Select Committee on Public Administration Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)

SIR GUS O'DONNELL KCB

11 OCTOBER 2005

  Q40  Julia Goldsworthy: You have talked about capability assessments and the Delivery Unit heading them up with external input. Are you able to elaborate a bit more on what you mean by external input and why you have judged that a totally independent assessment is not necessary? Following up from that, if you are holding the permanent secretaries accountable, how and with what mechanisms?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: I have just got into this and been able to announce this so could I give you the great details. First of all on independence, I am very strongly of the view that we have a large independent element to this but what I do not want is a department saying, "It is an independent review done of us, we do not believe it, we do not accept it," and just ignoring it. For me what really matters is that change takes place so that means, yes, I want a strong external input—and indeed I am delighted by the fact that permanent secretaries want it as well—to work together on this. There could be external leads of these teams that come in but at the end of the day, there will be a report that comes to me and the permanent secretary and we will sign it off. Then in terms of the accountability—your second point—I will be holding the permanent secretary accountable for improvements in the areas where improvements are needed. We will agree an action plan and trajectories to get to a level that we all believe that department needs to be at.

  Q41  Julia Goldsworthy: How would that then tie in with the roles that are already there for the Ombudsmen and the National Audit Office and the Audit Commission?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: The Audit Commission have been doing this sort of thing for local authorities so they will play a key role. The National Audit Office has its own role which is looking at value for money and auditing accounts and all the rest of it. I do not want to stop them doing that. It is a very important role and they do it very well. They have not been doing capability reviews so probably the obvious place for me to look is the Audit Commission. What was the other group you mentioned?

  Q42  Julia Goldsworthy: The Ombudsmen.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: The Ombudsmen are slightly different in that they are picking up those cases where there have been failures, where the internal systems have failed, and they are more specific cases. We have published a Consultation Document on helping the Ombudsmen work together to try and learn lessons from them as to how that feeds back into better customer service, but I am sure when we look at capability one of the things we will be looking at is customer service capability where that is relevant for departments, and clearly the ability of them to learn from customer complaints is something where I think you might well get some of the private sector who would be very good to help you do that aspect.

  Q43  Grant Shapps: Sir Gus, I wonder if you would agree with me that it is a pretty good indication of a Civil Service department which is failing when they have to set up their own special helpline for MPs to contact them?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: No, I think that is a very good example of providing a good service to you.

  Q44  Grant Shapps: The way I am thinking about this is if it were not for two categories of cases, the Child Support Agency cases and Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) cases, I would probably have half the number of people turn up at my surgeries each week. That is probably the experience of most of us round here. Those are two organisations which I think you would probably accept are clearly failing. It seems to me it is the failing ones which require special helplines for Members of Parliament to contact you in order to move cases up the chain. Is that the way it works, that there is a special helpline when things are going wrong? I struggle to think of a department with a special helpline where there are problems that cannot be addressed via the usual channels.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: If you think of the degree of difficulty of what both those departments are trying to handle. For example, if you take the Child Support Agency, this is something that is incredibly hard. In the past it was dealt with by our courts and there were issues then about the difficulty of it and lots of dissatisfied customers, but they would not blame civil servants because they would be problems with the courts. Now we have got a Child Support Agency, which I understand had cross party support, they are dealing with people who are generally in conflict and who are possibly not co-operating. It does not surprise me that there are disputes in that area. When you go to the IND there are also people who are quite often in dispute. Those are the difficult areas and that is where you are going to get lots of cases. I predict whatever system we have in line for things like child support, you will be kept very busy in your constituency dealing with people who dispute the cases.

  Q45  Grant Shapps: I accept what you are saying entirely, particularly about the CSA where clearly it has come about through family breakdown which has much wider issues than the Civil Service can possibly resolve. However, in one of those departments there are six people—five people when I called up because somebody was off sick—handling 30,000 cases and they were prioritised according to the person I was speaking to, as green, amber and red, and one that no-one was supposed to know about called a red star, and what an MP could do by calling up and finally getting through was to move it up one level in that, whereas ordinary members of the public would be expected to wait around for hours on the helpline and usually then not to get their response dealt with at all. They are self-confessed, over-worked, over- whelmed civil servants and I am interested to know what you think should be done about that.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: In all of these areas where we are having problems—and this is an example where a capability review would help us identify—

  Q46  Grant Shapps: Or more staff possibly?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Exactly. There will be various elements to solutions. There will be one about is it policy changes, and I do not think we should shy away from that. Is it that, yes, we just need to put more resources into it. I know the newly appointed head of the CSA is looking again at the IT systems and whether they are right for case-handling in terms of the numbers they have got, but it is a difficult situation. They start with some backlogs and it is a very complex policy area.

  Q47  Grant Shapps: Are you aware, to draw out an example of the inefficiency within the CSA, that if somebody's direct debit falls due on a Sunday, at the beginning of the next week they will receive a letter telling them that their payment is overdue even though it has been paid on that day and it must mean that one in seven instances are sent reminders. Can you even start to calculate how much that must be costing? I would be interested to hear the figure. Obviously you will not have it with you now.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Curiously enough, I do not have that figure!

  Q48  Grant Shapps: Were you aware of the problem?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: I am aware that there are a number of structural problems at the CSA, yes.

