|
CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 756-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION SELECT COMMITTEE
Thursday 20 April 2006 LORD BIRT Evidence heard in Public Questions 229 - 357
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Public Administration Select Committee on Thursday 20 April 2006 Members present Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair Mr David Burrowes Paul Flynn Kelvin Hopkins Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger Julie Morgan Mr Gordon Prentice ________________
Witnesses: Lord Birt, a Member of the House of Lords, gave evidence. Q229 Chairman: Let me call the Committee to order and welcome our witness this morning, Lord Birt. It is very nice to see you. As you know, we are doing an inquiry into what we call 'Governing the Future: Strategic thinking inside government 'and you seemed a good person to talk to, which is why we asked you. In fact we asked you to come before, did we not---- Lord Birt: You did, Chairman. Q230 Chairman: ----when you were still doing the job last year, and you were not able to help us at that point. Why was that, do you think? Lord Birt: As you know, Chairman, the Prime Minister thought Stephen Aldridge was the right person to help you on that occasion. Q231 Chairman: You were quite happy to come, were you not? Lord Birt: I think I was absolutely ready to accept the convention that it is for ministers to decide who should appear on their behalf. Q232 Chairman: You were quite happy to come, the Prime Minister did not want you to come and therefore you did not come? Lord Birt: I was very happy to accept it. Q233 Chairman: Thank you for that and thank you for coming today. What is strategy? Lord Birt: It is a much over-used and often abused word, Chairman. I think my definition of good strategy is a plan to achieve a defined outcome, usually a stretching and transformational outcome of some kind, and a robust, deliverable plan to achieve it. Q234 Chairman: We do not want to get into definitions here, but how is it different from policy? Lord Birt: Policy is a subset of strategy. In order to achieve that better outcome you will need many things. Obviously we are talking now in the domain of the public sector, but these things apply in other walks of life, most obviously the commercial sector as well. You will almost certainly need new policies, you may need new institutions, you may need reformed institutions, you may need different incentives, different skills, different capabilities and different capacities. You may need a whole host of things of which new policy may be one. Q235 Chairman: So strategy is not distinguished by the fact that it is long-term; it is a different kind of thinking about policy? Lord Birt: No. I think, not to be theoretical but to be practical, in most institutions (and I have had experience of strategy in a wide array of institutions), there are exceptions, but you are normally talking about something across three to five-year horizons, and you are normally aiming to make the world a better place or, in a commercial environment, massively to improve your profitability; in a public sector environment to improve outcomes for the citizenry. Q236 Chairman: Before we leave these definitions, what is forward strategy as opposed to strategy? Lord Birt: These are not my words or my terms, Chairman. I think forward strategy is just another way of saying what I have just said, which is strategy over the longer term, but in day-to-day parlance people often use the term strategy loosely to mean a plan to achieve a short-term objective. I, like everybody else, use the term loosely, but I think, in terms of the Committee's deliberations, it is most useful to think about it as something over the longer term. Q237 Chairman: I ask because clearly you would not have a backward strategy, would you? It is a bit of gobbledegook, is it not? Lord Birt: As I said, Chairman, except when I am speaking loosely, it is not a term I would use myself. Q238 Chairman: Let us quickly take stock of the area you are involved in. Looking at the letter of appointment that you got from Jeremy Heywood, the Prime Minister's Principal Private Secretary, he says, "The Prime Minister looks forward to seeing the work that will come out of this important new venture." What I wondered is what is this important new venture? Surely Government does this kind of thing all the time. What is the important new venture that you were called upon to do? Lord Birt: Historically, Chairman, I simply do not think that is true. I do not think Government has done this sort of thing in the past. I have not refreshed my memory on that letter of appointment, but it was not my first task for the Prime Minister. What year was that? Q239 Chairman: This is 2001. Lord Birt: I had obviously done some work for the Prime Minister in the year 2000. Q240 Chairman: That was roughly the time you started? Lord Birt: No, I had done a major project in the year before on the Criminal Justice System. Q241 Chairman: What is the important new venture that government was not doing that you were called upon to do in the strategy field? Lord Birt: In a nutshell (and I have to emphasise this was not work I did alone, I did it with a very large number of other people), I think government was moving to a position where it was engaged in whole system strategies, not looking at a narrow specific particular question but looking at systems in the round. The previous year I had looked, at the Prime Minister's request, at the Criminal Justice System in the round, which has many, many institutions in its component parts, and tried to understand how the whole system was working. What the Prime Minister wanted to do was to apply that methodology to other public sector areas, which then happened over the following years. It is simply not the case, so far as I am aware, that any government previously had ever done any work of that kind at all. If it had done, it has been well hidden away. Q242 Chairman: But someone looking at the structure of government, not just recently but over the long-term, will see government playing around with strategic institutions and strategic thinking, central policy review staff in the seventies under Heath and so on, and when you were brought in someone looking at the Government would have said, "Look, departments have their Strategy Units doing strategic thinking. Lord Birt: They did not, Chairman. They did not have them. Q243 Chairman: My understanding is that they did. You can tell us more about it. Departments have strategic work going on. The Government itself has a Strategy Unit, borne out of what was previously a Performance and Innovation Unit, with a head doing strategic thinking? Lord Birt: Yes. Q244 Chairman: I think the Prime Minister has another person who does strategy for him, currently Matthew Taylor, I think. He has got a Policy Unit in Number 10. What I am trying to get at is, in all that going on, what is this important new venture that you were brought in to do? Lord Birt: I think all those activities, Chairman, are more coherent than you make them sound. It was not so much that I was brought in to do something. This was a system undergoing change, and I think the reality was that the public sector had not yet embraced the tools that were, by that point, widely used throughout the private sector throughout the world. Even before I arrived I think this was starting to be recognised, and that period in the years following 2000 saw Government building up a capability, initially at the centre, to do the kind of far-reaching strategic thinking that had not been done hitherto but had been done widely in other places. The Prime Minister was asking others to create that capability, and it went through some slightly different manifestations but it ended up in the Strategy Unit, which is recognisably the kind of institution you would find in a major global corporation with a very similar set of skills available, and, indeed, now, I think, a rich national asset. Gradually some of that began to be replicated in the departments. There is not duplication between what the Strategy Unit does and what other units at the centre do. There are very clear distinguishing lines. You mentioned the Policy Directorate in Number 10. It has a different task, a different job, which I am happy to discuss if you wish. Q245 Chairman: Now that you have left, is it that the system has now been put into the proper strategic order? You have performed this important new task, it is done, strategic thinking in government is now secure and well established and you can leave and do other things. Lord Birt: I did not establish it, Chairman. It was established as part of the Cabinet Office by successive Cabinet secretaries. I was very happy indeed to work with the Strategy Unit. I did no strategy work by myself. All my work was done with quite large teams composed of members of the Strategy Unit and, generally, officials from departments. The Prime Minister asked me to lead on a number of different topics, but I worked with the Strategy Unit. The Strategy Unit did lots of work with which I was not involved at all. The answer to your question, therefore, is I feel no authorship of this but