CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1647-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Public Administration Committee

 

 

SKILLS FOR GOVERNMENT

 

 

Thursday 12 October 2006

MS GILL RIDER and MS ANNE-MARIE LAWLOR

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 77

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Committee

on Thursday 12 October 2006

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

David Heyes

Kelvin Hopkins

Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger

Julie Morgan

Jenny Willott

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Ms Gill Rider, Director General, Leadership and People Strategy, and Ms Anne Marie-Lawlor, Director of Leadership Development, Corporate Development Group, Cabinet Office, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: I would like to welcome our witnesses this morning, Gill Rider, Director General, Leadership and People Strategy, and Anne Marie-Lawlor, Director of Leadership Development, Corporate Development Group in the Cabinet Office. We are doing an inquiry, as you know, into the whole attempt to up-skill government. You are the key people doing it and therefore we wanted to hear from you what you were all about. Thank you for your memorandum. I do not know if either of you would like to say something by way of introduction.

Ms Rider: I think it would be worth introducing the objectives that Gus gave me. I have only been here for five months - so very new, and still in my learning curve - but he gave me very clear objectives. Three objectives. Very straightforward. One is to work with the current leadership of the Civil Service to help improve the leadership and particularly to look at the development of future leaders. The second is to create a people strategy for the Civil Service and all the elements that involves. The third is to help improve the professionalism of HR, continuing the journey that HR is on in terms of developing skills, but to work to make sure, essentially, that we have the capability for the future. I thought that would be a helpful context in terms of what my job title means.

Q2 Chairman: Thank you for that. Would you like to add anything?

Ms Lawlor: I have nothing to add to that.

Q3 Chairman: I am interested in a number of things, but one is that you have come in just from the private sector.

Ms Rider: Yes,

Q4 Chairman: Without, as I understand it, any public sector experience.

Ms Rider: Not very much at all, but a little bit. I worked with the NHS back in the early eighties, but as a consultant working with the NHS.

Q5 Chairman: But you know about management and training and all this stuff. Tell us, in terms that we can understand, as someone coming in from the private sector like that, how does the public sector strike you?

Ms Rider: That is a very broad question. Twenty-seven years in the private sector and only five months in the public sector, so it is obviously very much first impressions. I have been very, very pleasantly surprised ... not surprised - that sounds derogatory - delighted, at the quality of the people I have met, particularly the leaders of the Civil Service. I think it is very hard when you are in the private sector to appreciate quite what the leadership challenge is here and you tend to think of things in comparable terms. But the leadership challenge is not comparable because, quite rightly, in terms of what our democracy requires, we have the leadership of the Civil Service, who have to both manage and lead their organisation, but they also have to serve the Government and the ministers. The pivot point between how you serve and how you organise, manage and lead an organisation means that there is a complexity in that relationship that the leaders of the Civil Service need to deal with of which there is no comparable in the private sector. The quality of the people that manage that relationship is extremely high. There have been quite a number of comments about leadership in the Civil Service, but I have been very impressed. The second thing that is really immediate and which you see is the pride of the people who work in the public sector. Whether you go to visit Job Centre Plus or Disability Living Allowance, when you go to visit the people doing the frontline work there is a huge sense of pride and engagement in their work. In the private sector we spend an enormous amount of time and money trying to get people to feel as engaged and as positive about the work they do. So I have been very impressed.

Q6 Chairman: As you say, there is a big difference is there not?

Ms Rider: Yes.

Q7 Chairman: There are a number of big differences, but one is that in the private sector the people who run companies are responsible for managing them. Whereas in the public sector, the people who run things, the politically elected ministers, are disbarred from running them. Does that not make it a very odd situation?

Ms Rider: It makes it a complex situation but it is fundamentally about how our democracy is structured. From everything I have seen and read in the last few months, I think it is probably much better than a number of the other systems that you could have. I think it is obviously very different from the private sector but that does not mean to say it is wrong. I think it is probably a very good model in terms of keeping the impartiality but driving the organisation through in terms of how our politics work.

Q8 Chairman: Should the skills that the Civil Service needs not be defined by the politicians?

Ms Rider: The skills that the Civil Service needs are absolutely defined by the environment and the context in which the Civil Service sits. Clearly, the Civil Service needs the skills to interact and work effectively with politicians, but it also needs very clearly the skills to take the policies, the ideas of the Government, and to translate those through into better public services. That is what we are all about. So there are very different sorts of sets of skills. I am going to ask Anne-Marie to help with that one.

Ms Lawlor: To add to that, the skills that the Civil Service needs are of course defined by politicians. If we take something like our Professional Skills for Government programme, which I hope we will have a chance to talk about in a little bit more detail, that was based on a number of discussions with various ministers about the skills they wanted to have. That very certainly informed determining the mix of skills we thought we need now in the Civil Service and going forward, which is a very important element of it. Equally, when it comes to particular posts, while appointment is made in an impartial way and ministers are not part of the final appointment process, in the early stages of defining a role, particularly a new role, ministers are engaged in that discussion in determining what skills they need and what personal qualities they need in someone with whom they will be working closely to make that job work very effectively.

Q9 Chairman: Just, as it were, charting the landscape, when I asked you how you found it when you came in, the reason we get slightly jaundiced about this is that those of us who have been observing this field these many years have seen initiatives come and go with enormous regularity, each of which is announced as an epic moment in the transforming of the skills of the Civil Service. You have provided a memorandum, in which you say, "Over the past few years, there has been a landmark shift in the Civil Service skills strategy." I bet I could show you documents which talked about such shifts previously. What is different about this shift?

Ms Rider: Firstly, in any organisation you find a history of initiatives that build up because people are always trying to change. The world is always changing, so you always find a history of initiatives. The question that certainly I asked, as I was looking to whether I would join or not, was fundamentally about that: Is this going to achieve change? Certainly, when it comes to a number of initiatives around the Civil Service, but particularly Professional Skills for Government, there is an extremely comprehensive, well-thought-through process of: what are the skills we require; how does it fit into the career structure of the individuals; what experiences do we need to make sure they get as well as what training? It is extremely comprehensive. The judgment you make about whether the change is happening or not is the change in the behaviours and the culture and the expectations of the individuals in it. Certainly, if you go to talk to civil servants about Professional Skills for Government they do understand that it means different requirements to them. People no longer talk about a career that is through policy setting; they talk about a career that has a variety of skills, that includes policy setting but they know they need some operational expertise as well in order to make sure the policies are implementable. They also know that they need to have the range of managerial skills that make you effective, whether that is financial skills, commercial skills, people-management skills. People now, when you talk to them, have internalised it, if you like. To me, that is the judge of it. Clearly it is a new initiative, so you cannot judge something that is so fundamental about change in the first year or so. This will take years to build into the culture. But my assessment is that it is a very effective programme. Anne-Marie has been much more heavily involved clearly in this.

