CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 756-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

public administration SELECT committee

 

 

governing the future

 

 

Thursday 26 January 2006

MR STEPHEN ALDRIDGE

LORD DONOUGHUE and DR WILLIAM PLOWDEN

Evidence heard in Public Questions 70 - 230

 

 

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 Select Committee

on Thursday 26 January 2006

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

David Heyes

Kelvin Hopkins

Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger

Julie Morgan

Mr Gordon Prentice

Jenny Willott

________________

Witness: Mr Stephen Aldridge, Director of the Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office, gave evidence.

Q70 Chairman: Good morning, everyone. Can I welcome Stephen Aldridge, who is the Director of the Strategy Unit. As you know, the Committee is doing an inquiry into, we call it, Governing the Future, strategic thinking within government, and we are delighted that you are able to come along and see us about this. We had put in a bid for Lord Birt at one time, but we were directed instantly towards you and denied Lord Birt, but in no sense are you second best, we are delighted to have you. I think you were Acting Director at that point and you have now become Director, so you are the man and I am sure you will be very helpful to us. Would you like to say anything, by way of introduction?

Mr Aldridge: No. I said I would be happy to go straight into questions to cover the ground.

Q71 Chairman: Thank you very much for that. You are a career civil servant, are you not?

Mr Aldridge: Correct.

Q72 Chairman: Your predecessor became a civil servant but was originally a special adviser, therefore his political position was really rather different. Just thinking about this, I wonder whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to have the head of a special unit who was a career civil servant? The reason I ask the question is that thinking strategically about future policy issues is merely a technical exercise, yet in fact it is highly political, is it not, because it is shaped by the kind of future that you want to have as well as the one that you think you might be going to have? I am just wondering whether this is an uneasy role, or a sensible role, for a senior civil servant?

Mr Aldridge: The previous Director of the Unit, Geoff Mulgan, was in that capacity, also a civil servant and therefore bound by exactly the same sorts of rules and constraints as others on that.

Q73 Chairman: His history was as a special adviser at Number 10?

Mr Aldridge: Indeed, but in strategy work, in determining the advice you give, there are perhaps three considerations, that determine the issues you look at, what it is that determines your approach. One part of that may be picking up issues of concern to the public, and that should inform the range of issues that you look at; another will be political values and a third will be a more objective, rigorous analysis of the problems that you face, what causes them and what is the range of options for dealing with them. What I think the Strategy Unit can do is help particularly in that area around rigorous analysis and the deployment of evidence in support of strategy and policy. Ultimately, of course, it is for ministers to decide the political values that determine their goals and the trade‑offs that they make between them. I think you can make a good separation of functions and I do not see why a civil servant, or indeed someone from another background, cannot play that role.

Q74 Chairman: We may explore that a bit further, but let me ask you some initial questions about how the system works. There are about 70 of you, are there not?

Mr Aldridge: At the moment, we are about 50, 55.

Q75 Chairman: You are a very large unit, certainly in historic terms and thinking about people at the centre, certainly compared with Heath's Central Policy Review staff, back in the seventies, which I think was about 20-odd, so there is quite a large number of people engaged in this. Who commissions your work?

Mr Aldridge: Ultimate decisions about our work programme are determined by the Prime Minister but, in deciding priorities for our work programme, we consult with policy advisers in Number 10, we have various suggestions for new work that come to us from departments and, in some cases, work we do to review the challenges and opportunities facing the UK through, for example, our Strategic Audit work will identify issues that might be suitable topics for work by the Strategy Unit. The subject areas come from a number of sources but, ultimately, decisions are taken by the Prime Minister.

Q76 Chairman: Really you work for the Prime Minister?

Mr Aldridge: Correct.

Q77 Chairman: Is that a good thing, do you think; why do you not work for the Cabinet?

Mr Aldridge: We have a sort of dual role, consistent with the Cabinet Office objectives. Yes, on the one hand, we have a role in supporting the Prime Minister in developing strategy, we provide him with an analytical capacity to get to the roots of problems and their causes, we provide a strategic capacity to try to clarify goals, possible trade‑offs between them and what measures might be taken to achieve those goals.

Chairman: Yes, I think I understand that.

Mr Aldridge: We have a second function, which is about helping departments develop more effective strategies and policies and helping departments build their strategic capability. In that capacity, much of the work we do, though ultimately commissioned by the Prime Minister, is undertaken jointly or in close collaboration with departments.

Q78 Chairman: The Prime Minister is ultimately the commissioner of all your work?

Mr Aldridge: Yes.

Q79 Chairman: Therefore you deliver your reports to the Prime Minister?

Mr Aldridge: Yes, ultimately, but in many cases, if we are doing a piece of work jointly with another department, it will be to the Prime Minister and to the relevant secretary of state. Reports will go as necessary to Cabinet committees or whatever collective forum is needed.

Q80 Chairman: They always do go into government, in some way, do they, and they are considered by government, in some way?

Mr Aldridge: Yes.

Q81 Chairman: In all different ways?

Mr Aldridge: Yes. It will depend on the nature of the work. Again, for example, if you have looked at the sort of work that is on our website, some of our work will certainly take the form of published reports that are statements of government policy. Equally, our work may contribute to White Papers and some of our work consists of more open-ended discussion papers. I think there was a discussion at one of the previous meetings of this Committee of the work we had done on social mobility. That did not lead to any policy conclusions, it was a piece of work which was done to raise the profile of an issue, facilitate better understanding of an issue and obviously informed consideration of that issue across government. Different pieces of work lead to different outputs and are considered in different ways.

Q82 Chairman: When I look at the list of the work that you have done, and it is a very varied list, what I could not quite understand was why you were doing some of it, because some of it - I do not want to give you a long list - seemed directly the kind of stuff that strategic people inside departments ought to be doing, it was not cross-government stuff, it was straight policy. That would be one question. The other one, allied to that, is why do you undertake some of these strategic inquiries and why does government in other cases farm it out? Why do we set up commissions to look at all kinds of things, pensions, for example, recently, but many other examples too? Amongst all these different models of inquiring into the future, where do you sit?

Mr Aldridge: I think it is important to emphasise that inevitably our role has evolved over time. When the Strategy Unit was created - originally it was something called the Performance and Innovation Unit, set up in 1998 - in general there were relatively few strategy units in other departments. As strategic capacity, capability, across Whitehall has developed since that time so inevitably our role has changed. As I was saying previously, increasingly we will be doing our work jointly with the relevant departments, sometimes with their own strategy units, or equivalents, or with other parts of the department. Why is there a necessity for a Strategy Unit, why are we doing the things we do rather than departments? Part of that goes back to my answer to the previous question, that there is certain support that any Prime Minister of the day may need, in terms of analytical rigour. The Strategy Unit is perhaps in a fortunate position that it does not have many day-to-day responsibilities and therefore can step back a bit from the events of the day, the immediate crises, and offer perhaps a more considered view to the Prime Minister and Number 10 than might otherwise be possible.

Q83 Chairman: It is a confused and crowded field, is it not? Why does the Prime Minister, do you think, in addition to you, have another strategy adviser who also issues reports; latterly, Lord Birt? Is not all this rather confusing?

Mr Aldridge: No. Lord Birt was Strategy Adviser in Number 10. The reports that he worked on were generally supported by the Strategy Unit, so there was a co‑ordination of effort in the sorts of projects and reports that he produced.

Chairman: I am sure that colleagues will want to explore that.

Q84 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I follow on from the questioning that Tony started. You go in to sort out failing departments, you take up the problems that they cannot sort out; you take them on because nobody else does. I have been looking through a list, and Tony is right, this is the Strategy Unit Impact Tracker, a wonderful piece of double-speak, and there are all these things you have done. You are just covering up the cracks in the messes of other departments?

Mr Aldridge: I do not think we are there to deal with failing departments. We are there to have a positive role in bringing a more strategic approach to policy-making. It may be worthwhile saying just a bit about what we mean by good strategy. Good strategy will involve very rigorous analysis of the problem or issue that you are dealing with and developing an understanding of what causes it. It is about making sure that the goals behind a particular strategy policy are clear and that the trade‑offs are understood, that you properly explore what is the role of government in achieving those goals and that you have got a set of soundly-based, practical policy measures for achieving them. The Strategy Unit is in a good position to help advance good strategy because of the sorts of people we are able to recruit. It is an unusual mix of people in the Civil Service and with a Civil Service background, so everyone in the Unit is on Civil Service rules. We are particularly well placed to take a cross-cutting perspective, so we can look across departments and think about how best to develop strategic capability. Because we bring in people from departments, and we work jointly with departments on our projects, we are able to help build capability in the departments concerned. There is a whole series of ways in which, through working jointly with departments, we are able to support them as well as to advance the wider strategic objectives that the government has.

Q85 Mr Liddell-Grainger: These departments have civil servants coming out of their ears; they are all career civil servants. Looking at the Strategy Unit reports, just the first page, the London Project Report, that should be entitled 'Stuff the Mayor'. The next one is the Chances of Disabled People; that is Health. The next one is employment; that is Employment. The next one is Social Mobility - Health. The next one is sustainable future for UK fishing - Defra. The last one - I am reading just from the first page - Changing Behaviour; that is social services. All of these, you are papering the cracks?

Mr Aldridge: Actually, all of those are good examples of cross-cutting issues, so disability touches on issues of labour market policy, health policy, education, social mobility, again touches on a whole range of different policy areas. Those are areas perhaps where we are particularly well placed to make a contribution and bring a more strategic approach, and a more strategic approach will lead to a more cross-cutting set of solutions than perhaps the more conventional, silo-based policy-making would produce.

Q86 Mr Liddell-Grainger: When we first looked at this, which seems like a lifetime ago, there was a 'blue-sky' strategy, there was the Delivery Unit, there was an enormous amount of units; what has happened to all those other units?

Mr Aldridge: There was a period during which something called the Forward Strategy Unit existed alongside the Performance and Innovation Unit; they were brought together and consolidated in a single Strategy Unit in 2002. The Strategy Unit is the only unit to stay the course.

Q87 Mr Liddell-Grainger: The only unit left?

Mr Aldridge: There were only ever two, but, yes, we are now the single unit.

Q88 Chairman: When you say the Forward Strategy Unit, you would not have a Backward Strategy Unit, would you?

Mr Aldridge: Indeed.

Q89 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Lord Birt was a strategic thinker, that was his idea, was it not, he was to come up with strategy for the future, etc? He has gone without coming before us, which is a great shame. You have taken over that role totally, so you report directly to the Prime Minister?

Mr Aldridge: I report to Sir Gus O'Donnell.

Q90 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Ultimately to the Prime Minister; so all the systems now come through you, but you are not Communications, are you?

Mr Aldridge: No.

Q91 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is still somebody else. Everything else is now through you directly to the PM?

Mr Aldridge: That is correct, but just to clarify it, the Strategy Unit is based in the Cabinet Office and, yes, we cover strategy, but of course there is also a Policy Directorate in Number 10.

Q92 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Who heads the Policy Directorate?

Mr Aldridge: David Bennett heads the Policy Directorate.