I am really proud to have been involved in it and I would say very strongly to the Committee that the growing capability at the centre - and you want to talk about strategy today but the centre has acquired new and important capabilities in other ways: for instance the Delivery Unit - we are starting to see develop in Britain an appropriate centre for government, which, in my view, is an asset for any future government of any political persuasion. I left Government in December feeling that I had seen a substantial and significant improvement in the capability of government. Q246 Chairman: We shall want to ask you more about that general point which you are making. Tell me if I am wrong, but the impression that I got was that your presence was quite considerably resented within government because departments asked, "Who is this person coming and trampling on our territory? We are doing strategic work. Who is this person to come and tell us about transport policy or criminal policy?" Lord Birt: You must tell me who these people are, Chairman. They did not say it to me. Q247 Chairman: Other people already doing strategy work in government said, "Who is this person coming in working separately for the Prime Minister when we already exist?" Were you a bit of an irritant around the system? Lord Birt: Chairman, I have no knowledge of people saying the kind of things that you have just repeated. I would observe only, and I observe this of all systems, that there is always something of a tension between the centre and in government the departments. In business you see exactly the same tension arising between the corporate centre and the operating divisions. It is in the nature of things that there will always be some tension. I am happy to discuss some of the reasons for that, if you wish. Chairman: No, that is interesting. I think Julie wanted to ask you about your payment or lack of it. Q248 Julie Morgan: Lord Birt, I am very interested in the nature of your appointment. We understand that you were not paid for this post during the four to five years you were in Downing Street? Lord Birt: Six. Q249 Julie Morgan: Six years you were in Downing Street. We wondered why you were not paid. Was it because there was no money to pay you or you offered your services for free? Could you tell us why you were not paid? Lord Birt: When I started in 2000 I had a number of commercial responsibilities, some of which remained for a number of years, and I thought it prudent that when I worked for Government it was better that I worked for free. In the first year I probably only worked a couple of days a week. As time progressed I worked more and more time, but the principle had been established that I would work for free and I was happy to work for free, though it became increasingly an odd experience to spend an increasing amount of your time doing a job which was unpaid. Q250 Julie Morgan: So you offered to work for free? Lord Birt: I did offer to work for free, yes, but it was not an issue. It was my view that this was better. Q251 Julie Morgan: What do you think about the fact that offering to work for free meant that you were in an advantageous position in order to take this sort of important role really, because people who could not afford to do it were not able to offer their services? Lord Birt: I think there are probably large numbers of very, very capable people who are willing to work for government for free - I have a lot of experience of that myself - because they are public spirited, but I do not regard this as a very a significant issue. I think it would have been perfectly possible for somebody to work in Number 10 performing the kind of role that I did, and being paid. The circumstances of my life made it better that I should not be paid, but I see no issue in principle about somebody doing the job and being paid. Q252 Julie Morgan: It may be there is not a fundamental issue, and I accept that people are public spirited and do things without pay, but I am slightly concerned about whether that does not remove you from some of the responsibilities of being paid. How can I describe it? If you are a minister, for example, you have a code of practice and if you are a civil servant, there are things you have to work within. Lord Birt: I was exactly the same. I was under exactly the same obligations as anybody else to maintain confidentiality and all the other obligations that are rightly placed on public servants. Q253 Julie Morgan: So you think this practice that does happen of people offering their services free is good? Lord Birt: I think it is in the public interest. It is in the public interest that people of talent and ability should participate and help the country to be better governed, and I had a lot of experience of people who did that. Q254 Mr Prentice: How did the issue of your employment crop up? Was it after a game of tennis with the Prime Minister or what? Lord Birt: I am not good enough on the tennis court to take on the Prime Minister. Q255 Mr Prentice: How did it happen? Would you take us through it? Did the Prime Minister say to you, "John, I would like you to work at Number 10"? Lord Birt: My detailed recollection is slightly lost in the mists of time because we are talking about six years ago. Q256 Mr Prentice: I would remember if the Prime Minister offered me a job? Lord Birt: Your day may come! As I recall, he asked to see me. I think I met him socially somewhere and he said, "When you finish at the BBC you must come and do some work for us", and I went in to see him at his request and, slightly to my surprise, he asked me to spend the next year of my life looking at the Criminal Justice System. Q257 Paul Flynn: Can I ask about the style of your performance. I have got the Drug Report here and I notice that every page is headlines and a low-case simple sentence. Every page is full of pie charts, bullet points, everything is repeated at least twice and further examples are given. It is exactly the kind of way that a good junior school teacher would communicate with an eight year old. Is this the way you considered it best to communicate with the Prime Minister? Lord Birt: I wonder how much experience you have had of the private sector: because if you went into any private sector institution, any major corporation---- Q258 Paul Flynn: I do not think you are answering the question. Do you think this is the right way to communicate with the Prime Minister? I have a number of other questions I would like to ask. Lord Birt: I am happy to come to that. I think you would find in any modern corporate environment exactly the same set of techniques being used. I think they are enormously valuable. I think it is an appropriate way in any organisation to communicate either with the Executive or with the wider organisation. It has all sorts of merits and advantages which I am happy to go into with you. Q259 Paul Flynn: The report itself is very different from anything that has been produced by government probably in the last 30 years in its objectivity, in the fact that it is evidence-based and it is free from the hysteria with which the subject of drugs is normally described. It is very different from what has been produced, very similar to reports like the Transform Report and the Select Committee Reports in this House in its conclusions. Are you disappointed with the response from government on the conclusions that you reached? Lord Birt: I am very happy to talk to the Committee about the sorts of issues that have been raised so far, namely the way in which government structures itself to address strategic questions, but I am afraid I do not want to go into any of the detail of my advice to the Prime Minister or the response to that advice. Q260 Paul Flynn: The purpose of our inquiry is that we believe there is a role for say a committee of the future that would look in this dispassionate way at these issues that have not been solved and that have bedevilled successive governments without any solutions coming out, and it is important to us if we assess the value of the existing bodies such as the Strategy Unit. In your report you made one conclusion, which was about the ineffectiveness of attempts to control drugs on the supply side, but governments - the American government and our government - are trying to do precisely that in Afghanistan and you point out the futility of this and how this was counterproductive in Colombia. If we can make a sensible judgment on the value of your work and the other bodies that are forecast in the future, we surely should know what likely effect it is having now on government policy? Lord Birt: I am happy to address the question in general with the caveat I have already expressed. I would say, and I have to emphasise, that this must not be characterised as my work. I had a great deal of help on all of the projects with which I was involved. Alongside that, there is a huge body of work developed by the Strategy Unit, and other parts of government, which has a very similar approach to the approach that you have identified in the Drug Report. The Committee may be interested in some of the methodology. Pretty much all Strategy Unit reports are in two phases. The first we used jokingly to refer to as a 