Ms Lawlor: I would add one thing, which I hope offers a glimmer of hope, because I think a tradition of initiatives is one we are trying to shift away from. Professional Skills for Government was invented under the leadership of Andrew Turnbull, of course. One of the very first thing Gus O'Donnell said when he became Cabinet Secretary was, "I'm absolutely 100 per cent behind Professional Skills for Government. It is not going anywhere." That was of great significance because a number of people might have been waiting to see: Will this last or will it change? The signals from the top, from Gus and from all the permanent secretaries, have been very clear: that they want it to be here to stay, that it is here to stay. The point is to embed it and to continue with the internalisation that Gill just talked about, not to look for the next new thing on the horizon.

Q10 Chairman: Before I hand over to colleagues, I would like to ask you two questions, one about, as it were, the top of the service and one about the bottom of the service. There is the attempt to bring, through open competition, new people at the top of the service, and the figures on that are quite striking. Forty per cent of the top senior Civil Service posts are open to open competition. We have had a memorandum from Sir Robin Mountfield, a former ex permanent secretary, who is a shrewd observer of these things. He said to us - and he has said it to us before - that he thinks this is full of dangers, that where we should be bringing people in is into middle management, so that they then can be able to rise to the top along with other people inside the service if need be. Bringing them in at the top is, he thinks, a misguided and dangerous policy. Do you think he has a point?

Ms Rider: Could you help me, because I have not seen what he has written: Why does he think it is dangerous?

Q11 Chairman: Because he thinks that a service should primarily grow its own people. He thinks the big lesson of the private sector - which you can tell us about - is that the best companies do grow their own people and that some artificial export in at the top, when you have not brought people in earlier, is a mistake.

Ms Rider: I can certainly talk about that - and I clearly have to make sure I overcome my personal interest in this. My experience in the private sector very clearly says that organisations do indeed try to build their own talent. There is a very strong focus on making sure you are nurturing the talent and giving it the right experience, you are bringing people through, getting them ready for leadership positions. But the private sector also recognises that at times you will really need to go out and get new experience, for two very simple reasons: (i) you need to go out and get experience for specific skills where you have gaps, perhaps where the business is doing something new and different, and (ii) you go out when you need new blood - and that is it, just that you recognise you need new blood. The Civil Service is clearly trying to change: it is doing a lot of different things; the context in which it is operating is changing, and therefore the Civil Service is recognising that it needs some different skills from those it has had before, and so it is looking to make this blend, this balance, work between internal and external. I see part of my job as being to help the process of building the next generation of leaders in the Civil Service and to make sure that balance is right between the people we have developed that can compete for the roles at the top and do so successfully and the people that we need to be bringing in from outside. I do not know specifically what you are saying, but the organisations do need to build their own leadership talent. We are making an investment in people the whole time; we just need to make sure we get that balance right.

Q12 Chairman: I would urge you to look at his memorandum. It is full of good things. Do you think there is a balance beyond which you should not go, in terms of the balance between internally grown people and people who are brought in? It has been argued that if you go beyond a certain point, then you would fundamentally change the character, the incentives inside the system. Do you have a figure in mind?

Ms Rider: No, I do not have a figure in mind because it very much depends on the organisation, and it is clearly very important, when you bring people in from outside, that you are not only assessing their capability to do the job but you are assessing their behaviours and their values to make sure that they are going to sustain those things that you find are very important in the culture. It may be that some of his concern is about sustaining the values of the Civil Service. That is clearly a very important element of recruitment. There is obviously a balance. If you were changing everybody overnight and bringing in people who had no history, had no background, had no understanding of the objectives of the organisation, completely changing your top teams, that would be an issue. We certainly would not want to get to that. There is a balance to be kept.

Ms Lawlor: The 43 per cent of senior Civil Service posts going to competition at the moment is not instead of opening middle management posts up to open competition. It is simply that, in an organisation the scale of the Civil Service, we at the centre have a much stronger handle on what is going on in the senior Civil Service and of course the leadership of an organisation is crucial to shaping the culture of an organisation. If you look at individual departments, most, if not all, of those are recruiting actively from all sorts of labour markets at many different levels. For example, I am on loan to the Cabinet Office from the Department for Education and Skills, which has had a policy for some time of looking to recruit at least some middle management posts from the whole of the education sector, precisely in order to enrich the skill mix, to bring in experience from outside, bring in real-life, hands-on experience of dealing with the policies the department is building. So it is not an either/or in looking at how it is happening in practice.

Q13 Chairman: The criticism is often that when we have these discussions we tend to focus on the senior Civil Service all the time, which is just this small percentage of the Civil Service. Hundreds of thousands of people tend not to get discussed when we are talking about the balance between policy skills and operational management skills and so on, and yet the figures you have given us I found to be pretty alarming. You tell us that inside the public sector there are 132,000 people who are not qualified even to level 2 (basic skills in numeracy, literacy and IT), which is a little under 13 per cent of the workforce. Very large numbers of civil servants you are telling us do not have even basic literacy, numeracy and IT skills.

Ms Rider: I am going to ask Anne-Marie to comment on the basis of the statistics. It is always dangerous when you look at the big numbers because it is totally dependent on what you need people to do. The whole purpose of employment generally is to make sure you get a match between the individual and what they are capable of doing and what the job requires, so it may not be a problem in the way that you are articulating.

Ms Lawlor: There are three things I would say about that. One is that the data you quote is the data we have, although I hope we have also told you that we are not completely confident in that data, because the data from the labour force survey, which is what this is based on, for the central government sector is not completely reliable. The reason for that is that it is a door-step survey and people do not always answer correctly what sector they work for. The first thing is that we are doing work to make sure that data is correct, but we do think that we are not very different from the workforce at large in the number of people who do not level 2 basic skills. That is, as Gill says, partly because of the huge range of occupations we have in the Civil Service. I am Chief Executive of Government Skills as part of my job, which is the Sector Skills Council for Central Government, and one of the fascinating things about running that sector skills council is that, unlike any other sector skills council, we cover just about every occupation which exists in the list of occupations because of the range of different jobs that civil servants do. For particular people's jobs, this may not always be an issue. Equally, as part of the machine, it is part of government policy that people should have the basic skills which they need, so we are working very hard on that. Under the aegis of government skills, we have just started a very ambitious project on which we are working very closely with the trade unions, to use union learning representatives in departments to do very active work to find out who needs help with basic skills in ways that are not intimidating for individuals - because it can be intimidating to say to your boss, "Look, I've got a literacy problem," but it may not be so intimidating to talk to a colleague - and to put training in place to address that. That is starting very quickly.