Q93 Mr Liddell-Grainger: What is his staff; do you know how big it is, by any chance?

Mr Aldridge: It is nine or ten.

Q94 Mr Liddell-Grainger: They report directly to the Prime Minister again?

Mr Aldridge: Yes.

Q95 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Their responsibility is; how would you define them?

Mr Aldridge: They provide day-to-day policy advice to the Prime Minister whilst the Strategy Unit is focused on the strategic, on the medium to long term. Whilst they deal with the more day-to-day advice, there has of course to be a meshing of our work programme with their concerns and priorities.

Q96 Mr Liddell-Grainger: The guy who heads the Directorate, is he a career civil servant or is it a political appointment?

Mr Aldridge: It is a political appointment.

Q97 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Out of the nine or ten, do you know how many of them are civil servants? If you do not know, just say so.

Mr Aldridge: I think, roughly, it is half and half.

Q98 Kelvin Hopkins: In the days of Geoff Mulgan, my immediate assumption was that the Strategy Unit was simply a group of hand-picked, prime ministerial clones, driving a right-wing liberal ideology. I may say, I do not think that now, having read the papers.

Mr Aldridge: It has always been a Civil Service unit.

Q99 Kelvin Hopkins: Even when Geoff Mulgan was there?

Mr Aldridge: Yes.

Q100 Kelvin Hopkins: I can believe it in your case, but I would have to be persuaded about Geoff Mulgan. 'Strategy' has a big sound, but looking through the list of subjects that you have dealt with and produced reports on they are some way from the core of what policy is about. The reports are useful, but they are about help for children, about alcohol problems - all interesting, and I am interested in them myself, but they are not actually at the core of what the government is about. Is that fair?

Mr Aldridge: That is true of some of them. Again, over time our role has evolved and currently we are supporting work, for example, on the Energy Review and we have done work in the past on schools, for example. Certainly we have done work in areas that would be considered core as well as important but maybe not such a high priority.

Q101 Kelvin Hopkins: Given that you are a sort of think tank, would it not be more appropriate for you to work to the departments responsible for the subjects you are researching, so that they could plug into your unit when they wanted a special bit of work done. You would provide it to the Department, for the minister and thence to Cabinet? That is how it would have worked in the past.

Mr Aldridge: In fact, we do play that role, as well as being available to support the Prime Minister. Examples: we are supporting the Energy Review by making available three people to work in DTI on their Energy Review Report. We were asked recently by ODPM to support them in producing a White Paper on local government that is due in the summer. Because we are also responsive to suggestions for new work put forward by departments, we can undertake projects collaboratively with departments, I think for exactly that remit. Equally, there may be occasions when we need to provide analysis and strategy advice more directly to the Prime Minister, as well as working on projects proposed by departments.

Q102 Kelvin Hopkins: I have worked most of my life before Parliament in policy units, in effect, so I know that when someone at the top has decided something and one is providing reports which are not very supportive one just gets marginalised. Let us take energy, for example. You have got something down here, you have done some work on alternative energy, and from what I understand, if we invested the same amount we could get twice the amount of energy from alternative energy than we could from nuclear. But someone at the top has decided that we are going to have nuclear. One comes up with a report saying, in terms of energy, we would do just as well, or even better, with a nuclear strategy but somebody higher up has said, "No way". Is that how it operates?

Mr Aldridge: No. I think we are genuinely challenged to bring analytical rigour and an evidence-based approach to the work we do. On energy, yes, there is a review going on but that is going to be no less rigorous and evidence-based than the previous energy review. It is true, previously we have done work on energy and that pointed to, for example, the case for increased investment in energy efficiency and in renewables to meet a range of energy policy objectives. That same review, which was published in 2001, also identified the range of factors which might cause one to revisit the energy strategy we have, so it highlighted, for example, that if there was slow progress in the liberalisation of energy markets, or if we entered a period of higher energy prices, it would be necessary to revisit the strategy, and that is exactly what is happening. Indeed, it is good practice, in the light of new information, new developments, to have strategies which can respond and evolve in the light of changing circumstances.

Q103 Kelvin Hopkins: To take another subject, alcohol is an area about which I know a little myself. I should qualify that by saying I was Chair of the All-Party Group on Alcohol Misuse for five years. We tried for years to get the government to come forward with an alcohol strategy and it was held back. Yet we have an alcohol crisis in this country now, with deaths from cirrhosis going up, with crime and disorder on Saturday nights. The rest of Europe is going in the other direction and we are going in the wrong direction. Clearly, your Strategy Unit and this rigorous analysis and policy approach has not been very successful in persuading the government to see things differently?

Mr Aldridge: We did a report on alcohol harm reduction. I think that report was quite successful in flagging up the magnitude of those harms. I think it estimated that harms associated with alcohol misuse amounted, I think it was, up to £20 billion a year. That analysis, I think, was quite successful in raising the profile of the issue, raising awareness that this was something that one needed to be concerned about; also it did come forward with a range of, I think, practical measures, health measures, crime and disorder measures, for addressing that. Of course, there may be issues around delivering implementation; as with any strategy, there may come some point where you need to revisit it in the light of new information or events. I think it did help raise the profile of that issue and begin to move policy in the direction that you are suggesting.

Q104 Kelvin Hopkins: Then the government introduced 24-hour drinking?

Mr Aldridge: Also it introduced various sanctions and penalties to deal with alcohol misuse, so that the liberalisation was accompanied by a more effective way of dealing with any adverse effects.

Q105 Kelvin Hopkins: You talk about rigorous analysis, and if you, your Strategy Unit, looked at two areas, I should say you would come up with conclusions which everybody would say were sensible. I am sure, if you were rational, you would say that railways privatisation has been an expensive disaster. Everything costs four or five times as much as it did, we have got the most expensive railways in Europe and they do not really work very well. Should not the Strategy Unit be saying to the Prime Minister "Privatisation has been a disaster; bring the railways back into public ownership," because that is what everybody wants and that is what is rational?

Mr Aldridge: We have done work on transport in the past, but actually that stepped back a bit more to try to ask about what our objectives were and what was the best way of meeting those objectives, so we have looked at not just the supply side, the role of the railways, the role of the road system, we also did quite a bit of work looking at the demand side, how you deal with congestion, particularly, on the roads, for example. I think the work we have done on transport, as in other areas, has involved stepping back a bit to look at the broader picture, what the problem is, what are the different ways of tackling it and then coming forward with options in a range of areas for dealing with it. So, in the case of transport, tackling under-investment, thinking about appropriate governance structures for a transport strategy, a rather broader view.

Q106 Kelvin Hopkins: A lot of the options, the sensible ones, are the sorts of sensible things that the man, and woman undoubtedly, on the Clapham omnibus would come up with, just reading the newspapers, but the government is resistant to them. As the Strategy Unit, surely you should be advising the government and saying "This is what's sensible; why don't you do it?"

Mr Aldridge: That is true, but sometimes the right measures may not be immediately acceptable, and there may be a role for the Strategy Unit, or indeed others, in providing a clear analysis of what the problem is and what action is needed in order to make it easier for policy changes to occur. I think people today might say, based perhaps on the London experience, that some form of congestion charging is a very sensible way of helping to deal with some aspects of the transport problems we face, but that perhaps was not apparent before that congestion charging was introduced. Analyses that can help explain perhaps why difficult policy measures will be of benefit might actually make it easier to move policy in the right direction. I think that is where we can help, but I am not saying that we can completely overcome political or other challenges that you may face, but it may make the task a bit easier.

Q107 Kelvin Hopkins: Any strategy unit worth its salt, if it is going to be objective and rigorous, should have different voices within it, people saying different things. How many people from what government would regard as the 'awkward squad', people like me, who would actually write down or say "This is the logical thing to do," how many real arguments and debates do you have within your Unit? Do you provide uncomfortable papers for the Prime Minister to read? Or indeed, are the awkward squad, these difficult, argumentative, disagreeable people, combed out before you get started?

Mr Aldridge: Certainly, as a Unit, we are very diverse, I think, in the range of people that we recruit. As I said, about half of us are permanent civil servants; the other half will come into the Unit on fixed-term contracts, all on secondment, again bound by the Civil Service rules, and they will have a variety of backgrounds: private sector, academia, NGOs, local government, we have people from overseas. There are varieties of viewpoints and backgrounds.

Q108 Kelvin Hopkins: People, in that case, can have the same ideology, they can have the same view?

Mr Aldridge: Indeed; and that is not the only way in which we seek to gather different viewpoints. We work very closely with departments. We try to be very open in our engagement with the wider world. In the past, when we have done projects on things like urban regeneration, or when we did our work on disability, we brought in people from the front-line to work on our project teams and to test out whether the ideas we were coming up with were actually going to work, in terms of front-line delivery. I am not saying that it is perfect, but we do try to be open, we do try to listen to a variety of viewpoints.

Q109 Chairman: You were talking about congestion charging. It is interesting, because there was a committee in the 1960s, was there not, which recommended road pricing, which reminds us that there are issues about the reception end of things and the politics of it which matter hugely?

Mr Aldridge: It may be that good analysis, a good, clear and compelling statement of what a problem is and why a particular solution may be helpful, can actually help you move in what may be the right direction.

Q110 Chairman: But it may take 40 years?

Mr Aldridge: Hopefully, good strategy will accelerate that.

Q111 Julie Morgan: Do you have any constraints on what you make public, about what you find out?

Mr Aldridge: Clearly, there are some. There is some advice, some of the work we do results in confidential advice to ministers and clearly that will not be published. In the main, if you look at our website, if you look at the publications that have followed other work that we have done, White Papers, Green Papers, the great majority of what we do, in some form, at some stage, does end up in the public domain. Before something is published we may well have had quite extensive engagement with various stakeholders within Whitehall, and indeed beyond.

Q112 Julie Morgan: We have got a long list of reports here. Are there any reports that were not published, that you did a lot of work on but were not actually published, for whatever reason?

Mr Aldridge: There may be one or two, but really not very many at all.

Q113 Julie Morgan: For what sorts of reasons would they not have been published?

Mr Aldridge: If they were exploring issues or options for ministers to consider. There are certain issues where you need to give ministers space to explore options and consider ideas. There have been a few reports in that category.

Q114 Julie Morgan: Have you ever come up with a set of proposals that have been politically rejected before you were able to finish the work or publish them?

Mr Aldridge: Not politically rejected; all pieces of work or projects will evolve as you go forward, indeed as you learn and as you discuss. I think it is less that reports are rejected but more that they may evolve as you learn more and as you engage with stakeholders. Sometimes, some of the issues you work on, some of the options for dealing with them that you identify, may be politically quite challenging, and therefore you may need to think about what are the steps you might take to move in the right direction. It may be that in some cases you need to think about what is the right path to move in the direction that you think is the right one, rather than it is rejected completely.

Q115 Julie Morgan: In some ways, is that how you might be different from an independent strategy unit, a think tank? Do you feel you start with a blank sheet on a particular subject, or do you feel you are trammelled by the government?