'policy-free zone'; in other words, it was simply an attempt to describe, to get to the bottom of the matter in hand, to understand. The best way of understanding the future is to understand the past. It is a fantastically difficult thing to do. It often takes months and months of activity. Some of the pages that you refer to there, I can think of some of the pages in that report where a very distinguished civil servant spent six months of his life analysing the data which would give you the key insight reflected in one of those pages. So, the first phase was always to understand how we got to where we are now, what the forces in play are and, because trends emerge from that, where those trends may be leading: because the best way of understanding the future is to understand where trends may take you in the future. I think, almost without exception, the first phase of Strategy Unit reports in general, including the ones that I was involved with, helped change people's and departments' understanding of what the critical issues were. We then went on to a second phase (and again this is standard strategy methodology) where you often go into a deeper diagnosis because the first phase often tells you what the problems are. You may think you know what the problems are when you start off. Normally six months later, and the first phase would often take you six months or more to do, you have actually identified what the real problems are. You then often have to dig deeper into some aspects that you did not cover in the first phase and then, with really rigorous methodology, try to draw out solutions which are rooted in the diagnosis. Inevitably, at that point, you are analysing some of the obstacles in the way. Institutions, as I said earlier, may not be fit for purpose; they may be located in the wrong department; their incentive structure may be weak; and it is in the way of things at that stage of the strategy process that the system itself sometimes feels uncomfortable. However, what always happened is that there was an intense policy debate arising from the first phase of the analysis. I would say overall the work of the Strategy Unit has been very significant in changing people's perceptions of the true nature of problems. Often what the Strategy Unit and others working with it have recommended has been accepted, sometimes it has been a slow burn, sometimes it has been rejected as too uncomfortable. Q261 Paul Flynn: I think that is very encouraging, but, if you could look, the previous government's policies in this area were evidence free generally and you are providing evidence. As I say, I am full of admiration for this report. You said it had an effect on government departments. When the report was presented was it presented to the Prime Minister alone? Lord Birt: No. Q262 Paul Flynn: What was the circulation? Lord Birt: It was presented to all the key departments involved, of which there were many. Q263 Paul Flynn: Were you disappointed by the reaction? Lord Birt: I have already said that I am afraid I do not want to go into the detail of what recommendations were made or what the response was. I have tried to answer helpfully in general terms. Q264 Chairman: Were you building in assumptions about likely political acceptability to the work that you did? Was that part of the strategic process or was that something that was seen as completely separate? Lord Birt: Chairman, that is not an easy question to answer. Plainly, and I think again this is true of all Strategy Unit work, you have to have an understanding of the wider context and the likely response of those who will finally see the report, but I would say, generally speaking, all of those reports try to come up with policy recommendations which were rooted in the evidence; and I am very pleased that Mr Flynn has identified just how strongly evidence-based all of this work is that the Strategy Unit is involved with. All of the policy solutions sprang from the evidence and sometimes they were uncomfortable. You are all politicians. You know why sometimes ideas are very uncomfortable to existing, entrenched, embedded interests. Institutions, organisations, were often invented a very long time ago for a different purpose. It is very rare for any institution to be wholly fit for today's purposes. Of course, in the real world, there was discomfort, but we tried always to tell it how it was and to draw out of the analysis the most robust policy and organisational solutions, many of which were accepted, not all of which were, and I quite understand why they were not. I did not operate as a politician in this exercise. I tried to do justice to the evidence and it was for politicians to make up their minds about the political acceptability of solutions. Q265 Paul Flynn: One of the attractions of a possible committee in the future is to extend the horizons of politicians from the short-term and the tabloid headlines the next morning and their far horizons at the date of the next General Election. Do you see the approach that the Strategy Unit and others have applied being useful if one has a body of parliamentarians or politicians looking into how policies will work out in 10, 25, 100 years' time? Lord Birt: Anything that will put pressure on politicians of all persuasions to think strategically is something that I would personally support, because we know that so many of the pressures day-to-day on politicians, and it does not matter which government is in power, in the short-term press on the perception of something going wrong today. There are some forces in play, however, which should encourage all politicians to think strategically in the long-term. Frankly, if you are going to be in office for one or two terms and if you act strategically from the beginning, then your policies will be more robust and you will have better outcomes during the period when you are in office. If you have an eye on history, all politicians should want to implement the kind of solutions which may be difficult in the short-term but will make the world a better place in the long-term. I think that it would be a good thing for Parliament to press on the Executive to be more strategic and, frankly, I do not believe at the moment that Parliament does that. I think often it too presses on the short-term. Where I think I part company with you is the notion of a single committee doing that. I would suggest that it should be the job of all committees in the sector that they cover, not just to take evidence on the political difficulties of the moment, but also to press departments on their long-term plans to achieve better outcomes. When departments have published their strategies, I think there was a disappointing lack of public debate about those strategies, including in Parliament itself. If I may say so, I think the Committee is thinking about the right issue; I am not sure it is the right solution. Q266 Paul Flynn: Have you any view on the effectiveness of these similar committees in Israel and Finland and other countries? Lord Birt: I am afraid you have greater knowledge than me about them. Q267 Mr Burrowes: You mentioned that you are challenging entrenched institutions not being fit for purpose. What institutions would you include in that definition? Lord Birt: I have to say what I said earlier, that I am happy to talk in general terms. Q268 Mr Burrowes: In general institutional terms rather than particular substantive policy? Lord Birt: I think what I said is a general truth about organisations, and it is true in the private sector as well. Q269 Mr Burrowes: You say "institutions". You must be able to talk generally about what institutions you mean. Do you mean the Civil Service? Lord Birt: I am talking about anything you might describe as an organisation. It might be a company, it might be a department, it might be a body at arms length from a department. All of us have experiences of what happens to institutions. They lose their way. As I said earlier, they were designed for another purpose in another era and they are not any longer fit for purpose today. Institutions are often inward looking, they do not pay sufficient attention to what is happening in the world around them, they do not understand the implications of change. In the private sector what typically happens to such institutions is that they get taken over and revitalised by a new management. Unfortunately, in the public sector there is no similar mechanism. Q270 Mr Burrowes: Obviously we have the electorate. Lord Birt: There is in terms of removing the Government of the day, but down in the heart of the system there may be institutions which have stayed on similar tracks for a very long period of time. Q271 Mr Burrowes: Does it take an outside adviser to be able to think in that way and challenge in that way? Lord Birt: I do not think there is any one way. Q272 Mr Burrowes: It could be done without you? Lord Birt: Absolutely. I have already made clear that I think the Strategy Unit is a significant advance in government capability; I think the same has to happen in the departments. It is in the process of happening but there are many departments that still need to strengthen their strategic capability and many institutions, under the umbrella