Q14 Chairman: Tell me, what kind of Civil Service job recruits people within even basic skills in literacy and numeracy?

Ms Lawlor: There are people doing fairly basic level administrative jobs. It is not that they have no literacy and numeracy, we are talking level 2 literacy and numeracy. There are stonemasons. There are people working in forests. There are all sorts of occupations where, while we would desire everybody working in the Civil Service to have these skills, they are not day-to-day relevant in the job that they are doing.

Q15 Chairman: I am just astonished by the numbers.

Ms Lawlor: We have a lot of people working in forestry and we are one of the biggest employers of stonemasons in the country.

Chairman: There is no answer, as we say, to that! I am going to bring in some colleagues now. I need some help.

Q16 Mr Liddell-Grainger: It is very useful not to be able to write in a forest, I am sure. Could I ask you: who interviewed you for your job?

Ms Rider: I was interviewed in the normal way by a panel that was composed of a member of the Civil Service Commissioners, by Gus O'Donnell and two external people.

Q17 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Who were the two and what did they do? Were they civil servants.

Ms Rider: No, they were not.

Q18 Mr Liddell-Grainger: They were from the private sector.

Ms Rider: I do not know their detailed biographies, but, from what I checked out at the time, they had worked in a variety of private sector organisations and some public sector.

Q19 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Did you feel they had some understanding of what you were being asked to achieve?

Ms Rider: It was certainly a very tough and gruelling process, yes. I felt quite exhausted.

Q20 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is not the question. Do you think they understood what you were set out to achieve?

Ms Rider: I certainly did.

Q21 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You felt they were asking you to re-skill the Civil Service. Is that what they were asking you to do?

Ms Rider: I think they were asking me to ensure that we do absolutely the best possible job we can in making sure that the Civil Service has the best leadership, the people, the skills for those people and the HR policies and practices, the best it can have, for what we need to do in the future.

Q22 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Does it not worry you that they have had to bring somebody in like you? With no disrespect to you at all, Gill - I do not know your background particularly, other than I see you were with Accenture - they have virtually had to come to you to do all the things you have just told me, which is the role of the Civil Service. You are saying they are terribly good, and you are very surprised, and they are wonderful people and great - except they cannot read in forests. Is that an indictment that the service is in a complete shambles? You have said all the things the Civil Service should naturally be doing, yet they are bringing you in to do what they should be doing anyway.

Ms Rider: I do not think in the least it is in a shambles. It is recognising, and, being quite demanding of itself, is saying, "What is it we need to be doing for the future?" In looking at what it needs to be doing for the future, it has identified that there are some things I can help with. I certainly would not be in the space that you are in, in looking at my appointment in that way.

Q23 Mr Liddell-Grainger: There are six core principles. Let us just go through them: people management; financial management; programme and project management; analysis and use of evidence; strategic thinking; and communications and marketing. They are the core fundamentals of a Civil Service. You are here. They are not working. You have been brought in to sort out a mess.

Ms Rider: I disagree. I do not think they are not working. We are working to improve them. I have not been brought in to sort out a mess; I have been brought in to help everybody do what they want to do, which is to try to make sure we are the best we possibly can be for what we need to do today and in the future.

Q24 Mr Liddell-Grainger: May we look at a couple of examples. Nigel Crisp got fired because he was told the NHS was incompetent. We have a procurement programme which is a disaster. We have IT projects coming out of our ears that have been a shambles. We have the CSA - where do you start with the CSA? We have the Inland Revenue that cannot even fill in its own forms, never mind anybody else's - grade 2s, presumably. We have the MoD which cannot even get enough kit for the troops, who are getting killed. We have got tax credits - again, where do you start? We have single farm payments - a catastrophe. We are seeing management failures all the way through the Civil Service, at the very highest levels, and a lot of people have sat where you have sat to explain why they have made a mess of it. Pensions. We have had so many people. But you are saying it is all right.

Ms Rider: I think you have just listed a whole series of problems, clearly, and no one would deny that there are some problems, but you need to put that in the context of: This is a hugely complex thing we are trying to do. When you have big projects you always have risks. I believe I am right in saying that the failure rate of Civil Service projects is no greater than that in the private sector.

Q25 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is fine, is it? I am so sorry.

Ms Rider: No, of course it is not.

Q26 Mr Liddell-Grainger: If I had known that, then NHS IT ... I am sorry. Is that not stupid of this Committee: here we are, saying to Parliament it is incompetence ----

Ms Rider: I did not say it was fine. I did not say it was fine.

Q27 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You are covering up for it. Come on, you are meant to be there sorting it out.

Ms Rider: If we want to talk constructively about things we are trying to do to help make improvements ----

Q28 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Which is what I am coming on to. Let us set the scene, because you seem to have rose-tinted glasses. You are saying you are pleasantly surprised and you are happy and so on, yet the failures - and they have always been thus, I suspect - seem to be getting more pronounced. Maybe that is because the media are digging more. Maybe that is because the Civil Service are leaking more. I do not know. I think there is a bit of both. It does boil down to the fact that the projects are getting more and more expensive and they are failures. The money involved is bigger. Are you saying that they are recruiting low quality people, that they are recruiting the wrong people, or should business people be brought in at a higher level to sort these out because of management skills which the Civil Service probably do not have at certain levels?

Ms Rider: I am not inferring from the list of things any of those. I certainly see a desire to make sure that we have the right skills in the right place to sort these out; an absolute strengthening of the ability to learn lessons from one situation to another; a very, very rigorous process of putting in to make sure we have the right professional skills, be it the IT skills, the commercial skills, procurement skills - the whole set of skills. We are seeing a very rigorous process. I am not rose-tinted. I am here because there are some challenges and I want to help with those challenges, but I am recognising that there are processes and programmes and people training and recruitment in place.

Q29 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Okay, so they do not make the grade, are you for sacking civil servants?

Ms Rider: Performance management. I can reflect on my experience in the private sector. Twenty-seven years.

Q30 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You would sack somebody in the private sector if they did not make the grade, would you not?

Ms Rider: I think, from what I have seen, the process would be absolutely the same. With performance management, when you have identified somebody who needs improvement, performance management should happen day by day - indeed, it is happening day by day: lots and lots of actions across the whole Civil Service. When you have a particular issue that needs to be improved, then you have to do exactly in the private sector what you do here.

Q31 Mr Liddell-Grainger: So you would fire people if they do not make the grade.