Mr Aldridge: We certainly start with a blank sheet and will try to work an issue through from first principles. Unlike a sort of think tank or an independent commission, we are of course within the Civil Service and in the perhaps advantageous position that our work can be taken forward to consideration by ministers and decision; we are in the advantageous position of being able to influence perhaps more quickly the decision-making process. Clearly, a think tank can be much better able to say "We should do X or Y," whereas we will have in mind, particularly as we get to published conclusions, what is going to be acceptable to stakeholders. Privately, of course, we may have our blank sheet of paper, first principles answer and we can think about how we go from that to what might be, in the first instance, the published conclusions. It does vary from issue to issue, but we will always have thought things through from first principles.

Q116 Julie Morgan: Do you ever draw back from something because you know this may produce a result which the Prime Minister may not want?

Mr Aldridge: Not necessarily draw back but think through; if there were some barriers to achieving the desired outcome, we might think through the work, what are the other ways of getting there and how we deal with those barriers. Let us take an example again. If we take congestion charging, if you were doing some work on transport policy and, very suddenly and coldly, suggested the right answer was congestion charging, it might be quite difficult, given there could be losers associated with that, for ministers to say, "Yes, let's go ahead and do that." However, if you start off by trying to explain more effectively why this solution is helpful in advancing transport objectives, maybe publish a report which does no more than analyse the problem and what might be the benefits of this option, then you can begin to lay the ground for firm decisions later on. It is not necessarily the case that when you approach things with your blank sheet of paper you may suddenly find that it is rejected; you may have to think through how best you advance, having done your analysis, the right answer to the problem that you face.

Q117 Julie Morgan: Looking through the list, this is a little while back, 2000, so obviously you were not there, the Prime Minister's Review of Adoption, for example, I can remember that because it is a subject I am particularly interested in. I believe, at that time, the Prime Minister felt that not enough children were being adopted and there were too many barriers, and that was something which then you followed through. Quite clearly, it was the Prime Minister making public statements, and presumably you produced a report to back that up, which is not a blank sheet, is it?

Mr Aldridge: There was a report and it was followed I believe by a White Paper and legislation, and I think the numbers of people adopted actually have risen quite significantly, as a consequence.

Q118 Julie Morgan: I would agree with what happened, but it is just interesting that it arose from the Prime Minister saying this was what he wanted to happen and then you followed it through, and how did that relate to the department involved?

Mr Aldridge: The project itself was carried out collaboratively with the Department of Health. It was a very short project. I think the initial Strategy Unit involvement was just three or four months, then the follow-through was handed over to and taken forward by the Department of Health. Right from the outset the Department was involved, working with the Strategy Unit, and taking it on once our work was completed.

Q119 David Heyes: Tomorrow evening I will be off to the monthly meeting of the Management Committee of my constituency Labour Party and they will hold me to account; they think that I am playing a part in putting Party policy into action. I am sure that similar arrangements apply to Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. I would say to them, frankly, that their belief that I am actually determining Party policies and responsible for implementing them is pretty naïve and that all sorts of policies emerge which I am being held to account for by them and in which I have played no part, which, in fact, in many ways, seem to be contrary to what I believed was Party policy. Really I am asking you, what role does the manifesto, the Party policy, what emerges from within Party lines, play in determining your agenda?

Mr Aldridge: Our work programme ultimately will reflect the government's, the Prime Minister's, priorities. The government's manifesto obviously is one of the sources which makes clear what those priorities are, so there will be a relationship between our work programme and the sorts of priorities that are set out in the government's manifesto. It does not mean that we will be working on every priority that emerges from that, necessarily, because sometimes it will be taken forward by departments.

Q120 David Heyes: A very important policy development, as far as the Labour Party was concerned, the year before last, was the Warwick agreement and the commitments to workforce benefits, in terms of safety, working hours, working conditions, very cross-cutting issues to do with workforce development, it is absolutely central to the work that we do because of the cross-cutting nature of your role. What work is going on within your Unit to bring about the commitments that were made on Warwick?

Mr Aldridge: That is not an issue on which we are working or have worked. It is not the case that the Strategy Unit would get involved necessarily in all areas of policy.

Q121 David Heyes: Is that because nobody has asked you?

Mr Aldridge: In that case, they have not asked us.

Q122 David Heyes: It would seem to me to be an absolutely ideal example of the kind of thing that you should be doing, because it is a high profile example, by the political party that is in government, that is cross-cutting in its nature, and you are not even looking at it?

Mr Aldridge: That is true, but there are always choices to make about which projects we do, which issues we look at. We try to make a judgment based on how important or urgent the issue is, whether it is an issue that is amenable to - - -

Q123 David Heyes: This is a non-urgent issue; it is not a priority issue, is it?

Mr Aldridge: These are all relative to other things we might work on. We take a view, do we have the resources, expertise, to address an issue; is it an issue that is already being addressed effectively elsewhere in government, is it a cross-cutting issue. We try to apply some criteria and thought to ranking the priorities for our work, so that when propositions come forward we have got some reasoned basis for why we have got the set of projects we have rather than some other set.

Q124 David Heyes: Is it not the case that the bottom line for you is survival? Ultimately, you are obliged to tell your political masters what they want to hear, or what you think they want to hear. The most extreme example of where that has got us into problems recently is all the advice on weapons of mass destruction and the issues around the Iraq war.

Mr Aldridge: No. The very strong steer that we get is that the PM and the policy advisers in Number 10 want the best possible analysis to underpin their decision-making processes. We are expected to be analytically rigorous, we are expected to start with that blank sheet of paper and suggest, based on an analysis of evidence, what might be the right answers to the problems that need to be tackled. Ministers will decide what is politically possible, or not; we are asked to give the best analysis and advice that we can.

Q125 David Heyes: The lesson of history is that it can be very dangerous for you to get on to politically unpopular territory though. We have got the example of the abolition of the Central Policy Review Unit in the eighties. Mrs Thatcher did not like the advice she had been given so the equivalent of you at the time was sacked?

Mr Aldridge: That comes back, I think, to the discussion we had before, that sometimes you need to think about how you give difficult advice and what recommendations flow from it. It may be that in some areas the right starting-point is something that is very analytical, helps build a broader consensus about what the problem is and where it needs to be tackled, and once you have built more of that consensus then you can move on to come forward with proposals. I think there is a degree of horses for courses here. The Strategy Unit does not produce one single type of output; it will offer a range of different types of output from its work, which, depending on the issue and the task, will be suitable in different circumstances.

Q126 Jenny Willott: I want to ask some very practical questions, quite quickly. When you are producing your reports, how long-term do you look, what timeframes do you look towards?

Mr Aldridge: It will depend on the policy. When we have done work on energy, we have looked 50 years ahead; when we have done work on transport, 30 years; as long as is necessary for the policy concerned.

Q127 Jenny Willott: You talked about the Policy Unit earlier on, the work that they do, the day-to-day advice; do you ever do work looking at the long-term implications of the advice that they have given?

Mr Aldridge: No. I do not think we have done that, but perhaps I should turn the question round. We may look at an issue like energy, which potentially perhaps has got very long timescales, 50 years, or whatever. The strategy for achieving your energy goals over that period will need to have within it not just longer-term measures but medium-term measures and short-term measures, so we will think about what you might need to be doing now, in the next few years, in order to achieve a 10-year, 20-year, 50-year objective. We certainly do that, and obviously that helps frame the advice which the Policy Directorate gives.

Q128 Jenny Willott: Is there a relationship between the two, so that the Policy Unit will use the work that you have done in order to inform their decisions and what they are going to advise?

Mr Aldridge: Absolutely. There are only nine or ten of them. We are a very important source of analysis, research and evidence to inform the advice that they give.

Q129 Jenny Willott: If there are issues, which you have not done previously and you have not done work on, which come up, on which they have to provide immediate advice, short-term stuff, how does that fit into the process that you are looking at, or, when you are doing some research in the future, then do you look at what decisions they made and what advice they gave and the materials they used to make those decisions?

Mr Aldridge: There are different possibilities. It may be that, whilst currently we are not working on something that comes up, we may have done so recently, in the past, and we will be able to deploy that to their benefit. Alternatively, again depending on what the need is, it might be that we would identify a gap in strategy or policy work as a result and a proposition would arise for a new piece of work, which then we would judge alongside other proposals for new work by the Units. I suspect, in that case, it might trigger a new project or a new piece of work.

Q130 Jenny Willott: Can I ask about the relationship between the Strategy Unit and think tanks; do you ever commission work from think tanks?

Mr Aldridge: I think, over the years, on one or two occasions we may have done so, but in the main we commission very little work externally because we have people within the Unit who can produce the strategy and policy work that is needed. We have had people come in with think tank backgrounds to work in the Strategy Unit and that is probably more important than commissioned work.

Q131 Jenny Willott: Do you use reports that think tanks produce to assist your work?

Mr Aldridge: We use a range of research and evidence sources to inform our work, including think tank work.

Q132 Jenny Willott: One of the things that Gus O'Donnell said is that the role of think tanks is thinking the unthinkable. Given that you are much more specific, in some of the questions Julie was asking, about where the ideas come from, and so on, it would appear from the outside that actually it would be very difficult for the Strategy Unit to be thinking wild and unusual thoughts. How do you use the ideas and the thoughts generated by think tanks to inform what you are doing?

Mr Aldridge: In a variety ways. It may flag up issues that maybe we ought to be considering as an area for new Strategy Unit work. Think tank work may flag up ideas for policy changes that we should be considering as part of existing projects. I would say that some of the work we have done, some of our discussion papers, for example, our work on social mobility or life satisfaction, is quite cutting-edge. I am not sure it is in the unthinkable category but it is exploring issues which perhaps are not currently in the policy mainstream and therefore opening up new approaches, expanding boundaries, and certainly I think ministers and others have found that sort of work helpful. I think we can play that sort of role and have done so in much of the work we have done. I would also flag up our Strategic Audits, two of which have been published, which look across the whole policy agenda and review the progress that has been made and what challenges are likely to be faced in future. Those are very wide-ranging and I think challenging documents.

Chairman: They are indeed. Thank you very much.

Q133 Mr Prentice: You have got 55 people. I have got this paper, Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, it was published only eight months ago, and it tells us that the Strategy Unit has between 70 and 90 people at any one time. Where have all the people gone?

Mr Aldridge: Actually the numbers are quite flexible, so over the years there has been quite a bit of variation in the numbers.

Q134 Mr Prentice: How many in May 2005 when this was published; presumably, between 70 and 90?

Mr Aldridge: We certainly did not have that number in May 2005. People in the Strategy Unit will generally come in on loan from other departments or they come in on fixed-term contracts.

Q135 Mr Prentice: I am going to come on to how people get into the Strategy Unit.

Mr Aldridge: Actually there is quite a significant degree of turnover.

Q136 Mr Prentice: You cannot tell me how many people were employed in the Strategy Unit at that time. How many people were in the Strategy Unit in May 2005, when this document was produced?

Mr Aldridge: Yes, I can. The number in the Strategy Unit at that time was about 60.

Q137 Mr Prentice: Sixty; not between 70 and 90?