of those departments, do as well. If you have a significant strategic capability in any part of the system, then it should keep you alert and aware providing that the whole Executive is listening, and it should not be necessary for outsiders to come in. Q273 Mr Burrowes: You say "the whole Executive". There is now an appropriate centre for government, but is it appropriate to have in the centre for government personal appointments to the Prime Minister beholden to the Prime Minister rather than necessarily the Cabinet? Lord Birt: I think it is entirely appropriate. Prime Minister's in all countries at all times have wanted to have around them their own advisers, and I think it is reasonable, right and proper. As I have already said, the ideal is that organisations should have their own strategic capability, but there is no organisation that does not from time to time benefit from having outsiders take a look at them. It happens in the real world the whole time, for a variety of different reasons. Outsiders can bring a fresh eye; they can bring challenge. Often organisations are on tracks. They are operating, as I keep saying, because that is how they used to operate and they have a set of perceptions which guide them day-to-day but often they are unaware of other things that are happening in the world, and you often need an outsider to come in to expose the wider context. Q274 Mr Burrowes: But you do not last long. It is all short-term outside appointments and then you move on. What about that permanent Civil Service involvement? Are they sidelined now? They simply have short-term advisers who are in favour for a short time and then you move on? Lord Birt: No, I feel really strongly that what we should be talking about is embedding a new capability in government itself which is not particular to the government of the day, and that is what we are in the process of doing. Q275 Mr Burrowes: Or, indeed, the Prime Minister of the day? Lord Birt: Or, indeed, the Prime Minister of the day, yes. The Strategy Unit, as I said earlier, should be an asset for any Prime Minister. Q276 Mr Burrowes: But your personal appointment was personal to the Prime Minister. Rather than the Government or the future direction of government, it was very personal to the Prime Minister. Lord Birt: I do not grasp the point you are making. Q277 Mr Burrowes: If you are part of that appropriate centre, you are part of a personal appointment to the Prime Minister rather than necessarily part of ensuring the future government---- Lord Birt: You would have to talk to the Prime Minister about that, but I think it is reasonable for Prime Ministers, if they perceive a problem, to seek a solution to it. This Prime Minister did not seek a short-term solution. He has worked extremely hard to build the capability of government itself, not just for his sake but for the sake of future governments. Q278 Chairman: When the Prime Minister says and does things that are designed to strengthen the centre of government - that was part of the intention when he came in, thinking the centre was too weak and lacking in strategy capability? Lord Birt: Yes. Q279 Chairman: Do you think we just need a sort of full-bloodied Prime Minister's department that acts as the strategic centre of government? Lord Birt: I do not find labels particularly helpful here because the underlying implication plainly is that the Prime Minister is too powerful. I rather prefer myself to ask: what is the appropriate capability that the centre of government should have? As I keep saying, those questions are not just specific to government, they are specific to all organisations and systems. I think it is true that the centre of government was historically weak. We have talked about the strategic dimension, but the centre of government had no ability to understand whether departments were delivering on what they said they were going to, until the institution of the Delivery Unit, a conventional performance measurement capability you would find in any corporate environment: are the operating divisions doing what they have said they are going to do? Have they got a lifetime plan to deliver these outcomes and are these plans on track? The unit that Michael Barber started is doing these things, and so I would be amazed if any future government did not want to continue to do that. We have not talked about another really important thing that has been going on, which is improving the all-round capability of government to deliver, in an ever more complex world, the reform of the Civil Service itself. Q280 Chairman: No, we shall ask you about that, but I just want to understand this precise point so that we are clear. To take your own methodology, the analysis is that the centre of government and its strategic capability is historically weak. What I want to know from you now is: is it now powerful enough and does it exist in the right form? Lord Birt: I think it is now powerful enough at the centre. I think the Strategy Unit is something that not only any British government should be very pleased to find but any government anywhere. It is very interesting that governments across the world are observing what is happening in Britain and are coming to understand and study and no doubt in due course to replicate. Where I think work remains to be done, as I have already indicated, is in the departments themselves. There is a similar problem in the departments to the one that was historically true in the centre. The departments themselves are gradually acquiring the appropriate capability in their own centres to manage their own affairs, which is not just about strategy, it is about finance and how you harness technology and a whole host of questions of that kind. We are in the process of seeing departments develop this modern capability, as I would see it, and obviously Andrew Turnbull went a long way in leading this process. Gus O'Donnell continues to lead the charge, but I think we would all recognise that there remains work to be done before all the departments themselves have the right kind of capability. I think increasingly the centre of government itself does. It is very, very close to having all the right capabilities now. Q281 Chairman: Where do you think the Cabinet sits in this picture? We are supposed to have a system of Cabinet. How does the Cabinet sit in this system of strategic capability? Lord Birt: The Cabinet has bee exposed to all of this cross-cutting work in all situations. Where we have this issue about the role of leadership at the centre, and the appropriate relationship between the centre and, in this case, departments... Q282 Chairman: No, but this is quite important, so I want to pursue it. We are beefing up Number 10? Lord Birt: It is not Number 10 actually, it is the wider centre. Hardly any of this is Number 10 that we have been talking about. Q283 Chairman: We are beefing up the centre. You came in to work for the Prime Minister to develop strategic capability around the Prime Minister; and you think it is also important to beef up the strategic capability of departments. What I am asking you is how about the beefing up of the strategic capability of the Cabinet? Where does the Cabinet sit in all of this? Lord Birt: I think one of the things (and I do not know whether you have taken evidence on this) that has been happening is that the Strategy Unit has been supporting the Cabinet committee system. I do not see any difficulty myself between the role, as I have already described, of leadership that comes from the centre, particularly on cross-cutting issues, particularly on trying to get the departments themselves to create a greater capability, and, as in any organisation, all the key figures (in this case Cabinet ministers) coming together to stand behind the broad strategic direction of the Government itself and to endorse particular policies which ideally are strategically rooted. Q284 Kelvin Hopkins: I have to confess a deep scepticism about what you have been saying so far, but put that to one side. Why was the Prime Minister so determined for you not to come to see us before you left his employment? Lord Birt: That is your characterisation. I doubt he was determined. You are asking the wrong person. You must ask the Prime Minister. As I recall, you did ask the Prime Minister, did you not? That honestly is not a matter for me. You must ask others. Q285 Kelvin Hopkins: Yes, but we were told that Stephen Aldridge was an alternative suitable substitute, he was the civil servant leader of the Strategy Unit, which is clearly a strategy which has been played down and now only looks at marginal issues? Lord Birt: No, that is simply not the case. Q286 Kelvin Hopkins: We looked at this recently and it clearly did not have the influence and power that you had at the centre? Lord Birt: No, that is quite wrong. Honestly, either you have the wrong information or you have drawn the wrong conclusions from it. Let me respond. It is simply not true. The Strategy Unit is a major unit, not only valued by the Prime Minister but I think by all ministers who encounter it, and the unit is responsible for a very large body of work, much of which I was unaware of. They are not in any sense marginal, they are absolutely