Ms Rider: Just let me finish. When you have people who are not performing, you work on what they need to improve. You make sure they understand what they need to improve, you create objectives. Generally speaking, that sorts things out. If it does not, you go on and you put in a performance improvement plan with that individual to make sure they are improving. Once you have done that, you really track what is happening. Performance management and dealing with that happens one to one - I have done it myself a lot of times - between you and the individual. Generally speaking, individuals in the private sector or here work out that either they need to change and they make the grade or they choose to move. When they choose to move, they do that in a way that creates an environment where the individual leaves with respect. It generally means they go to a job which they will do better because they have learned some lessons and it does not cost you any money. That was the approach we took in the private sector. That is the approach we take here.

Q32 Mr Liddell-Grainger: So, yes, you would fire people.

Ms Rider: Firing is a very clear, black and white term for a process of performance management and improvement that goes on day in and day out.

Q33 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You have been brought to try and sort out things that have been happening in the Civil Service.

Ms Rider: Yes.

Q34 Mr Liddell-Grainger: If people do not make the grade, you are just going to shift them.

Ms Rider: No.

Q35 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You are just going to hide them somewhere else. In Forestry.

Ms Rider: Some interesting images are conjured up by that.

Q36 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is why I am trying to get to the bottom of this. You appear to have solved a problem.

Ms Rider: If the problem needs to be solved in that way, then we will deal with it in an appropriate way for the individual and for us.

Q37 Mr Liddell-Grainger: One of the things that intrigues me - and we are hopefully going down to Sunningdale to look at the way things are run down there, which should be good and will be very interesting - and we have seen a lot of cabinet secretaries: in the time I have been in Parliament we have seen four, and Gus O'Donnell is certainly a different breed, there is no doubt about at - and you say there are certain levels to which you think perhaps the private sector could not get involved. If we are determined to change ethos - there are six core principles, that is what they want - there is no reason why you could not get somebody at the very highest levels, even to shadow, to bring the ethos of the private sector to the very highest echelons of the public sector, is there?

Ms Rider: Clearly, I am here because I believe I can make ----

Q38 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am talking about at the Gus O'Donnell level. Do you think that would be impossible?

Ms Rider: I think that would be very, very hard.

Q39 Chairman: What about at the permanent secretary level?

Ms Rider: There are examples. Permanent secretaries have been brought in from outside.

Q40 Chairman: Yes, but their background is that they have started, probably gone out, and come back. That is slightly different. Could somebody like you, who has very limited experience in the private sector - which I think is what you said - be brought in at a much .... I was going to say much higher level, but you know what I mean, at permanent secretary level. I do apologise. Do you think that could happen?

Ms Rider: I do not see any reason why it should not happen, except for the fact that the learning curve is enormous. And do not underestimate the complexity that I was talking about right at the beginning, of the permanent secretary's relationship between not only an organisation and working with Parliament. That pivot point is very complex and there is no analogy in the private sector. We talk about boards of directors, investors, shareholders. That is all a very, very different relationship. I think that would be the one thing I would be very cautious of in looking at making direct comparisons. If you look at the chief executive of an agency, for example, which is one step removed from that permanent secretary relationship, then we have brought in a number of people from the private sector to head those agencies.

Q41 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You are saying that there are comparables. There certainly are. No management would allow the CSA, tax credits, single farm payments, pensions - all the disasters we have had - to happen. They would have stepped in long before to stop it, because their role in the private sector is to manage. Do you think a lot of these disasters would have been stopped if they had had external thinking private sector managers?

Ms Rider: I think in a number of the situations there have been people involved who have come in from the private sector.

Q42 Mr Liddell-Grainger: They have had to because of this.

Ms Rider: Personally, I find it very frustrating that there is this belief that the private sector always gets it right and the public sector does not. I do not think that is true. For me that is very frustrating, because I look at the balance of things that I have seen happen in the private sector and the things that I am seeing happen here and I do not see such a difference. I think it is very frustrating for me to hear those things the whole time because it creates a lack of confidence in the Civil Service and actually the civil servants I have met are good and equally competent to a number of the people I have seen over the years in the private sector.

Q43 Mr Liddell-Grainger: The difference is that not millions of people's lives are going to be affected by an incompetent CSA, by incompetence in tax credits, by incompetence in tax credits, by incompetence in single farm payments and by incompetence in pensions. As MPs we deal with this all the time, because people come to see us. We know. People have sat in those seats, the Ombudsman and many others - public administration covers all this - who have said, "Yes it is a cock up, because nobody came forward soon enough to say, 'What's going to happen?'" Even the Cabinet Office. £120 million worth of computer equipment! "What are you doing with all that? You only employ 1600 people." That is pretty incompetent. What is going on? If this was private, they would have said long before. It would have been spotted long before this went wrong that there was a problem and it would have been solved, not to have the fiasco of the IT in the NHS, et cetera. It never would have got that far. You would have been fired, if it had.

Ms Rider: I am delighted from my old world that you have such confidence in the private sector. I think that the important debate here is about how we make sure we improve the skills that exist in government. That is what we are trying to do. I think it is also important that we just keep reflecting back, as you said, that what we are really trying to do is to improve the public services that we give. Everything that we are trying to do with skills is about doing that.

Ms Lawlor: I would like to pick up on one aspect. You talked about a number of IT-related things - and it is very, very important to take account here of the work that Ian Watmore has been doing and John Suffolk is now doing around the IT profession - but we now have a much more highly professionalised cadre of IT professionals. We have our Chief Information Officers Council, we have much, much more rigorous training and selection, and a number of people have come from all sorts of different parts of the economy to work in that profession, precisely to address the things that have not worked so well in the past. Looking forward, I think we are putting in place the things to enable us better to deliver these large-scale IT-based projects in the future.

Q44 Mr Liddell-Grainger: So the Cabinet Office being sued last year for £24 million by a company that then got it wrong was one of those things.

Ms Lawlor: Of course it was not one of those things. The point is that we are taking serious steps with the very strong commitment of Gus O'Donnell and the permanent secretary community to put right and address those issues that we need to put right.

Q45 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Does this not boil down to the ethos of the Civil Service and what it wants to achieve and what it can achieve. The gap is absolutely enormous. For you to change that around is going to take a very, very long time indeed. My suggestion is that you are going to need more external help, in the likes of Gill and others, to be able to achieve that in any sensible timeframe.

Ms Lawlor: To answer as a career civil servant, the ethos of the Civil Service is enormously committed to delivering first-rate public services and no one minds more than dedicated civil servants when things do not go right. Really, nobody minds more. So the ethos is absolutely committed to the right end and you see that at all sorts of different levels in all the different organisations I have worked in. Where we need to make strides and where we are putting all efforts is in making sure that alongside that commitment and that passion and that ethos are the skills that people need, including injections from other parts of the economy - absolutely including that.

Mr Liddell-Grainger: Thank you.