Mr Aldridge: No.

Q138 Mr Prentice: So that is wrong?

Mr Aldridge: Yes.

Q139 Mr Prentice: People are brought in on fixed-term contracts; why is that?

Mr Aldridge: One of the distinguishing features of the Strategy Unit is that we have a mix of permanent civil servants who are employed in the Unit and people from other backgrounds. They come in on fixed-term contracts because, generally speaking, in the sort of work that they will do in the Strategy Unit, there is probably a requirement for people to be there for two to three years. They will bring in particular skills that we will need for that period and beyond that it is probably sensible then for those people - - -

Q140 Mr Prentice: Okay; they are in it for two or three years. What about the civil servants; does that apply to them as well, the two or three years?

Mr Aldridge: Yes, because whilst we have some permanent Cabinet Office staff many will come in on loan.

Q141 Mr Prentice: How do they get in? Are people kind of fast-tracked into the Strategy Unit because that is a good kind of career development move, in the way that bright civil servants are put into ministers' private offices?

Mr Aldridge: No, it is open competition, we advertise in the press, if you go to our website you will see our adverts for staff, people apply and they go through a standard interview.

Q142 Mr Prentice: Who gives them the job? It is a panel of people that appoints them, and you are there?

Mr Aldridge: Correct. For senior staff, it is me; correct.

Q143 Mr Prentice: What are you looking for, really creative people, a bit zany?

Mr Aldridge: We are looking for outstanding analytical skills, strategic thinking skills, project planning and management skills, good interpersonal skills, the ability to work in teams and to influence stakeholders, then there is creativity in policy solutions.

Q144 Mr Prentice: What is the average age of people in the Strategy Unit?

Mr Aldridge: I guess, most of them, are in the range 25 to 40.

Q145 Mr Prentice: You are the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit. When did the Prime Minister last wander into the Strategy Unit and say, "Okay, guys and girls, let's have a brainstorming session"?

Mr Aldridge: He has not actually done that but what does happen is, and again it will depend on the nature of the work, it may be that our work will end up before a Cabinet committee that the Prime Minister would chair.

Q146 Mr Prentice: Does he ever physically go into the Unit and meet the people and talk to them; does he?

Mr Aldridge: No. We are based in Admiralty Arch. We are not in Downing Street. We go to meetings in Number 10. There are various meetings that the PM holds to discuss Strategy Unit work with departments.

Q147 Mr Prentice: Do you think Britain is well governed? It is a simple question.

Mr Aldridge: Yes, I suppose I do.

Q148 Mr Prentice: Do you have anything to do with the evolution of health policy; have you got major structural reforms in the Health Service going on at the moment? Do you have any secondees from the Department of Health? Have you had any say whatsoever in the development of policy on NHS structures; let us take Primary Care Trusts?

Mr Aldridge: We have done in the past a review of health strategy, this was in 2001-2002. Part of that, I think, did touch on NHS structures. More recently we have done some work on NHS reform, and that is something that we have been doing with the Department of Health.

Q149 Mr Prentice: Were you involved in the development of the departmental five-year plans?

Mr Aldridge: Those were department-led rather than Strategy Unit.

Q150 Mr Prentice: I do not want to get bogged down in departmental issues but, given that the government has recognised that it was a major policy error in announcing that PCTs would no longer have a provider function, that they would be commissioning bodies only, it was a major policy melt-down, was it not? Yes it was, and you had nothing to do with that, the Strategy Unit had nothing to do with that at all?

Mr Aldridge: At the time, it is correct, we were not doing work on health issues; however, on previous occasions we have done work on health, as I mentioned, in 2002. We have also done more generic work on public service reform, how it has evolved and what sort of approach should be followed, all of which has been done closely with the relevant departments. We cannot be working at all times in all areas so there is always a balance to strike between what the Strategy Unit does and what departments do.

Q151 Mr Prentice: The Prime Minister has said that a decision will be made in this Parliament on Britain's nuclear deterrent. There are five policy people in the Ministry of Defence working on this, five, and you have produced a paper on countries at risk of instability, and so on. Given that the nuclear weapons programme could cost the nation up to £25,000 million, and it is a strategic issue, it is a long-term issue, cross-cutting, foreign, defence, are you involved in any way?

Mr Aldridge: We are not involved in that.

Q152 Mr Prentice: Would you like to be involved?

Mr Aldridge: At the moment, our remit is to focus on domestic policy.

Q153 Mr Prentice: What about countries at risk of instability; that is not domestic?

Mr Aldridge: No, but as things stand currently our focus is on domestic policy.

Q154 Chairman: As we end, I would like to ask a couple of things really bordering on what Gordon has been asking you. At the moment, the government's whole approach to public service reform centres on these notions of markets, quasi-markets, choice, contestability, diversity, and there are huge arguments raging about the underlying analysis behind these approaches, whether applied to health or to education. For example, does choice drive up standards across systems, or does it lead to cream-skimming and segregation. You would think that a Strategy Unit concerned with long-term underlying analysis would be able to help us with these questions. The Committee found, when it was doing its inquiry into these issues recently, that there was nowhere in government that could provide it with any of the underlying analysis behind these approaches to public policy, citing international evidence, citing some of the theoretical literature, it was completely absent, and you see the consequences of its absence in the arguments we are having about education at the moment. What I am saying to you is, why has the Strategy Unit not been the place where that analysis has been developed?

Mr Aldridge: I think we have done some of that analysis. For example, on schools, we have certainly looked at the evidence on the impacts of choice and contestability in schools provision.

Q155 Chairman: Which report is that?

Mr Aldridge: It is not in the public domain.

Q156 Chairman: How does that inform the public and parliamentary argument if it does not exist?

Mr Aldridge: We did work on this jointly with the Department for Education and Skills, so this was something that we did as part of joint work, collaborative work, with that department. Certainly we explored the evidence base, we looked at the experience of other countries which had introduced these sorts of reforms and explored the conditions under which they were most successful.

Q157 Chairman: This is extremely interesting because none of that appears in the Education White Paper; it is devoid of analysis of that kind. You say there has been analysis in government of these underlying issues affecting these major policy decisions, it has not been published, it has not been shared with Parliament or the public, it is absent from White Papers, but it is there somewhere?

Mr Aldridge: Certainly analysis of that kind has been done and they have worked on some very good academic and other surveys of that.

Q158 Chairman: Why would you not want that underlying analysis, nothing to do with confidential discussion within government, why would that not inform all these policy debates that we are having?

Mr Aldridge: It did. I think that evidence is quite generally available. It is true, the Strategy Unit has not published something of that kind, but it is quite readily available.

Q159 Chairman: Where is it readily available?

Mr Aldridge: There are various academic surveys, think tank material, which review this evidence.

Q160 Chairman: As you give me that answer, you know that is not an adequate answer, do you not?

Mr Aldridge: It has certainly been available to inform policy.

Q161 Chairman: Can you take commissions from Parliament?

Mr Aldridge: I think we take our commissions from ministers.

Q162 Chairman: So you cannot take them. If I say to you, on behalf of this Committee, that we would love to have access, as legislators, to this underlying analysis on these choice, quasi-market issues that you have been doing, that has not been published, could we have access to this, or could you go and do some work on it for us, you are not able to help us?

Mr Aldridge: I think I would have to consult ministers.

Q163 Chairman: Just on Julie's point that she asked you about, the publication criteria, are you sure that the work that you have done would not be open to freedom of information requests, even stuff that you have not made available, because, as I understand it, it does not go into the heart of confidential discussion between ministers, it is in the category of background research information, which should be available?

Mr Aldridge: Absolutely, yes, and material has been released on that basis and it is on our website.

Q164 Chairman: So the stuff that you have not published you think will be amenable to freedom of information requests?

Mr Aldridge: I do not know, but certainly we have made available analysis before, where we have been requested to do so.

Q165 Chairman: Your job, the headship of the Unit, was vacant for a year. Does this mean that there was discussion about its future?

Mr Aldridge: No. I think it was more the timing. As you know, Geoff Mulgan, the previous Director, stood down in the summer of 2004 and I think there was an expectation that a general election would follow relatively soon after, therefore it would make sense to make decisions about the permanent headship of the Unit once the general election was passed. By the time we approached the election and the election was held, there were then various key personnel changes at the centre, a new Cabinet Secretary, changes in people in Number 10, and so, again, until those changes had worked their way through and new people were established they were not in a position to confirm an appointment.

Q166 Chairman: You cannot give me a dispassionate answer to this but I will ask it anyway. Because the strategic side of government has changed a good deal, we talked about the units that have come and gone, been merged, and so on, and how it has happened in the past, and we are going to have a discussion more about that in a moment, is it your view that we have got the structure right now?

Mr Aldridge: I do not suppose that the structure will ever be completely right because circumstances are evolving. I think there is a requirement for the sorts of functions that the Strategy Unit performs to support the Prime Minister, but as strategic capability develops in departments, encouraged, for example, by the departmental capability assessments that Sir Gus O'Donnell announced when he appeared before the Committee, I think inevitably there will be further evolution of the Unit's role, so I do not think it will ever be completely stable. As the discussion about our numbers illustrated, depending on the tasks at the time, the expected needs of the centre and departments, so our shape and form will evolve with that.

Chairman: Thank you for coming along and telling us about the work of the Unit. We know a little bit more about it now and you have raised some questions in our minds to help us with our further thoughts on this. Thank you very much indeed.

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Lord Donoughue, a Member of the House of Lords and Dr William Plowden, gave evidence.

Q167 Chairman: Can I welcome our further witnesses this morning, Dr William Plowden and Lord Donoughue. I was confessing to colleagues earlier, well I did not confess the whole truth, the whole truth is that I was taught by both of you at the LSE over 30 years ago, so it is an unusual occasion.

Lord Donoughue: You have survived fairly well, considering, Chairman.

Q168 Chairman: Both of you sitting in front of me; but thank you very much for coming along. We would like to talk about strategy, and with Lord Donoughue we would like to have just a few minutes on memoirs as well, if we may. Would either of you like to say anything, by way of introduction, or shall we just fire off?

Lord Donoughue: You fire.

Q169 Chairman: Can we continue then what we were on just now. Can I ask you, Dr Plowden, whether you think the structure that we have developed now in government, based upon the fact that you were in the original Central Policy Review Staff in the 1970s, the way in which we organise these things in government now, is better than the way we organised it then and whether we have got broadly the right arrangements?

Dr Plowden: I think it is right, Chairman, in the sense that there is now an assumption that there needs to be a fairly strong capability at the centre, which both Bernard Donoughue and I, in our different ways, had struggled to establish. I think the centre has been in a terrible muddle in recent years, with units, as you have been commenting recently, coming and going and now being amalgamated to form this rather large Strategy Unit, whose establishment is even larger than it has actually got people on the ground. Broadly speaking, I think that it is on the right lines. You need something which will support the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to do their job in relation to government as a whole and in relation to departments. I wonder whether perhaps it is a bit too big and I would like to see slightly more stability.