central to the formulation of government policy. I was involved in a relatively small number of pieces of policy work over six years, not the vast number that the Strategy Unit was, and I was additionally involved in some of the matters we have touched on, which is building the broader capability of government itself. Q287 Kelvin Hopkins: I have not got the list here, but I remember the list included things like alcohol strategy, which is important? Lord Birt: Extremely important. Q288 Kelvin Hopkins: But it is not the same as, going to the other extreme, declaring war, which is really serious, or, indeed, the future of the health service, the future of education. Lord Birt: But the Strategy Unit was involved in all of that work. I am sorry if I was not clear. The Strategy Unit provided most of the soldiers on those occasions as well as the departments themselves. These were large teams of people. Q289 Kelvin Hopkins: Was there not a change when Geoff Mulgan left and was replaced by Stephen Aldridge, who was very much a Geoff Mulgan but writ small, was he not? Lord Birt: Honestly, I think these are offensive terms. Q290 Kelvin Hopkins: I am trying to get the truth out. Lord Birt: Yes, but I think it is quite wrong that you should malign individuals in this way. I worked closely with both of those people and they are both exceptionally able, very, very skilled strategically in both instances and both of them are very capable and were, in the case of Geoff, and are, in the case of Stephen, enormously capable leaders of their unit. I had a different role. It did not in any way subvert the role of the leadership of the Strategy Unit. Q291 Kelvin Hopkins: We can debate that another time at greater length, but the impression I have is that the Prime Minister does not trust the Civil Service, does not trust the Cabinet, certainly does not trust Parliament, and that he looks for someone, or a small group of people, whom he does trust, and you were one of those. What is it about you that he trusts? Lord Birt: I do not accept that characterisation of the Prime Minister for one minute. He is a great admirer of the Civil Service, as am I. This is a great national asset. The Civil Service is full of extremely talented, able and capable people utterly dedicated to public service, very independently minded, never the creature of any one government. I felt privileged to work with them. I have already made clear that I think there are all sorts of ways in which a modern Civil Service needed to gain new skills and capabilities, but I have never had anything myself other than the greatest of respect for civil servants, and I know that that is the Prime Minister's position, but the Prime Minister is a challenging person. One of his strengths is that he always wants to do better, he always wants to challenge, he always wants to understand. Complacency is not built into his nature, and so he will keep challenging; but that is not the same as suggesting that he does not have a great trust in the inherent strengths of the British Civil Service and his ministers. Q292 Kelvin Hopkins: That is not the picture that we get from reading a recent article by Sue Cameron in the Financial Times, who has written a very long piece about the difference between life under Sir Gus O'Donnell and under his predecessor. Lord Birt: I read lots of those pieces. I had the privilege of being in the heart of government for six years and I very rarely recognise the truth as I experienced it from them. Q293 Kelvin Hopkins: One particular question. The Prime Minister asked you to lead some work on the future of transport. There are lots of people who know a lot about transport and have good, intelligent thoughts about how we should manage and run our transport systems for the future; indeed, I know a lot about it myself but I am not the sort of person the Prime Minister would ever ask, and I appreciate that, but why did he want you to lead the transport research? Do you have any knowledge of transport? Lord Birt: You are again, I think, asking a question more appropriately put to somebody else. I wonder if there is something simple that I may not have made sufficiently clear to you, which is that I did not sit in an office and look out of the window and wonder how to make the world a better place. Who do you think I worked with? I worked with the most expert people in government and in the outside world who brought a huge body of knowledge to bear, not least the extraordinarily capable research facility within the Department for Transport itself. It was a large team, it was a multi-disciplinary team, which is something that I do not think has been drawn out so far. These Strategy Unit teams are composed of economists, of mathematical modellers (often coming from the outside world; I have worked with some modellers of extraordinary distinction). In addition, some of the team have business analyst skills - Mr Flynn and I touched on this earlier - who are capable of examining a mass of information and distilling out of it key insights; so it was a multi-disciplinary team heavily involving the key experts in the Department for Transport. My job was to marshal the work and to draw out of it the critical insights for the benefit of the Prime Minister and, I hope, for the wider benefit of Whitehall itself. Q294 Kelvin Hopkins: The impression you give is of a collegiate approach, discursive, and whatever. The impression of the outside world certainly is that there are decisions made at the centre and driven out and that it is the job of ministers, departments and Parliament to do what the centre says, not to have a view? Lord Birt: It was not my experience of how the Prime Minister operated. He is a very evidence-based person, he is very happy to be exposed to very uncomfortable analysis, he does not shy away from being exposed to radical notions. He involves his colleagues but he is a challenging person, and I think that is right and that is why I was very happy to work with him for six years. Q295 Kelvin Hopkins: One last question. I heard the reference to evidence-base and I did gasp slightly because there are so many areas, I think, where the evidence suggests that the opposite of what the Government is doing would work better. I just take one example. PFI is horrendously expensive, the Treasury is getting twitchy about paying the bill for it and the evidence is that it should be dumped and we should go back to funding things by cheap public investment with government borrowing from the money markets, which would save the tax-payer vast sums of money and retain things in the public sector. That is an evidence-based argument that I put and yet it is ignored by government. Why is that? Lord Birt: That is not an issue that either I studied or would like to comment upon. Q296 Mr Liddell-Grainger: If you look back, Lord Birt, at your six years in government, what are your three crowning achievements? What are the three things you can look at outside this place and say, "I did that"? Lord Birt: This is like being on Desert Island Discs! Q297 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Yes. Let us go for it. I will ask for your favourite song in a minute! Lord Birt: I cannot answer the question. Q298 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Come on? Lord Birt: No, I cannot. Q299 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Why not? Give us an insight? Lord Birt: I would have to dig a hole in the ground and speak into it! Q300 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is the worry, is it not? This is a government of targets. What is your target? What have you done to say, "I have hit my target"? Lord Birt: I am not sure I can add anything to what I said before. I was very happy, very privileged to come in in 2000. I have had some of the most extraordinary, fulfilling and happy experiences of my life. I have seen the capability of government in the period grow enormously and I am happy to have been on the team, but I would not wish to extract anything that I felt I was myself personally responsible for. It is just not in the nature of the way government works. I hope I was valuable, but I do not want to suggest that I was responsible for any particular achievement. Q301 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You sound like a child of the sixties, happy with life's experiences! Lord Birt: I am a child of the sixties! Q302 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You sound as though you are smoking dodgy fags or something. There must be something you can tell us. What have you done? You have sat in an office in there and you cannot tell us anything? Lord Birt: No, I would be happy to tell you lots of things---- Q303 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Give us a clue. Binge drinking has gone up. Lord Birt: ----but you will have to take me for a drink! Q304 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is an open invitation. Annie's Bar at twelve! Come on, Lord Birt, there must be something you can tell us that you have achieved. Give us a clue? Lord Birt: I have nothing to add to what I have just said. Q305 Mr Liddell-Grainger: All right. You are now outside. You are looking in. You have moved on. You are