Q46 Julie Morgan: Before I became a Member of Parliament I worked in the voluntary sector. I know a number of individuals who have gone from the voluntary sector into the Civil Service and have found a huge culture shock and have found it quite difficult to forge their way. One of the things that struck them most strongly is the expectation that they can move between different departments with ease and the emphasis that you have put on and defend on skills rather than the knowledge base. To me, it is extraordinary that you could come in with the background of huge expertise in something like childcare and then be expected to move to another department, carrying the skills but not the knowledge. In your memorandum you defend this, but I find this extraordinary and I wonder if you could expand on that.

Ms Rider: I will leave Anne-Marie to deal with the detail on that, but I certainly have always believed what you are describing, effectively. People have functional skills (ie, sector experience) but they also have very precise professional skills (whether they are an expert in analysing information or they are an expert in project management or they are an expert in IT or HR, or whatever their general set of skills is) - it is a sort of 'T' model, of a broad set of skills you have and then some deep specialisation - and, I think, for people to be their best, they need to develop skills in both those areas, both special/general skills and functional skills. People can move and can be very motivated and stretched by going into a different environment and seeing things from a different perspective. When people move, I think it is hugely important that there is some set of skills that they have that they carry with them, and it may not be the sector skills that they have - the sector, the information, the functional area - but they will have some other set of skills that they carry with them. Clearly, if you were packing up your bag and going to do something completely revolutionary and totally different from what you have done before, that puts you into a huge learning curve, but human beings are pretty good at going through learning curves and doing different things. I would not suggest that you move from one thing to another thing completely, because we should all build on our strengths, but if you understand what your strengths are and what sort of skills you have then making moves is very good.

Ms Lawlor: Taking the Professional Skills for Government model, which is about both breadth and depth of experience, that is based very much on the fact that at particular points in your career different things are more important. Certainly in the early stages, up to the middle management stages of people's careers, that depth of knowledge of the subject specialisation (perhaps childcare) is very, very important, together with growing skills, including transferable skills. If you work in the field of childcare, you are acquiring skills about partnership working, about working with other people, about complex relationships, as well as knowing about the field of childcare. Professional Skills for Government also says that we should no longer enable people to move up a narrow pipeline, only ever knowing about one area, that if you want to progress through an organisation you absolutely do need to broaden your experience and get experience of different types of role, so you cannot just do policy but you must also get some operational corporate service experience. And, ideally, you will work in different environments altogether along the way as well, perhaps including the private sector, perhaps including the voluntary sector. I think that must be right for the people we want at the most senior levels of our organisation, that they have that breadth of experience, the ability to see the whole picture and to have acquired the knowledge they have got from that. The other point I would make is that an important part of the career offer for many people who join the Civil Service at different points in their career is the richness of opportunity that we offer. As Gill says, it is not starting over here and hurtling off to do something completely different - I am not going to go and run something in the military of defence - but to take the skills and apply them in a different circumstance is a fantastically motivating and refreshing experience.

Ms Rider: If I could take my own career as a little example: I started out doing work in the financial services sector; I worked with health, the NHS, for a long time; utility companies; energy companies - so moving around the sector but all the time building on the set of skills I had and taking those from different sectors. And you do learn, because when you go in to see something different it is sort of like you can see the wood from the trees: you can really be clear about the things that are good and the things that need to change. It does not suit everybody - and perhaps that is part of the examples you have as well.

Q47 Julie Morgan: It seems extraordinary to me that you lose that depth of knowledge by moving between departments. When this does happen, how much preparation is there for this? Is this something that the individual would request or is it part of a pattern that happens naturally?

Ms Rider: To speak, again, from my own process of coming in, induction processes are in place. There is training about specifics that you need, there is training about the environment, there is training about how Government works. The National School for Government, when you do go down to Sunningdale you will see, provides a lot of different courses like this.

Ms Lawlor: To people already in the system, if you like, there are processes. There is a performance appraisal process that we have touched on, so you would expect each line manager and each individual to discuss twice a year, at least, and probably at least four times a year, how the individual is doing in their job first and foremost. Because that must be the most important thing, what their development needs are, associated with that job, and what their personal aspirations are based on the two former things. We would expect planned processes where people move on after they have done an appropriate length of time in the job to achieve the things they were recruited to do, and then, as Gill says, for there to be an induction when they move. When jobs are advertised within the Civil Service, they are advertised on a competence basis, so you then apply for the job on the basis of the competence you bring from what you have already done, both in your career and indeed in the rest of your life. That too prepares you for the new role.

Q48 Julie Morgan: Do you have many civil servants expressing dissatisfaction with this way of working?

Ms Lawlor: No. I recognise the situation you describe, where we recruit people because they have an expertise and the expertise is what they want to continue to work with. We are getting better at working with that model because we will recruit people. I referred to my experience in the Department for Education, which of course has people who know about childcare. In that situation, we will recruit people in to do particular jobs in a field of expertise whose career is purely in childcare, so they will not see themselves as career civil servants, they will come and do a post for a while and then move on to another part in their career. We need to be flexible in recognising that not everybody wants to be a career civil servant, and, indeed, it is good that not everybody wants to be a career civil servant.

Q49 Chairman: I am back to where I started when asking you who you think you are working for and are you not working for ministers. We have had a succession of former ministers in front of us who have been on the whole very complimentary about the service they have had from the Civil Service, but the one thing they all have said is that they were frustrated by this career progression model, which meant that they were losing people all the time, and you were not building up a critical mass of skills upon which you could depend. It may make sense in terms of individual career development but it does not make sense, as ministers see it, in terms of what they need. David Blunkett said - and it was echoed by Michael Howard, Tom King, Chris Smith - "In a logical structure a team that has done well would not be disbanded but given new responsibility .... People would be promoted in post to do that rather than what is clearly musical chairs in which someone is moved every 18 months or two years to get promoted. That is a crazy system."

Ms Rider: I will not comment directly on the quote, but I think very specifically we are indeed looking at how frequently people move. Certainly I personally have a view that you do need to make sure people do not chop and change too soon, because it is very clear that when somebody takes on a job they go through a learning curve, then become very productive and then really deliver and get challenged, and we need to make sure that people stay in jobs long enough to get through that. I do think the private sector operates very much in the same way of making sure that people really get the opportunity to be continually stretched. You do not want teams to be sat in place and to last forever, because in that comes staleness. You do want people to be moved and to be stretched. There needs to be a certain amount of dynamism in the system always to make sure you are getting fresh ideas and new ways of working diversity into your teams, because out of that comes productivity. In terms of how we put teams together, we absolutely need to make sure we have the right skills on the teams. I have had it myself, working with many different people: often the person who is working with the team becomes reliant not on the skills of the team but on the personalities that are in the team and actually the really important thing here is to make sure we have the right skills in the teams.