Q170 Chairman: What about this issue of the political embarrassment that is around some of this, you heard us asking the questions about publication, because I think one of the aspects of the arrangements now, as opposed to when you were doing it, is that there is the commitment routinely to publish now. I remember, do you remember, your reports in the 1970s and the political embarrassment that used to appear occasionally when these were leaked and then it could be said, "Ah, well, this is what the government is really up to; it's really up to turning the NHS over into a private insurance system" and there were other rows as well? How do we handle the fact that this is something that is inside government and therefore in some way will always be associated with the government of the day; is there a case for having some sort of more arm's length arrangement?

Dr Plowden: The climate has changed enormously since I was in government in the 1970s and I welcome the move towards publication. Even the CPRS tried to publish most of its reports if it could. I am slightly rooted in the past. I do think there is a case for a body at the centre conducting some of its activities without what you might call the threat of publication, because there are some issues on which it would want to touch which involve very sensitive questions, which, if they were discussed in public, in the short term, would embarrass ministers to such an extent that it would not be allowed to discuss these issues in the future. I think, in the short run, there is a case for a body like that, and even more so for a Prime Minister's Policy Unit, conducting its activities, selected activities, confidentially. In my memo I say that there needs to be a number of other bodies which are engaged in comparable functions, thinking strategically and looking ahead, which are not as close to the centre, as close to the sensitivity of current politics, which are much freer to publish, which can be disowned by politicians if they so wish.

Q171 Chairman: Just on that, I am quite interested in this. The Committee is going to Finland shortly to see something they have there, which is called the Committee of the Future, inside the Finnish Parliament. I wonder if it would be useful, of course the government, rightly and necessarily, will have its strategic arm, would it be helpful too if we had a more free-standing commission, publicly funded, thinking about futures issues? We have one, and maybe more than one, which is the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which sits there, thinking all the time about environmental issues, not with great public profile any more. Would it be better to think about some sort of futures commission, as I say, at a little distance from the government, which was conspicuously independent but then would challenge government, Parliament and the public to think about some of these things?

Dr Plowden: The Dutch do, or did, have a rather similar body to the Finnish one, which I went to have a look at. My own view is that I would be slightly suspicious of a body which was there simply to think about futures in general. I would rather have specialist bodies, like the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which looked at the future in areas where thinking in the past has been very short-term and where a very long-term view is necessary. I would not want to set up a great all-singing and all‑dancing futures commission to look across the whole field of public policy, I think probably that would be going too far.

Lord Donoughue: I was just recalling that in the late seventies I worked very hard to introduce a British Brookings and we got that wholly in place with a more European basis, but to be here to look at exactly these kinds of issues, and one of Mrs Thatcher's first policy initiatives was to torpedo that, although we had in place all the finances.

Q172 Chairman: What would that have looked like?

Lord Donoughue: Initially, it would have looked rather like the Washington Brookings but it would have been looking independently at long-term strategic issues. I agree with William that you cannot try to look at everything. I am wholly in favour of having a Strategy Unit which identifies certain key, long-term planning issues and then involves the departments in discussing them and submitting their views to Cabinet. The problem with publication is you have clear choices here: do you want the confidence of the Prime Minister and senior ministers; if you do that, you will have to be very private, and not in public. If you go public very often, as the CPRS discovered, then you lose the confidence of ministers. Where I was, at the Policy Unit, the confidence of the Prime Minister was absolutely essential and so, on the whole, nothing we were doing ever appeared and I imagine, politically, that still has a lot of weight. It is a case for having a Strategy Unit, if you like, taking longer-term views but a bit removed from ministers and able to publish. The inflated size of that Unit just takes my breath away. I do not know how you conduct a body of that size with proper coherence. I can see the case for one which publishes and investigates independently but then you do need units close to the Prime Minister and close to the Cabinet that they can trust, as you said, that they can reject and then they move on.

Q173 Chairman: When you were in the Policy Unit, in Number 10 - - -

Lord Donoughue: I set it up and I headed it. It is quite a mistake, in my view, that the present Prime Minister has merged it with the Private Office. It suggests a failure to understand the different roles there are in the machine. I am sorry to have interrupted you.

Q174 Chairman: We note that too. The CPRS, of course, was still in business during the 1970s and I just wondered, from someone working at the policy face within Downing Street, what were the connections and the relationship with that other body that was doing strategic thinking?

Lord Donoughue: The connections were close. I was a firm believer in the CPRS. When Harold Wilson appointed me, he did say "Do you want to get rid of the CPRS?" and I said "Absolutely not" and I think he was about to get rid of Victor Rothschild and then did not. I could see two quite distinct roles, we were more political, we were more short-term, and we worked closely together. As far as possible, I tried to work with the Head of the CPRS. In very energetic conversations with the Cabinet Secretary, we decided what were the distinct roles and who did what. It worked on a personal level because there were old friends, like William and others, in the CPRS and we worked together on one or two issues, on unemployment, and so forth. I could see a clear distinction between these long-term strategic roles. We tried to introduce some long-term elements into the Policy Unit. In the late seventies we were very afraid that North Sea oil would be wasted and we wanted to get an energy strategy in place, whereby as you consumed North Sea oil you would be replacing it with other energy supplies, but we failed on that partly because the Treasury was not very keen and then Mrs Thatcher was not very keen. In my view, on the whole, there were clear differences and where there were not, as on unemployment, we worked together, William and his colleagues would come to my office and I would go to theirs. That needs to be small units. We were small units with a clear team philosophy, led by people who knew what they wanted, and it is much easier to work together then. I do not know how I would work with some great balloon with 90 people in it.

Dr Plowden: Chairman, the crucial distinction, which I think the Committee will have picked up, is of course between the Prime Minister's Unit, working for the Prime Minister, and the CPRS, or whatever it is called, working for the Cabinet. As long as you have got a prime ministerial and Cabinet system, I do think it is essential to try, and it is very difficult indeed to do it in practice, to get the Cabinet to work as a collective body which is informed by the strategic thinking of a Strategy Unit. There should be not just a Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, as there was a Prime Minister's Unit in Bernard Donoughue's day, you want a Prime Minister's Unit and a Unit which works for the Cabinet, that is to say, in public, it needs to be within government.

Q175 Chairman: When I asked you about whether the arrangements that we had were broadly corporate now, surely this is a big difference, that, as you heard in the discussion, we do have now a Prime Minister's Strategy Unit but we do not have a Cabinet Strategy Unit, whereas CPRS, notionally, at least, worked for Cabinet government, did it not?

Dr Plowden: I think the lesson that I learned, painfully, is that one's idealistic views about how a Cabinet system should work are not always borne out in practice. Prime Ministers set the tone of a government and the way it makes policy, they have their own ways of working, and if they do not wish to have the Cabinet playing a full part in the policy process then there is no point in trying to get a Cabinet advisory unit to do that.

Lord Donoughue: That is absolutely right, and of course both Harold Wilson and James Callaghan were total believers in the Cabinet system, and therefore they made it work. There is, of course, the timescale problem. What we found, because life was much harder then, was that the long term became just a succession of short-term survival crises, and it was very hard to bring in the long-term dimension when every week you were thinking the government was about to be destroyed by this or that issue. That does not apply now and actually it should be much easier to introduce the longer-term dimension.

Chairman: I am going to bring in some colleagues. I want to come back to you on memoirs before we get to the end, but, for the moment, Gordon Prentice.

Q176 Mr Prentice: Just a brief answer: do we have Cabinet government, or is it prime ministerial government now?

Lord Donoughue: We do not have Cabinet government in the way that William and I saw it, when virtually every issue was thrashed out in Cabinet committee, having been considered previously in official committees or mixed committees, and where Prime Ministers then accepted, in most cases, that was the decision and the whole of the machine knew what that decision was, because the Cabinet Secretary, or some other senior official, was always present and always took notes, as minutes, which were circulated to everybody. My impression is, and of course I am not at the centre of government, that system, of which I was often a critic but have now learned that, whatever its faults, it is better than the alternatives, actually worked quite well.

Dr Plowden: My short answer would be, no, as far as I can see.

Q177 Mr Prentice: So we should get rid of titles like Prime Minister's Strategy Unit and they should be renamed Cabinet's Strategy Unit?

Dr Plowden: It is no good renaming it Cabinet Strategy Unit if the Prime Minister does not wish to have it acting as a Cabinet Strategy Unit; that is a road to disaster. I would rather have a Prime Minister's Strategy Unit working for the Prime Minister than no Strategy Unit.

Q178 Mr Prentice: I do not want to take you down a blind alley into Cabinet government, but can I ask Lord Donoughue this. You worked at Number 10 in the 1970s. When you look at the landscape of Britain today, does it kind of surprise you where we have ended up, 35, 30 years later?

Lord Donoughue: The answer is yes, and in many ways I am pleased, because at that time, sitting in the centre, it was not clear that we would even be here. Life was very difficult then, the economy was in a total mess, it was very difficult to get social cohesion. The landscape that has faced the present Prime Minister and present Chancellor is unrecognisable, and we would have given right arms to have had it.

Q179 Mr Prentice: We live in a multicultural Britain. In the 1970s, when you were at the heart of government, we had the BNP, or its predecessor, marching in the streets, immigration was a big issue. Does it surprise you that those kinds of tensions, in the 1970s, seem largely to have dissolved now, 35 years later?

Lord Donoughue: I do not quite recognise that. I am not sure they have dissolved, may I say, and they were not such big issues then. There was a Cabinet committee on immigration, which I sat on, and we produced papers on it, but on the whole there was not much discussion and most ministers were unwilling to discuss it because they were afraid the Guardian would call them "Racist" if they even said there was an issue. The BNP popped up every so often, but I do not recognise that as the issue at the time, but I do not think we contemplated a multiracial society on the scale that it is now.

Q180 Mr Prentice: It has just kind of happened?

Lord Donoughue: It happened, because we did not contemplate decades of immigration on this scale.

Dr Plowden: There was a CPRS report on race relations, which they were very reluctant to pick up, they did not want to be confronted with this issue on the Cabinet table, which illustrates again the general point that there is no point in leading a horse to water if it will not drink what you offer it.

Q181 Mr Prentice: What makes a good strategy and what is the difference between strategy and policy work?

Dr Plowden: A good strategy is one which (a) takes the long-term view and (b) takes account of as many sectors and factors as possible, hence the case for having a strategic capacity at the centre. Also that it is a strategy to which individual policy decisions will be subjected, they will be evaluated in the light of the long-term strategy. Until that strategy is changed, they need to be consistent with it, so it gives a consistent set of guidelines which should influence policy decisions as long as that strategy is in force.

Lord Donoughue: That was not happening in my time. Different departments would take decisions and the CPRS, or we, would point out that this was not wholly compatible with decisions taken elsewhere. I do not think that strategic conceptualising was going on then. I do not know if it is going on now.

Q182 Mr Prentice: Can I put the same question to you that I put to Stephen Aldridge: do you think that Britain is well governed?

Lord Donoughue: No, and I am not sure it is possible to be well governed. My observation of our society is that it has become so big and so complex that it is very difficult, and I think the instinct of ministers and Whitehall to centralise is a last desperate attempt to try to get things under control, whereas I am not sure they are controlling it.