looking at the Civil Service, you are looking at the departments and you can look at them objectively. Who is failing? Lord Birt: Who is failing? Q306 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Yes, which departments are the failures? Lord Birt: Again, you seem to want to ask me questions which I am sure you realise I will not want to answer! It is not appropriate that I share with you all of the insights that I gained in government. It is not. These are matters for others. The answer to your question may well come out of Gus O'Donnell's capability reviews. Let me not dodge. I am not going to name names, it is quite inappropriate, but not all departments are strong, not all of them have the right measure of capability. All the ones that I have experience of are in a process of steady -and sometimes better than steady - improvement, but we have not gone on to talk about some other things. Let me be specific in order to give you something and purge your frustration! If you look at an area which we have not discussed, which is financial capability in government, would anybody suggest that historically the financial capability within the average Whitehall department was really strong when compared with a modern corporate finance capability in the private sector? The ability to delve down and understand in detail how money is spent, to relate it to outcomes - are very difficult and require advanced skills and capabilities. Whitehall has not traditionally had the model of a director of finance. That is all changing. Mary Keegan of the Treasury is leading a drive to improve the capability of the financial function across government, but if you said to me: do I think that the average department has the equivalent financial capability of a major global corporation? I would say, "No, it does not yet have it", and I could give similar examples in other areas. I think there are some departments that have worked really hard at this and are at the top end of the scale, and some, in the way of things, that are laggards. I am not going to name names. You would have to ask Gus O'Donnell that question. Q307 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Come on, Lord Birt. You are a frustrating man, sir. I can think of IT projects, tax credits, pensions, single farm payment, to name but four that are disasters and here you are, six years in government, in the centre, in a spiral staircase across the road, and what have we got out of you? Pitifully little. Lord Birt: I am sorry. Q308 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You have got to have a personal view? Lord Birt: I do. Of course I have a personal view. Q309 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Let us take tax credits. You cannot answer it? Lord Birt: I have tried to explain, I just think it is not appropriate for somebody who worked for the Prime Minister for six years and was privy to a lot of confidential discussion. I do not want to come out and parade a set of insights. Q310 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am not asking you what is not in the public domain. Lord Birt: I have tried to be helpful to the Committee in terms of setting out the broad picture. Q311 Chairman: What is it that makes a department strong and what is it that makes it weak? Lord Birt: We are now not talking about politics, we are talking about something which would be true under any government and under any minister. It is a good question. I have touched on many aspects of it already. The place where I would start is a very deep system-wide understanding of the sector over which it has oversight. Beyond that it has to have all the obvious things: it has to have capable operational civil servants supervising the key dimensions of policy; but, importantly in a modern organisation, it also has to have world class skills in some of the other areas we have been discussing, ie in finance, the ability to pull apart the department's finances; and also in technology, where also a department has to have a system-wide overview. Technology is hugely important today as we all understand. Having an overview of the ways in which you can harness technology to improve public outcomes in your sector is again a relatively new occurrence in Whitehall; or even having a CIO[1]. All the CIOs are not yet at the top table in their departments, and I think they should be. Also, finding the public sector equivalent of somebody to run the marketing function - but for marketing here to mean understanding the citizen, what does the citizen want in this particular domain, how are services delivered by the system? Are they delivered satisfactorily? Are they delivered seamlessly? HR is only gradually being professionalized across Whitehall. I mean introducing modern HR capabilities so that you make sure you not only recruit the most talented workforce but you develop it, you train it and you incentivise it. I think that is work in progress. I would look to see a department, like a modern corporation, at the top level has an appropriate range of skills directing the department's affairs. Q312 Chairman: These are the criteria of a good department. If a department lacks these things, whose responsibility is that? Lord Birt: I think it is the Cabinet Secretary's. Andrew Turnbull led a lot of work in this domain which has not received enough public notice. We are seeing some really significant things happening. We are seeing the professionalisation of the support functions. This is not a technical issue, this is really important. How can you take a holistic overview of institutions and sectors unless you have got the best quality modern skills at the top level in your department to enable you to do it? Andrew Turnbull led the beginnings of the process, creating centres of excellence in the Cabinet Office and the Treasury to lead the support functions, which is very, very significant. I think the overall responsibility for Whitehall's effectiveness rests with the Cabinet Secretary. The government of the day has a responsibility to drive it, to make the quality of government better, but it is basically in part an investment in future capability and I think it is for Sir Gus to lead that process. Q313 Mr Prentice: Why was it necessary for you to be based at Number 10? Lord Birt: Because I was working for the Prime Minister and if you worked at Number 10 you were in close proximity to him. Q314 Mr Prentice: The Prime Minister's strategy unit is based in Admiralty Arch which is --- Lord Birt: --- a short walk away. Q315 Mr Prentice: How often did you see the Prime Minister? Did he wander into your office for a brainstorming session? Lord Birt: When you finally get your invitation to join the Government you will discover that there is not much opportunity for people ambling around and chewing the cud. It is a very intensive business. Every minute of the day is scheduled. I saw the Prime Minister always when it was appropriate to see him and never unnecessarily. Q316 Mr Prentice: How often? Lord Birt: I always operated a simple principle, which was either he asked to see me or I asked to see him when I had something significant to say to him. Q317 Mr Prentice: It is a very simple question. On average, how often did you see the Prime Minister on a one-to-one basis? Lord Birt: I would probably have seen him - I am absolutely guessing now - 30 or 40 times a year, something like that. Q318 Mr Prentice: So once a month or something like that. Lord Birt: That is more than once a month. I would say once a week to once a fortnight, probably more likely once a fortnight. Q319 Mr Prentice: You left after six years. You said it was a very fulfilling time in your life. After six years had you become institutionalised? Lord Birt: I do not think anybody dealing with me would have said so. Q320 Mr Prentice: Did you have any fresh insights to bear? After six years at the centre of government did you feel that perhaps you had just run out of steam? Lord Birt: Absolutely not, no. There are always new issues being thrown up. As you deal with one set of issues a new set arises. Government is no different from anything else. Q321 Mr Prentice: I know you were on an unpaid contract. Did you want to leave Number 10? Lord Birt: My leaving was for purely personal reasons and had absolutely nothing to do with my time at Number 10. My preference would have been to stay on, and that is what the Prime Minister wanted, but for personal reasons I had to leave. Q322 Mr Prentice: At the very outset you told us there had been a substantial improvement in the capability of Government. Is policy-making better now than it was six years ago? Lord Birt: Yes. Q323 Mr Prentice: Let us take policy-making in the area of health. That is better, is it, with this huge restructuring that is going on at the moment? Lord Birt: It is, yes. Q324 Mr Prentice: What about education? You have had particular responsibility for education. Policy-making is better in education as well, is it? Lord Birt: Absolutely. Q325 Mr Prentice: Were you surprised when the Director of Education in Durham, which covers the Prime Minister's own constituency, said that the current Education Bill "means the end of state education"? That is a man who has been working in