daily Mail and the Guardian and the rest of
them have two columns, the expurgated and the unexpurgated? My
question was why go through it all?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: I think you
have a good point because I think what we are doing in this process
is enhancing the value. It is the wrong incentive structure because
people are actually selling "this is what they did not want
you to see" kind of thing. I do have some misgivings about
that approach. On the other hand, I think it is very important
that we enforce the rule about people submitting manuscripts because
if there were to be any issues of national security in there,
it would be important that we were able to take those out.
Q34 Mr Prentice: I have one or two
questions about Michael Bichard. You will have read the speech
that he made in July in London where he was talking about the
comprehensive performance assessments, the thing you announced
today, and he said that he was very much in favour of that. He
talked about establishing a Public Service rather than a Civil
Service and that seemed to chime in with what you were saying
that if the people of the Treasury wanted to get up, they should
get out.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: Get on and
get out.
Q35 Mr Prentice: So do you think
this idea of having a "public" rather than a "civil"
service would widen the pool of talent on which you can draw?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: I have been
trying actively to do that in terms of appointments and getting
people from the wider public sector to come into central government.
The most recent appointment that I made of that kind was Stella
Manzie from Coventry putting her as a non-exec on a Treasury board,
and Lin Homer has recently come in from Birmingham to be head
of IND in the Home Office. The recent permanent secretary appointment
that the Prime Minister made on my advice to ODPM, Peter Housden,
comes from the local authority sector so there is a lot of that
happening. I am very keen on it and I am pushing civil servants
to go the other way. I am talking to the NCVO tonight and one
of my themes will be: can we manage more interchange between the
Civil Service and the charities and voluntary sector, which I
am very keen on because of their role in delivery of public services.
I think this is a very important thing. Merging them into one
big employer is not something to which I aspire. The terms and
conditions of the different bodies are very different and their
control is very different, so I think interchange is preferable.
Q36 Mr Prentice: But he was a man
who straddled both, was he not?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: Indeed he did
but he will know—and it is one of the points I made when
I spoke to a conference the LGA were running—there is this
issue about pay levels. There is an issue when trying to attract
people in from the top of the local authority sector now because
they are tending to be paid rather more than civil servants, and
that is an issue.
Q37 Mr Prentice: The final point
is, and he made lots and lots of suggestions, he talked about
introducing more formal outsourcing of policy development. Do
you think the Civil Service should go out to think-tanks for ideas
on how to take policies forward?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: I have always
been very keen that we should be very externally aware. We should
always be aware of the policies think-tanks are proposing. Also
we have a number of other governments out there all facing similar
challenges so we should learn from international experience. I
think it is part of the job of a really good, diverse Civil Service
to pick up all of those things. This is one of the things I hope
the National School for Government will do—start bringing
in world experts on different subjects and we can also send civil
servants to learn.
Q38 Mr Prentice: At the Brighton
Conference the Prime Minister said we are all change-makers and
we are changing lots of things. I just wonder about the huge structural
changes that are about to take place in the NHS, in the Police
Service and so on because wherever we look the whole pack of cards
is being thrown up in the air and we do not know where they are
going to land. I do not know where some of these policies come
from. I just wonder what the Civil Service is doing to test the
robustness of those policies. If you look at what is about to
happen in the NHS we are re-creating structures that we—this
Government—created four or five years ago and presumably
the same people who are drawing up the new policies are the ones
who designed the old ones four or five years ago.
Sir Gus O'Donnell: In terms of
policy design, the two criteria that I push all the time are make
sure it is evidence based, so we have got objective evidence that
tells us what we should expect so that we can monitor it as it
goes along, and also quite often it makes sense to pilot policies
before you roll them out nationally. In the end it is ministers
who will decide on policies but it is very important that we give
good policy advice on what can be managed practically.
Q39 Mr Prentice: There is a spinning
gyroscope out there. I want you as Head of the Civil Service to
tell me that these huge changes that are going to be unleashed
on the National Health Service, the Police, ambulance trusts,
you name it, have all been thought through and that they weren't
just sprung on the Civil Service by people at the centre of government
saying, "This is the policy, you are the people who are experts
on delivering; go away and make it work"?
Sir Gus O'Donnell: I think that
is precisely what I am trying to sort out in terms of the culture,
that we should not have that separation whereby somebody says,
"Here is the policy; now go away and think about delivering
it." I think it is exactly the same in presentation as well.
In policy formulation you have to think very carefully about what
the delivery issues are so you are not presenting policy advice
to ministers which says, "It could be policy A or policy
B, there you go," as if delivery is a secondary issue but
actually, when you present policy advice on what the different
options are, you are very clear about what the delivery challenges
are. When you are in a period of rapid change there are going
to be difficulties and I think we have a Government at the moment
that is in the process of radical transformation and therefore
there are going to be some policies that work better than others.
I think that is the world we are in. My job is to try and make
sure that as civil servants we give really good advice and that
that advice, is related to policy and the implementability of
policy.
2 At this point the session was interrupted by a faulty
division bell. Back
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