Q183 Mr Prentice: You are academics and you look for rigour and evidence-based policy-making, and yet in huge areas of public policy, in health and education, restructuring the public services, everything is being restructured that is not nailed down, there is a lack of evidence, is there not?

Dr Plowden: Yes, there is a terrible propensity to move on to the next reform before the last one has been evaluated or given a chance to prove itself. My answer to your question would be, yes, by world standards, we are pretty well governed, with the major exception that Lord Donoughue points out, there is much too much pulled into the centre and this is a long-term trend which has been exacerbated in the last few years.

Lord Donoughue: I think the approach to the Health Service, which we need not go into in detail, is a reflection of the way government does not actually know what to do about this major issue.

Q184 Jenny Willott: In the 1970s, when the CPRS was in existence, was it involved in government decisions before they were announced or before they happened, on the whole, providing a strategic insight?

Dr Plowden: Yes, it was, and that gives me a chance to make a point which I noted was not made by Stephen Aldridge. The CPRS saw its role, as I am sure the Policy Unit did, and you must ask Lord Donoughue, very much as not only trying to help the government to devise a strategy for energy, or foreign relations, or whatever it might be, but also to ensure that, day by day and week by week, as I said a moment or two ago, individual decisions coming up were looked at in the context of that strategy. What we did, and I do not know whether it happens now, was to comment on particularly proposals coming forward to Cabinet, or indeed to the Prime Minister, from individual Cabinet ministers and departments, as to whether or not they were relevant to the strategy that had been decided, or was implicit, at least, in current government policy. So "Here is the Department of X backtracking on what you ministers agreed last year should be your policy," in the energy field, or the education field. "You will want to ask the Secretary of State for X why he is doing this and whether he should not do something that is more compatible with what we think, you think, the strategy is."

Lord Donoughue: There was a weekly committee, which may exist now or not, chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, held on Thursdays or on Friday mornings, which I always attended, which actually discussed the coming programme for the whole of government, and where the CPRS's views, on what William Plowden has just said, were taken into account and it was pointed out that this was running a bit incompatibly with that, and so on and so forth. The Cabinet Secretary was then very important as a linchpin in this process and I suspect the diminution in the role of the Cabinet Secretary has not been good for good government.

Q185 Jenny Willott: That is interesting. Can I pick up on something that Gordon asked the previous witness, which is about the involvement of the Strategy Unit in some of the big political issues that have kicked off in the last couple of months. In the 1970s, were it to have been similar issues, would the CPRS have been involved in doing the research and background work, for example, for proposals about changes to the Primary Care Trusts, looking at the issues of the choice agenda that Tony mentioned?

Dr Plowden: It would not do the basic research, necessarily, because it would have hoped the department would have done it and that the evidence would have been brought forward. What it certainly would have wanted to do though was ensure that the research had been done, that the arguments were properly set out and backed by the evidence needed to take the decision. I can remember indeed commenting on a draft White Paper, of which I said "This is not a White Paper," in the sense that it set out some conclusions and the evidence that it needed to make some conclusions, "it is a statement of policy with a lot of rhetoric attached." Our job was very much to ensure that government decisions as taken were soundly based and were not just floating in the air, based on some kind of prejudice but with a lot of spin to support them.

Q186 Jenny Willott: Could you imagine a situation happening in the same way in the 1970s, as clearly as it has in 2000?

Dr Plowden: Of course. Obviously, every situation is manageable and a powerful Minister of Health could then, as he, or she, could now, persuade the Prime Minister of the day that these changes were essential and they should go ahead, regardless of the lack of evidence, and there is nothing that the Central Policy Review Staff can do to stop that kind of development, if it is happening and it has got strong political support at the centre.

Lord Donoughue: Just an observation. What I saw, in relation to the CPRS, was ministers' reactions to CPRS investigations and reports. Some ministers, especially the second-rate ones, were very hostile to any CPRS report in their area, and of course some departments were hostile, and I imagine that would still be the case.

Q187 Jenny Willott: As you mentioned, Lord Donoughue, the number of staff in the Strategy Unit is at least double, sometimes three times, the number of staff that there were in the CPRS. Do you think it is producing twice the value?

Dr Plowden: I would be very surprised. I think that a unit of this sort needs to be, the criterion of our day was how many people you could get seated round the table of the Head of the CPRS, which was about this size, and it worked out at about 20. That does give a group of people who can discuss things, as I say, much earlier on, in the round, they can exchange views from a number of different points of view and can try to form some kind of collective view which is relevant to the views of the government as a whole. I think, once you get bigger than that you get a bureaucracy like the one you are trying to counter.

Lord Donoughue: Absolutely. I insisted that we never had double figures in the Policy Unit, for similar reasons but also wanting everyone to be involved, so you had a strategic thinking element in that as well. I just cannot conceive of how balloons of this size actually focus sharply on particular issues.

Q188 Chairman: Can I pick up just one point which Jenny raised, which is whether the quality of material produced by government has changed over the years and whether it has changed for the worse? I ask this because this government came in very attached to the notion of evidence-based policy and it set up new bits of government to feed in comparative experience, and so on, and yet there is a general perception that the quality of things like White Papers has declined markedly over the years, in terms of analysis of the problem to be addressed, the issues that bear on it and the solutions proposed. You have seen this at close quarters, both of you, over many years, is that a fair conclusion, do you think?

Dr Plowden: Chairman, I am sure the Committee will have been taking evidence or raising evidence from my old friend Sir Christopher Foster, who has been most eloquent on this subject and I found his views very persuasive, that the quality of the argument internally is less good because the quality of the argument which is required externally is less good, it is much more about presentation than about argument of evidence, to quote Gordon Prentice's point.

Lord Donoughue: Yes, that is my view; whether you have other factors involved here, the actual quality of Whitehall. When I became a minister, a quarter of a century later, although I was in a different department, my impression was that the quality of Whitehall was diminished and that all kinds of people who in my day and William's coming out of university would think of going into Whitehall were now going into the City or law, or what have you, so I did get a feeling that the calibre was not so good. I also got the view that, in my ministry, there was less interest in the quality of the policy, I hate to admit, but also "How will this play in the media?" which was not a question which actually had occurred in my five years in Whitehall.

Q189 Chairman: Can I use this just to help us with another inquiry that we are doing, which is on standards generally across government. There is a proposal, or a suggestion, that we need to have a mechanism which ensures better quality of material that is produced for Parliament, and indeed for the public, from government. I wondered if there was any way in which we could find a way of doing this, through inserting some sort of quality control mechanism through all this machinery that we have got now. At least it would ensure that when material was presented, in things like White Papers, at least it met a certain quality test, in terms of process. Is that a feasible proposition, do you think?

Dr Plowden: Chairman, I would have thought ministers and civil servants could get away with whatever they and the Prime Minister thought they could get away with. It seems to me there is perhaps a major role, if I can suggest it, for your Committee, to suggest to other committees that they should apply themselves some kind of quality test when confronting government publications and statements of every kind. If that were done consistently across the field then I think people might pick up the lesson.

Lord Donoughue: There is also legislation. Presumably, you compute the number of amendments to a bill introduced by the government simply because the drafting was imperfect and compare that with what was happening in the seventies. It is certainly a regular complaint in the House of Lords by old stagers and by Clerks that the quality of legislation is now much poorer.

Chairman: It is tempting to keep going riding with you, but we will try to haul it back.

Q190 Mr Liddell-Grainger: When you ran that Policy Unit, how many of your team were civil servants and how many of the team were political appointees?

Lord Donoughue: None were civil servants because I took a firm view that these were different roles and that what we should all be was outside experts in a policy area, that was our contribution, we were independent of the machine and that we should collaborate then with the machine, with the officials, because they had a different role and we could put our view and they put theirs. I am still convinced that there are different views. I am still convinced it is wrong, on the whole, although you do not want to be completely rigid, to have civil servants in a Policy Unit. I do not feel that so much about a long-term Strategy Unit but I think it is important, even for a Strategy Unit, that an outsider should chair it. What you have to have, when, as Harold Wilson asked me to do, you are trying to think the unthinkable, which is a cliché, but anyway that was what he said, is people independent of the machine pressures. I have to say, in relation to the CPRS, I felt, working closely with it, that there was a different quality of leadership when the CPRS was led by a strong outsider from when it was led by a very distinguished insider, because I think, if you are from the inside, without meaning to, you respond to the pressures of the machine and especially you do not want to upset the Treasury. If you are a younger person, you might be thinking where you are going to get your next appointment when you leave there. I think a strong outside element is essential, if you want the independence of thought.

Q191 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Basically, what you are saying is that Stephen, whom we have just seen, could be got at by the permanent secretaries?

Lord Donoughue: I would not want to personalise it but I am just saying that any young official who has his career in mind will not go out of his way to upset the machine; that is human. It is no criticism.

Q192 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You have not had sight of the list we have had of all the different reports. It is fairly comprehensive, to say the least, in the last five years. If you were looking at it from the outside, because of your argument, a lot of those could have been affected by the permanent secretary of a department saying "Now, look, come on lad, we don't really want to get this in front of the Prime Minister. He's the boss. I know we've got a slight problem but...". Would that ever have happened in your day?

Lord Donoughue: I would not want to say it happened; it just seems to me that it is human nature. William will have views on that because he has been both an official civil servant and an outsider and on the CPRS.

Dr Plowden: In the CPRS there was constant pressure from senior officials, and sometimes from ministers too, either not to look at a particular subject at all or to trim the views that it had expressed on it because they would be inconvenient and contrary to departmental policy. As Bernard said, I think it is a help to have somebody in charge of whatever the unit is called who can resist such pressures, because actually he is not beholden to the people from whom the pressures are coming.

Q193 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I ask both of you, if, way back, there had been a problem in a department, did you ever go in to try to paper over the cracks, to change the policy so that it was more acceptable from a political point of view and, basically, I suppose a bit crudely, get the government out of a hole, if something had gone wrong within a department; can you think of any examples, if it did? I know it was a long time ago.

Dr Plowden: The CPRS, I think, saw its job, as much as anything else, to try to rescue government policies from the iron grip of departments, and a very, very early CPRS inquiry was into the future of the British mainframe - an obsolete term, I think - computer industry. The Department of Trade and Industry had a strong policy to buy British, regardless of whether or not the British products were appropriate, which did not make any kind of sense in the light of government's industrial policies as a whole, or indeed any sense in the long term. The CPRS set out to challenge that policy because they thought that the government, as a whole, was being led in the wrong direction by the specialist department within it which had its own legitimate interests to pursue, but they were not interests that made sense in the bigger picture and in the longer term.

Lord Donoughue: Your report on the motorcar industry was very unacceptable to the Department of Industry, some I knew there, because it seemed to suggest that, unless it changed, it might not have a completely healthy future. I always wanted to work closely with departments, maybe because I lectured on the subject at the LSE, and so forth, but I thought you had to deliver the machine. There was a lot of machismo pleasure in outsiders fighting, and this kind of thing, but in the end it is results, you have to deliver the machine. My policy experts established very close relations with their relevant departments and I would go and sit on committees in departments to try to bring us all together.