education for 34 years. Lord Birt: I have to answer that question at a high level. I answered yes to all of those questions because I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Government has an infinitely deeper understanding of the total education environment and the total health environment. There are innumerable problems that policy has to cope with in both systems. Do I think we have analytical clarity about what the problems are? Yes. Do we have a broad sense of what better outcomes we want to achieve over time? Yes. Are those outcomes difficult to achieve in enormously complex systems involving employing very large numbers of people? Of course they are difficult. Will the path from where we were to a better future be a difficult one? Of course it will be. It is true in all spheres of human activity. If you are trying to transform a private sector company you have exactly the same problems. Strategy is hard, intellectual work, it can take a very long time and you have to wrap a wet towel around your head; but implementation is much harder in all systems. It is very hard to bring about massive organisational change. The result is never perfect. When politicians are in oppositional mode they pick on all the imperfections. There will always be imperfections, there will always be things that do not go right. Changing organisations is really hard. Institutions do not start with the right skills. They do not start with the right capabilities. They will often have to acquire them along the way. The progress from where you are to a better place will be generally a rocky one. Q326 Mr Prentice: Should we trust the experts? I have been listening to you carefully and it seems that government is really a technocratic managerial thing. You train people up so they have an understanding of what is happening out there. They are the experts and we should be guided by their recommendations. Lord Birt: No. Q327 Mr Prentice: No? Lord Birt: In the end politicians must determine the public outcomes they wish to achieve, and different political parties will have legitimately different perspectives on what those outcomes are. What we are talking about is, whatever party is in power, whatever better outcomes they wish to achieve, they should have the aid and assistance of a well-run, well-organised, skilled Civil Service to help them to deliver those outcomes; and for those outcomes to be delivered you have to have an evidence-based system. It does not matter what political party you belong to, you will not get to those better public outcomes without a really deep understanding of the evidence base; and that has been one of the gains of the last few years. Q328 Mr Prentice: I do not want to use jargon but sometimes it is impossible not to. Crosscutting policy work, is that working well or do we still have the old Whitehall model where policy is made "silo" style in each department? Lord Birt: This is a good question. That is where we came from. I think it is a myth to suggest that, if you go back into history, the departments themselves had a holistic policy in their areas. I think the reality is that the different parts of the department did have their own policies, but the departments themselves did not unite those policies together. That is the world we come from. You might describe it as a kind of micro-policy world. We are in transition to a world which is more strategic, which tries to pull all these things together and make them whole. It is going to be an imperfect journey. A lot of the really hard things in government actually involve five or six departments and in all systems it is really hard - in the jargon - to manage across the matrix. Q329 Mr Prentice: There is no point me asking you for an indication of some policies which have failed or are in the process of failing because government departments are not working well together. There is no point me asking you that question. Lord Birt: Is that a question? Q330 Mr Prentice: I am not going to get an answer, am I? Lord Birt: It is a world of greys rather than blacks and whites. Q331 Mr Prentice: Let me talk about a shining white issue here. You talk about a strategy having a three to five year horizon. You told us earlier that the Strategy Unit did a huge amount of work that you were unaware of. Lord Birt: Uninvolved with. I would sometimes be aware of it but not involved. Q332 Mr Prentice: Does it surprise you to hear that the Strategy Unit is doing no work whatsoever on the replacement of Britain's nuclear deterrent? A decision has to be made, we are told by the Prime Minister, in this Parliament, that is within your three to five year horizon. Are you shocked that such a momentous decision, costing perhaps up to £20,000 million, should not warrant the intellectual clout of examination by the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit? Lord Birt: I am glad you are such an admirer of its skills and works. My knowledge is no longer up-to-date. I think the important thing to say is that there is indeed an energy review, which I have absolutely no doubt, from my knowledge before I left Government, is going to be exactly what I hope you would wish, which is an evidence-based review. I know for certain that there are people involved in that review that have come from the Strategy Unit and have the sort of skills that you would hope would be brought to bear on an extremely important question. Q333 Mr Prentice: I am not talking about nuclear power, I was talking about the nuclear deterrent. Lord Birt: I am terribly sorry. Forgive me. I heard one word and answered the wrong question. The Strategy Unit is confined almost exclusively to domestic policy. Q334 Mr Prentice: But it does non-domestic work as well. We had the list circulated before us and we had the opportunity to speak to the head about it. Lord Birt: From my knowledge and recollection, it occasionally went into foreign policy areas. In the context Mr Flynn identified earlier, for instance, when the Strategy Unit looked at drugs policy, it was impossible to look at drugs policy without looking at the drugs supply route around the world. To the best of my knowledge it has never done any pure foreign policy or defence work. That is a different part of the woods. The foreign affairs/defence/intelligence capability is differently organised and I had very little to do with that myself. Q335 Mr Prentice: Have you read the Labour Party Manifesto? Lord Birt: A long time ago. Q336 Mr Prentice: We only had the election in May last year. Lord Birt: That is a year ago. If you were going to give me a quiz on it --- Chairman: It is a preliminary to another question. Q337 Mr Prentice: It is a very straightforward question. A year is not such a long time in politics. Have you read the Labour Party Manifesto? Lord Birt: I did read it at the time, yes. Mr Prentice: Because it has "forward" there; that is all about a "forward" strategy. Q338 Chairman: You mentioned the energy review. The Government is doing the energy review as an internal exercise, minister-led. We had the pensions review as an external exercise, a big outsider. How do we choose between these models of doing reviews? What are the criteria? Lord Birt: It is not my choice. I think it is horses for courses. There are different paradigms. There are, as I am sure Mr Aldridge shared with you, some things which are done for the Prime Minister alone, where he wants to think very privately about some issue of the day, and the circulation is low. On the other hand, I think Adair Turner has done an absolutely outstanding job on pensions. That is a very good example of a distinguished, independently-minded, challenging individual working with a body of expertise and laying bare the real choices for us all in a non-partisan way. That plainly has a huge virtue in raising the quality of public debate. As a citizen, the more we have of the latter the better. The more our democracy is well informed and our debate is civilised and informed the better. Q339 Chairman: The model we used to have to do these big strategic inquiries was the Royal Commission which we have dumped. Why have we dumped them? Lord Birt: I think again you are asking the wrong person. I have no great experience of Royal Commissions except of being on the receiving end in a former life. I personally think that is a less effective model most of the time. There are some issues before us on which it would be nice to build cross-party consensus, and take out of the day-to-day of politics and maybe we need models which enable us to do that. The weakness of the Royal Commission model is that it is a bit top-heavy. I think really good acute work happens in the circumstances that I identified earlier, where you have skilled multi-disciplinary teams that can spend months burrowing away at the data and drawing out insights. Having a lot of distinguished members of the great and the good sit in a room taking polite evidence from experts is not a very good way of gathering data and insight generally. There may be good reasons for it, but I think it is horses for courses. I was not involved in making those choices. Q340 Chairman: I wondered whether you had not thought about a kind of menu of strategic inquiry models that might exist