Ms Lawlor: I am sure you are aware that two or three years ago now, precisely to address the issues that the ministers you have referred to were talking about, we introduced for the senior Civil Service an expectation that there was a four-year norm: that people should normally stay in a post for four years. That was introduced for two reasons. One was that there were some people staying in post for a very, very long time, and it made sense, both to ministers and in terms of refreshing teams, to move them on, but also to make sure that people stayed long enough to see a thing through, to be accountable for what was happening in it. We are still working on embedding that, but it is very much a part of, as Gill says, what we are working to do.

Q50 Kelvin Hopkins: I am interested in what you have been saying so far, and very pleased, if I may say so, having had a wide range of experience myself in the private sector and quasi-public sector. Bad managers you find everywhere and you find good managers everywhere, and you find skills everywhere and lack of skills everywhere. But is it not a problem that the politician's perception, rather like Ian's, is that the private sector is good and knows everything, that it is the Holy Grail to which we should all move, and the public sector is inherently bad and weak and flawed. We have to get rid of that perception.

Ms Rider: I think so, very much. I totally agree with you.

Q51 Kelvin Hopkins: Moving on from that, the Government has contracted out lots of services, as far as they can. They have introduced consultants to control things at every level, special advisors keeping the senior Civil Service under control. Again, this strikes me as a lack of trust in the Civil Service by the most senior politicians. Has this had a damaging effect on morale in the Civil Service?

Ms Rider: You are asking specifically about the roles of special advisors or the different models for delivery.

Q52 Kelvin Hopkins: All of those things. Contracting out, and the fact that two billion pounds was spent on consultants last year, I understand, by the Government. It is almost as if there is a kind of commissar at every level checking that civil servants are doing exactly what the leadership wants. This must have some effect. Indeed, does it deter highly skilled people from applying for jobs because they do not want to live in that kind of world?

Ms Rider: I do not think that it is a deterrent to recruitment, and certainly when you look at both the percentages of people that leave the Civil Service and our ability to attract talent into the Civil Service, the data shows that we do not have a problem either in retention or recruitment at all, and so I do not think there is anything causing a problem there. I think what has happened and is happening is an attempt to get the best models of delivery and the best models of expertise into the way that things are delivered, and so you have a range of different ways of doing things, whether it is contracting out or setting up agencies, a range of different operational models all geared up to make sure we have the right objectives in place for organisations and the best possible ways of performing. Clearly there are things we can constantly learn, but I do not think it is becoming a recruitment or retention challenge.

Q53 Kelvin Hopkins: Even with training and intellect, some people do not make good managers?

Ms Rider: Absolutely.

Q54 Kelvin Hopkins: Yet, with a hierarchical system, one is promoted into a managerial role, and some people are not particularly good at managing people. Is that a problem particularly in the Civil Service?

Ms Rider: I have not seen anything to say it is any greater a problem in the Civil Service than it is in the private sector, because you have exactly that issue, and certainly in my old life that was an issue that we needed to deal with day in and day out, making sure that there were always going to be people who had really excellent special skills that you really wanted to encourage and have them succeed, but there were those very same people that you would not put in the place of leading a large organisation.

Q55 Kelvin Hopkins: At a lower level, or perhaps at every level, we have a problem of basic skills - literacy and numeracy - The Moser Report, some years ago, identified the fact that more than 50 per cent of the population do not understand what 50 per cent means. This must affect the Civil Service, numeracy in particular. Is that a problem: finding people simply who are numerate, who are literate, who know a little about the world and can handle the world in a sense?

Ms Rider: I will get Anne-Marie to answer this one, but fundamentally this is a problem for every country around the globe. In my old life I spent a lot of time travelling in and out of different countries, and it is a problem that goes far broader than the Civil Service in terms of how our education systems work and how we bring people through it. Anne-Marie is able to do with this one; it is her expertise.

Ms Lawlor: Just to add a little to that, I referred earlier to the work we are doing through government skills on adult basic skills. One of the very exciting things about setting up government skills, like the other 24 sector skills councils that have been set up around the country, is that they give our group of employers, which is the Civil Service, non-departmental public bodies and the Armed Forces, though not in a military capacity, the opportunity to work together to identify what skills they need now and in the future and, very importantly, to influence the supply side, that is schools, colleges, universities. One of the things we are starting work on now, as the other sector skills councils are, is precise regional national locations around the UK talking to the providers of education about exactly what sort of skills we need of people we want to recruit straight from education so that we do get the best possible fit between what is coming out and the people we are able to recruit.

Q56 Kelvin Hopkins: Finally, and I might betray some of my prejudices in this, in the past the administrative class of the Civil Service recruited the highest intellects from the best universities It was very competitive to get in, and the cleverest people often went into the Civil Service and became the leaders of our strong Civil Service, the Sir Humphries of this world. Now we have got a much more diffused way of recruiting and that Civil Service world seems to be moving away. Are we losing something in that? Are we still recruiting those extremely able people? That kind of discipline, the sense of pride and privilege almost at being in the Civil Service. Is that going and, if so, is it going to cause problems?

Ms Rider: One of the very first things I looked at was that, because I remember when I was leaving university, a long time ago, exactly that perception of what joining the Civil Service was about, and certainly one of the things that did give me a great deal of pride in the place that I have joined is the Fast Stream, which is exactly what you describe, a very rigorous process of recruiting the brightest and the best from the UK today then taking those people and helping them develop their career through the Civil Service. You look at how Fast Stream recruitment works. It is an incredibly thorough, very demanding process. It is very, very popular. I think the figures are something like 14,000 applicants of which 500 places are granted each year. So, it is still very much where the brightest and the best out of universities look and want to come, and it is just generally a very high-class act in terms of getting the talent into the Civil Service. Certainly in the summer I had a wonderful evening going to visit one of the things that is run through Fast Stream, which is a summer placement programme for ethnic minorities, and the talent that was in that room, private sector companies would actually almost kill to get hold of them. It was a really tremendous, uplifting event to talk to these young people starting out on their careers. Anne-Marie, this is one of your areas.

Ms Lawlor: I absolutely agree with everything that Gill has said. We said in the memorandum that if you wanted to come and see the Fast Stream in operation you would be very welcome to do so, and I would urge you to do so. I am a product of the Fast Stream improvement process myself, so it is now my project, and I regard it very passionately. I am someone that came along to the Fast Stream not quite sure what to make of it and completely fell in love with the notion of working with government through what I learned through the recruitment process. The ways in which it has changed since then, or since the examples that you are talking about, are absolutely not in terms of quality. If anything, we have a better selection process. We are more efficient. We brought it in from the private sector about four years go and have knocked two million pounds a year off the operating costs, so that is something we are very proud of, without reducing the quality, and, of course, the diversity is improving without making an impact on the quality. In fact, on the contrary, we think it is benefiting the quality. We are absolutely confident that it is a first-rate graduate recruitment programme, always in the top ten, usually the top five, of The Times Top 100.