Q194 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That was my next question. What was your relationship with the ministerial special advisers; did you have a good relationship, did they feed in, did they attend meetings? Obviously, you have just said that you did attend departmental meetings.

Lord Donoughue: Technically, I was the head of the special advisers, as Harold Wilson said, but it was not a role I ever took up, other than I did chair meetings of the special advisers, but I did not want to be held responsible for Tony Benn's special advisers and what they might be doing, so I left that one a fairly grey area. We did have meetings, not often but regularly, and I would invite in, to talk with my Policy Unit, the advisers of other ministers, because again I thought you have got to keep the communications and the network working together. They were a very mixed bunch, as I imagine they are today. Some of them were very political. We were more interested in those who brought in great expertise from the outside.

Q195 Mr Liddell-Grainger: It was interesting when you said Benn, because, if you read the Benn Diaries of that period when these special advisers, I cannot remember their names, they were called the same, were they not?

Lord Donoughue: Francis Morrell and Francis Cripps.

Q196 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is right, they were both Francis. There were wonderful scenes where he used to go and basically berate the Permanent Secretary and the Permanent Secretary would berate him. At that time, given that you could almost be the arbiter of the interdepartmental battles between the PLP really and that, did you get involved?

Lord Donoughue: If you are talking about Mr Benn, when he was at Industry, he was asked to produce a White Paper and his special advisers drafted that and the Department dissociated itself totally from it. There was another occasion when in Cabinet the Cabinet Office circulated the Department policy on oil and Tony Benn circulated to the Cabinet his own policy on oil, so you were dealing with a fractured situation there. On industry policy, in 1974 my Policy Unit actually wrote the White Paper that came out as the Department's White Paper under the instruction of the Prime Minister, so we were used in that role. That was a particularly difficult political situation because you had a Minister who had very bad relations with his Department and spent all of his time on the political side and whose energy policy certainly was geared towards making sure he got the National Union of Mineworkers' vote each year. If you were going to have an energy policy then it needed someone else to be doing it, and sometimes we supported the official policy and sometimes we did not, we had our own energy industry policy, but that presented a particular problem.

Q197 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I do not think that is the case now because things have changed, but do you get the feeling at all that sometimes it may be the case, where, like tax credits or CSA, there are incredibly contentious things which are an absolute nightmare for any government, that the Policy Unit sticks its finger in? There is a list of reports and there is nothing obvious in it, but do you think that also they are the sort of ultimate special adviser group that says to the department "Come on, let's go and sort it out; we'll do it;" do you think that goes on?

Lord Donoughue: I assume they try to exercise influence but really I do not know, but I do not think anyone knew in our time what we were doing.

Q198 Mr Liddell-Grainger: In any case, it did not matter anyway?

Lord Donoughue: Thank God, in some cases.

Q199 Kelvin Hopkins: I wonder if you would care to comment on my thought, that today government is less healthy, in many ways, than in your day? The tensions you talk about, the conflicts are what you expect in a pluralistic, political system, with a range of views, some of which may be more persuasive than others, but at least there is a range of views. The centralising of power and the elimination of opposition, which is now very obvious in Britain, is not that likely to lead to big political mistakes because there is no countervailing argument being put?

Lord Donoughue: I would not claim to be an expert on how it is conducted now. I only observe, like you do, and obviously it is more centralised in Number 10 and more prime ministerial, presidential, but there are other factors there. If you look at Harold Wilson's administration, the one in which I first served, if you think of someone of the scale of Barbara Castle, I think it was only number eight in that government, and you look down a government with Denis Healey and James Callaghan and Roy Jenkins, and so on and so forth, they were big barons. It was much more like a medieval system, and the monarch was sitting there with Lancaster and York and these and he had to keep them together but he could not just give them instructions. Whereas my feeling today is that perhaps not all the barons are quite as big, and so when you have a very big, powerful Prime Minister, it is more likely to work out that way. As William said at the beginning, you did need to rationalise and centralise power at the centre; that includes the Cabinet Office as well as Number 10.

Q200 Kelvin Hopkins: Without wishing to be rude about my parliamentary colleagues, the calibre of the people you were talking about is way above what we have now. It might be my impression, but is not that partly because the Prime Minister does not want challenge and because he is able to avoid challenge he can keep absolute control?

Lord Donoughue: I do not think I would want to comment on the Prime Minister. I would just make the point that then there were eight people in the Cabinet, any one of whom, had the other seven been killed by a bus, could have taken over as Prime Minister and been obviously qualified for the job, around since the war, having done lots of ministries. I think that is not the case today and I think you should be sympathetic with the Prime Minister in his position.

Q201 Chairman: We do not have the barons, we have a dual monarchy, have we not, which is a slightly different arrangement?

Lord Donoughue: Yes, though you have to think how powerful James Callaghan was then and how Roy Jenkins led what was virtually a quarter of the Party. They were pretty big, but I think having eight of them is much more democratic than having two of them.

Q202 Kelvin Hopkins: I think you make my point admirably and I do not disagree with that, but we have problems today which need to be sorted out politically. We mentioned the National Health Service, they do not know what to do, and I have my thoughts but my thoughts would not be regarded seriously by government or the Prime Minister, given that I am merely a backbench Labour MP. In your time, alternative thoughts were put forward and could be considered seriously. Someone in Cabinet might have said "We have a suggestion from our backbench committee and it seems to be worth discussing; how about discussing it?" One feels, these days, and I am sure it is true, that such alternative views, such opposition, would not be brooked. Is that not unhealthy?

Lord Donoughue: I cannot comment on today; it was as you wish it then.

Dr Plowden: I will just comment that, at its best, a strong Cabinet, with a well-supported Prime Minister and strong ministers round the table, is probably the most effective system for running a democratic nation that has been invented.

Lord Donoughue: I wholly support that; with a strong Cabinet Secretary as well.

Kelvin Hopkins: I agree, and I hope we can get back there. Thank you.

Q203 Mr Prentice: What is the ideal skills mix? Lord Donoughue, you talked about your Policy Unit being in single figures, and Dr Plowden mentioned 20 people round the table. What is the ideal skills mix for these philosopher kings sitting round the table?

Dr Plowden: They will not all be philosopher kings, I think, but that you have a number of people with varied backgrounds is one of the important points, people who have worked in business, in the trade unions, people from different social and racial backgrounds, who can bring at first hand some of the insights and knowledge that are required for decision-making. Also you need some of the skills which I think Stephen Aldridge pointed out, quite rightly, that he was looking for, good interpersonal relations, analytical capability, the ability to write and draft documents is still important. The list is very long, but I think variety, if anything, is the key for Stephen's team.

Lord Donoughue: Variety is good, but in the end there is no substitute for quality. In my sort of six or eight people, Economic Adviser, Andrew Graham, now the Master of Balliol College, number two Gavyn Davies, subsequently running Goldman Sachs and the BBC, David Piachaud, our most distinguished Social Administration Professor. These were the young ones, they were in their twenties. I think, if you can get really high quality, young people. The most stressful time of my over five years as Head of the Policy Unit was actually recruiting the team. I knew that the Unit would be successful and survive, as it did, or not, according to the calibre of those people, and I spent months 'phoning all my friends around the network, in the universities and in the City, trying to get the names of very able, young people, I did not want old people, like me, young people who were very bright. If you look at that group of people, another one is Head of Worcester College, Oxford, now, they were in their late twenties, early thirties, but they were really high quality; there is no substitute for quality.

Q204 Mr Prentice: Does the public have any role in developing strategy? At the moment we are about to embark on an energy review, there is a possibility of a new generation of nuclear power stations; a lot of people out there have very strong views on nuclear power. Is there a role for the public, at all, in any shape or form, in influencing the strategic direction of policy?

Dr Plowden: The answer must be, yes. If you take your example, of an energy policy that headed for nuclear power stations in the face of major public resistance, I think it would be catastrophic, they would not have confidence, it would lead to a series of short-term political crises as people lay down in front of the bulldozers. How far you institutionalise this by big conversations, and so on, I do not know, but you must take into account public opinion, as one, but only one, major factor in thinking about what is necessary for strategy.

Lord Donoughue: What is public opinion; our problem is that public opinion effectively becomes small interest groups and small prejudice groups, which can always get on the BBC 'Today' programme, but whether that is actually public opinion I do not know. Of course, a problem with nuclear power has been that the public has had strong views, and it could well be argued that a proper Strategy Unit would have made sure that we had more nuclear power in place by now.

Q205 Kelvin Hopkins: Just taking up this point about public opinion, surely, despite a battering by media, by whatever, there are still broad, philosophical predispositions about social justice, about levels of taxation and public services and privatisation, but these are not simple interest group arguments, these are broad, philosophical views, are they not, which should be represented in Parliament?

Lord Donoughue: I think they are. My impression of MPs, whatever their other failings, is that they are seriously exposed to the public and get a fairly good sense of what the public is thinking.

Q206 Chairman: You are not talking about Galloway now, are you? Can we have the last five minutes, if we may, on memoirs. Bernard, you bring interest and expertise not only as a memoirist but as someone who has seen the system grappling with memoirs, and I want to take us back almost exactly 30 years, to 13 January 1976, when you turn up at Number 10 for a Cabinet committee to discuss the Radcliffe Report, Radcliffe having been triggered by the Crossman business. There are Wilson and co., sitting around, wondering what to do with a recommendation from the Cabinet Secretary, and you give a very nice account, in your Downing Street Diary of how the discussion went. Could you just take us back to that discussion, to start with; how did it go?

Lord Donoughue: It was being pushed, through the Prime Minister, by the Cabinet Secretary, who wanted no more Crossman diaries, but sitting around the table were Barbara Castle and Tony Benn, who periodically were scribbling the text for their future diaries, and of course a number of Cabinet ministers might well see that as a well-earned pension. It was a strong move from the centre of the machine to control diaries and memoirs, and it did not work because the Cabinet committee was not sympathetic, and a number of them simply refused to sign what they were supposed to sign, on 15 years, or what have you.

Q207 Chairman: Who refused to sign?

Lord Donoughue: Roy Jenkins told me he would not sign, Barbara Castle told me she would not sign, Michael Foot told me he would not sign, so it just was not going to work. That was because I do not think it had been properly thought through, it was a knee-jerk, machine reaction to try to blot out people's memoirs, and I would hope that some committee, either here or in Whitehall, would be thinking through what rules you need, and I think you must have rules. The latest experience, with this man Meyer, just brings that home, and that is very damaging and you ought not really to have that; that is outrageous. How such a person can be chairing the Press Complaints Commission is explained only by the nature of the Press Complaints Commission. My view is that there are different categories of people. Career civil servants should have the strongest rules imposed on them and that should be a longer period of constraint, and for politicians and probably temporary civil servants it need not be as long. I think a career civil servant has obligations, in terms of discretion, and so forth, that are stronger than for anyone else. I think diaries are different from memoirs. I have published both. I waited 30 years before publishing my diaries. I think there is a firm rule that you should not publish diaries until the main players are off the stage. That should be the guide rule; it does not give you the precise time. Diaries can be the most hurtful because they reflect someone speaking in the short term, maybe angry or maybe not having thought it through, and, above all, not knowing that this was going to be recorded.