  Q49  Chairman: Perhaps you can find out if what Grant is saying is true and then you can write and tell us what you are going to do about it.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: I will get the head of the CSA to respond to you.[3]

  Q50 Grant Shapps: Clearly you accept there are problems in the CSA. We all know there are. We accept that these are wide problems which go way beyond the Civil Service and into society. When an organisation is set up and is so ineffective and has failed so completely and utterly and continues to fail years later, who should be taking the can for this?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Like I say, they are dealing with a difficult area. I feel responsible for all those civil servants who are operating, as you say, in very difficult circumstances in that department, trying to do the job as best they can, working very intensively, so it is for me to support them, but in terms of can I help them do what they want to do, which is deliver a first-class service, then, yes, I am very keen—and there is a new Head of the CSA—to talk to him about how he can ensure it will go up the route to DWP to Leigh Lewis, the new Permanent Secretary, when he takes over from Richard. This is one of the key areas we must address. I am very aware of these issues. In the same way as you have constituents, I have friends and other routes in to tell me precisely all these sorts of stories.

  Q51  Grant Shapps: This department had only six people but there were only five on that day because one was ill and clearly part of the solution I can tell you, without going into any kind of comprehensive assessment of it, is that there are just are not enough staff there. Whilst I have said that more staff is part of the answer, surely somebody should be losing their job over this kind of catastrophe? Perhaps you have an opinion whether that should happen within the Civil Service or at a political level, I do not know, but somebody should be carrying the can.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Sure. I will only go down that route if I could define precisely what the causes of the problems were.

  Q52  Grant Shapps: Because it is complex we never really get to an answer then?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Because it is complex if we do not know what the real causes are then I think it would be wrong to blame anyone. You have got a new Head of CSA coming in there and he is trying to sort things out. The staff who are there are trying their best to implement policies.

  Q53  Grant Shapps: A final thing, I cannot stress, and I am sure other Members around here will back me up on this, just what a mess it is in. It is incredible the stories that people come back with, the amount of casework taken up with the CSA, and I mentioned the IND at the beginning. Without those two government departments I would probably not need to run surgeries every other week.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Can I give you one piece of optimism to look at. When I was at the Cambridge court, they have a brand new court building that has excellent facilities for disadvantaged witnesses, for example, one of the things they have got there is a mediation service where if there are couples in dispute, if it is an issue about finance or whatever, they put them into mediation. They do not go anywhere near courts, they mediate, and they have something like an 85% success rate doing that without going near the system. I just wonder if we could not find ways to use mediation more.

  Q54  Grant Shapps: I am sure that is right on a general note. Finally, is it within your remit to say that this person has systematically failed and "I am afraid we are going to have to ask you to leave the Civil Service, in fact you will get the sack, because the computer system has not worked or there is such appalling mismanagement within this department"? Is that something you would ever do or consider?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: The Head of the CSA reports to the permanent secretary for the Department of Work and Pensions who in turn reports to me. If there were something where there were systematic failings and I thought it was individuals who should be held to account who were not fulfilling their job then obviously—

  Q55  Grant Shapps: I wonder how bad an organisation would have to look before you would think it was a systematic failure then?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: You have to sort out the causes of failure.

  Grant Shapps: More than just the MPs' helpline.

  Q56  David Heyes: Can I tease out a little more this interesting announcement you have made about capability reviews. You said that you expected a first pilot to be launched around December/January, which suggests it is a well thought out idea and that it is at a stage of development that has given you the confidence to speak about it today. I just wondered, if the essence of this is going to be based upon comparability as between departments, what purpose can pilots serve?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: First of all, what I have been spending my time doing is developing the idea. Bichard's speech was a very interesting speech and I have noted what you have talked about in terms of CPA in this Committee, so I think the big idea is right. The question about how you implement it, it took some time to sort out the methodology of how you do these things at local authority level because you cannot just wholesale translate them across to central government departments because they are rather different, so we will spend some time between now and December sorting out methodology. In terms of pilots we have never done this sort of thing for a Department of Work and Pensions or a Treasury or a Cabinet Office, so that is why I think we might need to go to pilots, plus the point that Mr Liddell-Grainger made about resources. We are not suddenly going to be able to do all the departments at once. I would like to do this as quickly as possible.

  Q57  David Heyes: But there is a huge plethora of inspection bodies in existence already. You have hinted you might attach this responsibility to one of the existing ones but you do not seem certain which that might be. Is there a risk of yet another inspection body being created because of the very special nature of this? I am doubting what you say about the huge experience in local government and there being no transferability of that experience into a Civil Service context. Surely that cannot be true?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: What I am saying is the people who have done it at a local authority level have been the local authority and Audit Commission doing it together and I want to exploit the people who have got that experience, most certainly. I did not mean to imply that. What I am saying is that the functions of, say, the Ministry of Defence are rather different from the functions of—

  Q58  David Heyes: Will it cover the work of the agencies? Is that your intention?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: I want to start with central government departments. Then I think we can move on to agencies.

  Q59  David Heyes: That is where the service delivery is, through agencies, and that is being excluded from this regime.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: It will not be excluded. We will get to it, most certainly.


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