Q57 Kelvin Hopkins: In other spheres it is now clear that women are doing much better than they did in the past, in fact much better than men. There are now more women at university than there are men.

Ms Rider: Yes.

Q58 Kelvin Hopkins: Is this reflected through the Civil Service, talking about diversity? Are you recruiting more women?

Ms Rider: Yes, the Civil Service is 50 per cent women, so it is absolutely representative of the population, and certainly, coming from the world I have come from, diversity is very much better here than the private sector at all levels. Clearly, it is something that we care about passionately and we do want to improve, but I think there is a very good track record. The diversity ten-point action plan that the Civil Service has launched is very thorough and very results orientated in terms of making sure we make things happen. Again, in terms of invitations and things to do, there is a series of diversity awards and I think decision time is very close.

Ms Lawlor: Yes, the award ceremony is on 26 October.

Ms Rider: So, at the moment, actually just looking at some of the stories of what people have achieved in term of diversity in the Civil Service is very good. I think it is an excellent story to tell, and while, as I say, everyone wants to improve, and we have some very demanding target on diversity, there are a lot of lessons in terms of what the Civil Service has done that we really need to find the ways to take out to the private sector to help improve diversity in the private sector.

Q59 David Heyes: I think we have focused quite a lot on the top level of the Civil Service in the discussion today. We have perhaps led you that way, but I also feel it reflects a top-down approach maybe to your work. For us the Civil Service front-line delivery really is at the bottom up. That is where the public form their perception about the quality of the service. I want to explore this. The difference between your view of the Civil Service in your early days in it where you have detected the pride of the people in the public sector, engagement with the work, more so, you said, than in the private sector, I wonder how this sits with the pressure, very often an ideological pressure, to privatise services at the front-line level, at the bottom level, of the Civil Service. We have got fairly crude managerial approaches like efficiency savings. There will be a massive percentage of efficiency savings without real prior thought being given to the consequences of how that can be achieved and services to be delivered through the private sector. How does all this sit with the top-down approach to a modern, efficient Civil Service where the staff feel motivated and part of your view?

Ms Rider: I think, as we said in an earlier question about looking at the best delivery models, to make sure that you achieve the best public services you can, and that is one side the equation. The other side of the equation is absolutely making sure that we continue to build the people at the front-line, the right services and skills, and one of the things that a number of the departments that I have spent time with are very much putting at the heart of their business strategy is making sure that, if you like, they have turned the world upside down, they are very focused on their customers. So, however our citizens interact with them, they are thinking very much about how they bring all the services together to make sure we serve the public in the best possible way. I think, although our conversation has naturally gone a bit top-down, many of the departments really do think from the front-line.

Q60 David Heyes: I am sorry to interrupt you. How do you do that when the front-line service has been privatised, run as a private enterprise and the day-to-day decisions about the skills required, the training of the people, their developments, is no longer in your hands? That is part of a contractual arrangement and you rely on the contractor to deal with those things?

Ms Rider: I cannot comment. It is a very hard thing to comment on generally because you need to get to specifics very quickly, but I think in any contract that we make with a private sector supplier, we need to be very clear of the things we expect, and so that those things that we expect are not just tied up in your moving from public sector to private sector, it is very much about how do you continue to get the right outcomes, how do you make sure that the right terms and conditions are in place for your employees, how do you make sure that the way that the customer interfaces is the right one? That is all tied into how you structure that particular deal, and so I do not really see the concern, I suppose.

Q61 David Heyes: The reality, in my constituency, would be in the Department for Work and Pensions, where that work has been very much front-line service with, very often, quite needy people in difficult circumstances. It is a service which has been privatised for several years now and all the feedback I get from my constituents is that the quality of that service is far less than it used to be, that it is under-staffed, the people are under-trained, they do not present as having the skills required to do the job, there are changes of contractor from time to time. It seems to be a de-motivated, disillusioned workforce that is out there. All those same messages come back from the staff themselves through their trade union contacts. That reality is a world away from the picture you paint of, "Yes, we can do it through private contractors and we will specify the contract to avoid all those essential risks"?

Ms Rider: I clearly do not know the specifics of that, and it is probably something you need to talk to the department about.

Q62 David Heyes: I give it to you anecdotally as a piece of evidence. There are many more examples I can quote to you?

Ms Rider: All I can talk about is that I am certain that the intention would be to make sure that what we are doing is achieving better public services. I am very clear about that.

Ms Lawlor: Again, I do not know the example, obviously, but one of the things we are working to do in Professional Skills for Government is to work with the closely connected parts of a similar sector, for example, parts of local government or, indeed, privatised parts of the public sector, to extend that skills framework to other people doing similar sorts of roles. This is at a very early stage, but the intention is certainly there to do that.

Q63 David Heyes: The Chartered Institute of Personal Development have given us their views on these issues. They have done some research based on national surveys that central government employees have less positive attitudes towards their work than people employed in the private sector, that they assess the trust in senior management at being less than half of that in the private sector and conclude that overall Civil Service could be better managed. That is the view of the top professionals in this game. In DWP, ironically, the one I just mentioned, "the top management not visible", "staff feeling that they are not listened to", "a lack of engagement in ownership by middle managers", "people management process underdeveloped and undervalued", and so on, a long catalogue of very severely critical comments. Again, I put that to you. That is a very different world to the one that you believe you preside over.

Ms Rider: I would not be idealistic about the world I preside over, and I would not be here if I did not think we need to make improvements. I do. I do not know the details of that particular survey, and I am always very cautious when I hear statistics because it is very dependent on how rigorous the survey is and how the question is asked, but I do know from our own staff survey results that there are clearly things that we need to do to improve.

Q64 David Heyes: That is from a professional organisation, and you say you need more of them to make a success of your work, HR Professionals?

Ms Rider: Yes. I do not know how much they sampled and I do not know how that would compare to our own surveys, but there are clearly things, when you look at our staff surveys, which we need to improve on. There are things about how much we work to develop our people, how much feedback we give our people. These things come out very clearly. They are different, but not entirely different, from what I have seen in the private sector. You always get people looking up at their leaders and saying they could do more for them. The question is how big is that gap and what do we need to do to fill it, and so one of the things I am very clear I will work on is actually how we do make sure that each line-manager knows what is expected of them from all of us in terms of their people management skills. That is not to say that there are not a lot of very good things happening today; it is just that in any organisation, anywhere I have been in the world, there is always more you can do. It is one of those issues that you always need to keep the burner on to make sure you get better at it.