Q208 Chairman: You mentioned Meyer, but the kind of thing that Lance Price has done, working as a special adviser at Number 10, you think is completely wrong?

Lord Donoughue: It is wrong; it is completely wrong. Not just because I waited 30 years but I think diaries are particularly damaging, though historically very desirable, they are very important assets, so you need diaries but you do not need them brought out in order to get serialisation in the Daily Mail and make your £100,000, which they will only do overnight. I did a contract on my diaries in 1981, with large sums of money around, which I did not take because it required early publication. When I finally published them the newspapers were not interested in serialising them at all.

Q209 Chairman: This discussion 30 years ago though, from your account of it, looks as though Wilson did not want a tightening up and he had a kind of interest in it anyway?

Lord Donoughue: He did not want it, but John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, rather dominated him. Harold was excessively deferential to all the senior civil servants and John Hunt dominated him. Once, John Hunt used a very shrewd tactic. He was putting down an answer to a question, the question having been planted, which stated the Radcliffe rules as government policy. Harold was about to sign it when I saw it and I said "You can't sign that; that just commits the government and you haven't got your Ministers with you," and Harold went all wobbly and then said, no, he would not sign up, but he nearly did it.

Q210 Chairman: You and he were broadly on the liberal side of the argument then?

Lord Donoughue: I had been involved in the Crossman thing, so I was on that side, yes.

Q211 Chairman: The question now though is, if you are now saying that people are doing things which they should not do, quite different from the case 30 years ago, we can have new rules but how on earth do we enforce them?

Lord Donoughue: With career civil servants, I think that should be a longish period, whether it is diaries, 20 years, and memoirs ten or 15 years after the last events described. Career civil servants could not have it in post because they could lose their pensions. On the whole, they are people who are brought up to obey rules and most of them are absolutely decent. All the senior civil servants I worked with had no intention of producing them and, I am very sorry, I try to provoke them to but they think that is not what a career public servant does. I think it is different for politicians and temporary civil servants, and I think you would have a shorter period for memoirs, though longer for career civil servants than it would be for politicians and others, but I do think you need rules. It is alright without rules; without rules you depend on the decency of people and being honourable. The moment that public servants are not decent and honourable you need rules. It is like self-regulation; you can have self-regulation until they break the rules and then you need to impose rules.

Q212 Chairman: Clare Short was here last week, of course who left the Cabinet eventually over Iraq and then rushed into print.

Lord Donoughue: That was quite wrong.

Q213 Chairman: She gave a very strong argument for how it is the rawness of the moment that is the spur for publication and that it contributes to the argument. Even if you say that it is quite wrong, and we can argue about that, what kind of arrangement could you possibly have which would be enforceable in a case like that?

Lord Donoughue: You can have an arrangement that when Cabinet ministers sign the Official Secrets Act, or whatever, they sign for a period, it would not be a long period, I said specifically it is much less time for them. The rawness of the argument, of course, is what attracts the newspapers, with large sums of money. Nothing prevents that Cabinet minister from writing articles, appearing on the media, but putting it in a proper, balanced way, but I think, especially with diaries, that is totally unfair, because an individual may speak to someone else; would they speak the same if they knew the person was keeping a diary? I kept a diary but that was one thing I was very aware of, that the person would not speak the same. Frankly, in government, ministers are different, if people knew that half the officials around the table were keeping a diary, or something, I think the conduct of government would be very difficult. I imagine now in Washington our Ambassador's situation is not made easier, if he goes into the White House to discuss Iran's nuclear power situation, by the thought that next year it may be all there, in public.

Q214 Mr Prentice: Alastair Campbell kept a diary, and that was in secret. Do you think that affected the quality of decision-making, that people held back from expressing their real views about issues because they knew that Alastair Campbell would be writing it all down?

Lord Donoughue: It may have influenced how they expressed themselves. Alastair has not yet published that diary.

Q215 Mr Prentice: He is going to publish it, because he says it is his pension?

Lord Donoughue: Yes, and I understand that. When I left government, Downing Street, for some time I did not have a job, and with four small children, so I understand there are financial pressures, but he has not published it yet.

Q216 Mr Prentice: I know, but you could have got lots and lots of money in 1981, but 25 or 30 years later the newspapers were not interested, you told us that. If Alastair Campbell is going to get his million, he will have to rush to the publishers the day after the Prime Minister goes, to get the money?

Lord Donoughue: That is the choice for him.

Q217 Mr Prentice: It is just for him?

Lord Donoughue: The first consideration is that the characters are no longer on the stage to be damaged, and he would argue, when the Prime Minister has gone, that is the main character who is not there, but how long will Alastair have been out by then?

Q218 Mr Prentice: There was all the stuff about the Chancellor of the Exchequer being psychologically flawed, and so on, and if you are telling us that maybe it will be okay for Alastair Campbell to publish the diary on the day after Blair stands down as Prime Minister - ‑ ‑

Lord Donoughue: I have not said that. I said that is the first consideration, the characters should be off the stage. I think there should be a discreet period of time; but how long has Alastair been out?

Mr Prentice: My colleagues will have to help me; what, four years, or something like that?

Chairman: No, less than that, a couple of years.

Lord Donoughue: I think you could set timescales. In the end, if someone who has signed something breaks it, you are right. With a civil servant, you can stop their pension. I think, with a temporary civil servant, or with an ex-minister, you cannot do that. If someone is prepared to break that then it is telling you something about them.

Q219 David Heyes: I just wonder, with the passage of 25, 30 years between the events and publication of your diaries, did you submit yourself to this vetting process, did you experience it yourself? Did you submit your text for vetting by the Cabinet Secretary?

Lord Donoughue: I did not. My diaries survived the 30-year rule, so I did not have to do that. Anyway, I think Cabinet Secretaries have got other, more important things to do.

Dr Plowden: I wrote a book about the CPRS and did submit it to the Cabinet Secretary. I took account of some of his comments and not others, which I thought were silly.

Q220 David Heyes: Can you describe the process and how it impacted on your book?

Dr Plowden: The process, in this case, was to send him the manuscript and to say "Here it is; we propose to publish." This was with Tessa Blackstone. We were strongly discouraged from publishing, because, again, 20 years ago there was less of this going on and even temporary civil servants did not publish books. Nonetheless, we went through the hoops and submitted the manuscript to the Cabinet Secretary, who read it and made some comments, and some of them seemed to us to be sensible, he said "It will be damaging to the national interest if this is revealed and this is not," and "This is an improper thing to say." In some cases, he made a similar comment and we ignored it. It was a balance. At least we went through the hoops. We applied our judgment to his judgments on what it would be appropriate to publish.

Q221 David Heyes: There was some self-censorship going on then, in preparing the text?

Dr Plowden: We wrote the text we wanted to write. The self-censorship was only in response to his imposed censorship, is this reasonable censorship or not.

Lord Donoughue: If you have time periods and someone obeys the time periods, it is not clear to me that they need to submit that to a busy Cabinet Secretary. That is the advantage of having time limits.

Q222 Kelvin Hopkins: You make a very clear distinction between civil servants and politicians, with which I strongly agree. Has not the problem arisen because that dividing line has been blurred? People like Lance Price are now called a civil servant; he was not. When he came to us, I said "You're just a dodgy politician, like the rest of us. You're not really a civil servant." If the civil servant was, as you say, absolutely trustworthy and never published diaries, that would be the way it should be. Politicians one has got to deal with differently, but accept them as politicians and do not try to pretend they are civil servants.

Lord Donoughue: There is a problem there, with the Lance Prices, which applied to me, and we had long discussions of what were we, as special advisers, and we came to the conclusion that we were temporary civil servants, so by that time were subject to all the constraints of being civil servants and also got some of the benefits. Lance Price is the same. We were not quite full civil servants but we were not politicians either.

Q223 Mr Liddell-Grainger: There is one person whose diaries I wonder if you would think about, Stella Rimmington, who published diaries about her time as a spy chief. Those sorts of diaries, for which 30 years is very little, in certain things they have been up to, should they be banned from ever having diaries, or should they be done by official historians?

Lord Donoughue: I was surprised about Stella Rimmington, but I still think, if you designate her as a career civil servant then I would say, whatever it is, 20 years, or that kind of rule would apply, and she broke that, as I understand it, but I have not read them and did not study it. Obviously, that is a very sensitive area. When I said the basic guide rule is when people are off the stage, she has much stricter guide rules as to when anyone can suffer from exposure.

Q224 Mr Prentice: I suspect that, if people in the United States, the political class, were listening in to this exchange, they would find it pretty quaint. Jeremy Greenstock, our man at the UN and in Iraq, was before us last week and his book was blocked by the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. He gave me, perhaps us, the impression that we should be a bit more relaxed about it all. He mentioned that Paul Bremer, the American man in Iraq, had just published his memoirs and life goes on in the United States, there is a torrent of books from people who were in the administration and now no longer are in the administration and life continues. Do you think perhaps we are just too uptight about these things?

Lord Donoughue: No. We are more relaxed than we were when they were trying to do the Crossman Diaries, we are more relaxed, but I would not myself see the American system of government as necessarily a model that we should be aiming for. I would suggest having clear rules, having timescales, different categories of people, and that those rules are fairly relaxed. If you had a five-year rule for politicians and a 10- or 15-year rule for civil servants, I think that is reasonable. It is much more relaxed than it used to be, but there are other factors on the other side. I do think you need to protect people within government, especially officials, who are required, in what they see as a private situation, to give advice and to give it openly and independently, you need to protect them from being exposed, three years later, as the person who said "Bomb Iran."

Q225 Mr Prentice: I understand that, but should ministers be the final arbiters, because there was Jeremy Greenstock telling us that it was Jack Straw who said, as a matter of principle, the book should not be published? I suppose my question is should there be maybe an independent panel of the great and the good?

Lord Donoughue: I think that is a good suggestion.

Dr Plowden: Yes.

Q226 Mr Prentice: An independent panel?

Lord Donoughue: Yes, I think that is a good suggestion, but guided by certain basic rules, which you might recommend.

Q227 Chairman: The contrast with the United States though is that people move in and out of government all the time.

Lord Donoughue: There is not much of a career Civil Service there.

Q228 Chairman: Therefore, their behaviour is different in relation to memoirs.

Lord Donoughue: They are all like ministers.

Dr Plowden: I certainly would not want to rest on the say-so of the current minister, because the current insider will have his, or her, very strong, own reasons for not wanting certain things to be published when they are perfectly publishable.

Chairman: We are told that Jack Straw wants to come and tell us about all this, so we should have a good session with him. We have had a really interesting morning with you. Thank you very much for coming. As I say, as someone who was taught by you both 30-odd years ago, it has been nice being able to ask you some questions this morning. Thank you very much indeed.