and when you might use one as opposed to another because they seem to use them in all kinds of different ways at the moment. Lord Birt: It was not me who used them. From the Government's point of view there are going to be different reasons. As an individual who spent most of his life in the media, all my instincts are for open and well-informed public debate, and the more we have of it the better. Q341 Chairman: When you were appointed it says the Prime Minister was looking to you for confidential advice on the long-term strategic issues facing Government. Although you were committed to open debate, in fact it was on a confidential basis. To what extent does it need to be confidential to be effective? Is it possible to be confidential because, as it happened, the analytical side of work has become available through FOI requests and all the rest of it? What is the balance between the confidence and the openness? Lord Birt: Again, it is a good question. You are all politicians and you know the answer to the question. I have already said that as an individual one wants to see really serious and significant evidence-based work exposed to the widest possible community, in Parliament, in the media and in the organisations most affected. That must be the ideal. Why does it not happen? It is because of the nature of our modern political culture. Q342 Chairman: So from your point of view, as someone doing the work, it would not have mattered, in fact it would have been a good thing, if this had been open to public debate, but it would be politically awkward if that was the case though, would it not? Lord Birt: Let us talk plainly. Of course evidence-based work and evidence-based policy can be politically awkward and other parties can make trouble at the expense of the government of the day and it was ever thus. Q343 Chairman: This is why one of the issues around this whole area of strategic thinking in Government has been dogged by the question of whether this should go on close to Government or whether it should go on at a distance from Government. Close to Government is good because it buys into the system and bad because any bad political waves that come out of it you get tarred with. That is why Heath got into trouble with the central policy review staff when they started saying we will turn the NHS over to a private insurance system and then they had to say this was not what they were proposing at all. So you want the distance to be able to think radically, but you want the proximity to be able to get influence. Which is the right way to go? Lord Birt: There is a slight air of the utopian about this. The utopian answer is the more we have substantial evidence-based work in the public domain the better. We should not mislead ourselves, no organisation can match Government's capability. The rich reservoir of understanding that exists in departments is extraordinary, and no academic body can replicate that. When you dip into that reservoir of insight and understanding, however, it is often inchoate. You have to draw out of it the essential strategic insights and so on and so forth. It is not possible for anybody but Government to do really searching, profound work, but obviously there are a lot of other bodies around, think-tanks and such like that are doing their best with publicly available information. I said earlier that as a citizen, speaking in this utopian framework, it would be nice if Parliament and the media were pressing the whole time for robust long-term solutions to our problems and showed a better understanding of the difficulties getting in their way, but that is not the world we live in. Q344 Chairman: You would like politicians to become more unpopular, would you not? Lord Birt: I think the truth is that better public outcomes will often only come at the price of someone's popularity. Q345 Chairman: We have these dreadful things called elections that come up every four years and it distorts the strategic time cycle, does it not? What are we going to do about it? Lord Birt: I look forward to the recommendations of the Committee! Q346 Paul Flynn: This report that you produced would have been the poorer if you knew it was going to come into the public domain. Is that true? The conclusions that you reach, which are uncomfortable for the Government, are that the Government is charging off in one direction and you are pointing to another direction. What does this say for future reports of this kind? If you knew this report was going to come into the public domain, how much the poorer would you have been? Lord Birt: It is reasonable that governments think in private. It is neither one thing or the other. Q347 Paul Flynn: You believe that parliamentarians should be denied the best thinking of the Government. I have this report which has at the top of it "Confidential Policy" on every page. It would not have been available to me and other parliamentarians who take an interest in this subject, whereas the pack produced by all government on this is available. Lord Birt: We have a tension here which is not easily resolved. On the one hand we have the need for the widest possible information to be available to Parliament and to the citizenry at large, and on the other the reasonable inclination of politicians in our current political climate to do the most sensitive thinking in private, and there is a tension there. Q348 Paul Flynn: So future reports, if it is known they are going to be published, will be the poorer for that. Lord Birt: There is that risk. It would be a real risk if any government, because it was fearful of the consequences of a leak, denied itself the opportunity to do really searching evidence-based strategic work. Q349 Paul Flynn: If Blairism ever becomes a religious cult, do you think you will be its Pope? Lord Birt: I am a great admirer of the Prime Minister. Q350 Chairman: It must drive you mad when you have got governments (I do not mean this Government) obsessed with tomorrow's headline in the Daily Mail and what they are going to do about it. Lord Birt: I do not think this Government is. Q351 Chairman: Governments are obsessed with it. That is what politicians do. Lord Birt: We are talking about the tensions. Q352 Chairman: Is there not a chasm between those daily preoccupations of politicians and your kind of big, long-term, probably unpopular strategic thinking, not least because we live in a system where we play this game of disagreement? Even when we agree we play the game of disagreement. So the kind of consensus that you might need, for example on pensions policy, which the good Swedes were able to get, is impossible to get here because what happens here is the Government proposes something and the Opposition has to oppose it instinctively and the third party has also to oppose it but on different grounds from the main Opposition, so we play this game all the time. This must drive you mad. Lord Birt: It is deep in our culture, Chairman. We have been a disputatious nation for hundreds of years, you see this when you look at our court system, our media system or the satirical movement which itself has been around for hundreds of years. It is a strength of our country that we are so challenging. There is no country in the world where people in power, not just governments, come under such intense scrutiny. That does bring enormous strengths, but you identified the weakness. I agree with you, we are less good as a country - and I now speak historically - at getting to the bottom of things and identifying robust long-term solutions and, as a result, in many areas of public policy we have fallen behind other major European countries over the last 30 or 40 years. Q353 Mr Prentice: You were cleared to see information marked confidential. Were there any times in the six years when you wanted to see information of a higher classification and this was denied to you? Lord Birt: No information was ever denied me. When you are involved in domestic policy work of the kind that I was, you just do not need to go near top secret information of that kind. Q354 Chairman: I know that you wanted to make sure we understood the connection between strategy and delivery. I wondered if you just want to say a quick word about that at the end so we have not missed it. Lord Birt: I think you kindly asked me questions which did allow me to elaborate on that. Q355 Chairman: If you think we have covered it then that is fine. Lord Birt: We covered it when we talked about the growing capability at the centre. We perhaps ought to have mentioned Civil Service training, which again I think has been high on the agenda in recent years. There is no talent problem in the British Civil Service, but many civil servants need to acquire a new portfolio of skills, more the kind of skills you would find in a modern private sector environment. That work is under way. It is not yet done. Q356 Chairman: It has been lovely to see you. The sky would not have fallen in had you come to us when you were still in office. The sky will not fall in because you have come to us now. Lord Birt: Are you sure? Q357 Chairman: I am pretty sure. You have informed our thinking. Thank you very much indeed. Lord Birt: Thank you, Chairman.
[1] Chief Information Officer |