Jenny Willott: I have had every single question I was going to ask answered already.

Q65 Chairman: This is a very unusual kind of Member of Parliament!

Ms Rider: Did we give you the right answers? Did you get enough answered?

Jenny Willott: I think so. I think pretty much everything I was going to raise has been covered in one way or another.

Q66 Kelvin Hopkins: I have one thing following on from what David has said. The areas where this demoralisation has taken place is where there has been most public focus. But a lot of this derives from policy changes, the decision to go for heavy mean-testing in all sort of spheres - the CSA, all the different sorts of credits - and it is in those areas that there has been most pressure. Is it not the case that civil servants have sometimes been asked to do the impossible with the resources given to them and that in fact it is government policies that have caused these problems?

Ms Rider: I am so early into this it is very hard for me to give you anything other than first impressions. What I have been involved in and have heard is a lot of civil servants doing very thoughtful processes, discussing the policies, discussing how you really implement them in an effective way, how you get the right balance between spending money and getting the best public services. I think that is going to be a constant dilemma, and I have seen a lot of discussions where people are very, very conscious of how to get the best out of it. It is a very hard environment if you are an employee and you get the sort of media attention that some of our employees have, and I think that that puts an extra pressure on things in terms of how you feel about your work.

Ms Lawlor: Could I add one thing to that? I cannot resist coming back to Professional Skills for Government because I feel so pleased that it is the right direction for us to be going in, but when we talk about having parity of esteem between the different career groupings - operational delivery, policy delivery and corporate services delivery - when we talk about people having to get experience outside their core area, that is precisely because we must not have people in the room making policy changes who do not know what it feels like to implement the policy change, because that is where all the complexity lies. A tiny change in a regulation can make enormous changes in a local job centre. I know because I have worked there. So, that is exactly what Professional Skills for Government is working really hard to tackle.

Kelvin Hopkins: What you are really saying is that you want professional skills for the politicians as well, so that they do not ask for the impossible.

Q67 Chairman: What you are saying, let us be clear about this, because this is at the heart of the Professional Skills for Government Programme and the whole analysis of what is wrong is that nobody in future is going to get to senior positions in the Civil Service without getting a much broader range of experience along the way than they had in the past, and the old Mandarin model of someone who has just come through the policy route with no hands-on operational experience, you are telling us that in future no-one is going to get to a top position in the Civil Service without, in some respects, having run something?

Ms Rider: You have got to be careful about timeframe on this, because it could be interpreted as tomorrow. This will take time.

Q68 Chairman: This is the point, is it not?

Ms Rider: This is absolutely where we want to go to, that people will really have experience of operational issues and delivery.

Q69 Chairman: You have set this target that 75 per cent of the senior Civil Service should demonstrate all six of these core skills that Ian was asking you about earlier on by September 2007. You say that by June of this year they have already done so in relation to three of the core skills, but then you are not certain that this is the right approach because you think this may just be box-ticking. That raises a variety of questions. First of all, how do you measure it? How do you know that 75 per cent of the senior Civil Service will have these core skills?

Ms Lawlor: I can tell you how we measured it to get the data we have got so far, and that was by a process I talked about earlier, the performance appraisal cycle - that was about at the mid-year point, so roughly this time last year actually - requiring line-managers to have a discussion with people working for them against the core skills, and there are detailed definitions behind each of those core skills, so it is not simply a headline, and reach a mutual agreement about whether the person had those skills or had not. That gives us some information. I would be the first to say that is not perfect information, and that is why we are pausing, not pausing at implementation, but we are having discussions with HR Professionals in departments at the moment and with managers in departments about other ways of getting at this information and ways in which we can have absolute confidence. Clearly, talking to senior managers of departments about the people working for them and talking to ministers about the people working beneath them is a large part of the picture.

Q70 Chairman: You are not testing them, are you? You are having discussions.

Ms Rider: It depends on the types of skills you are talking about. Certainly, if you look at what is happening in the financial area, there are some very rigorous processes going in to make sure that we have people who are professionally qualified, so using qualifications that are well established, making sure that we really assess them. It depends on the particular sector or the particular type of skills about how you are going to measure it.

Q71 Chairman: Let me also raise one question. This comes from Sir Robin Mountfield's memorandum that I mentioned at the beginning?

Ms Rider: Yes, I am going to get a copy and read it.

Q72 Chairman: You need to get a copy urgently?

Ms Rider: I am.

Q73 Chairman: He raises some interesting questions about the value of performance-related pay. One of the issues here is that, in some respects, the Civil Service seems to have been trying to ape private sector practices, including performance-related pay. Let me read what it says. He says, "Perhaps as a result of an inappropriate read across from private sector practice, it is wholly writ that performance pay forms an essential part of improving performance, yet I do not believe systematic evidence exists for this in the Civil Service." Does it?

Ms Rider: It has certainly been one of those areas that I have been looking at and trying to understand very carefully to make sure that I do not just automatically bring my perceptions of all this from the private sector but I understand what works around here. I do believe that performance pay is a very valuable tool in any leader's armour, because it gives you the opportunity to have very clear conversations with those that report to you about their objectives, to make sure that they have some skin in the game - that awful American phrase - in terms of actually achieving those objectives, and what the private sector does is the percentage of your compensation, your salary, that is based on those objectives is much, much higher than we have in the public sector. I am not quite sure from the words you read out which viewpoint he is coming from, whether he is saying there should be more of it or less of it, but I do think it is an important component of how we should be managing.

Q74 Chairman: He says it is inappropriate, because he says that much of what the Civil Service does is essentially collegiate, it is team work.

Ms Rider: Yes.

Q75 Chairman: It is not meeting individual quantitative targets which somebody in the private sector might be asked to do, putting up the sales figure, that kind of thing. It is a completely different model, and you need actually to develop the good working of team structures inside the Civil Service, which individualised performance pay does not do; in fact it tells against it.

Ms Rider: I would totally agree that teaming and collaboration is a really vital skill-set around here, but in the private sector we have exactly that challenge as well. You want individuals to perform, but you absolutely want them to perform to the good of the organisational unit they are in, and you simply set up objectives that are around objectives of what the team needs to achieve and objectives of what the individual needs to achieve. So, the two things are not incompatible at all, you just have to get the measures right.

Q76 Chairman: This is only a first conversation, and I am sure we shall have other ones. They ought to have warned you when you took on this job that one of the differences between the private sector and the public sector is that you often run the gauntlet of committees like this?

Ms Rider: I look forward to it.

Q77 Chairman: We have enjoyed it, I hope you have. I am sure we will see you again and we wish you well in the work that you are doing. Thank you very much to you too.

Ms Rider: Thank you very much.