Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR STEPHEN
HICKEY, MISS
ROSEMARY THEW,
MR CLIVE
BENNETT, MR
PAUL MARKWICK
AND MR
STEPHEN TETLOW
8 FEBRUARY 2006
Q20 Chairman: We have got the caveat;
start with the answer.
Mr Hickey: The answer is around
£45 million. The range we are currently quoting is between
£44 and £49.5 million.
Q21 Chairman: Out of a budget of?
Mr Hickey: The total departmental
budget—
Q22 Chairman: No, the DVO budget.
Mr Hickey: This is not just DVO;
it is a departmental project.
Q23 Chairman: So the money comes
from the Department and will not come off your individual budgets?
Mr Hickey: The Department will
have to provide the up-front investment. It crosses the whole
Department, including the DfT centre, the Highways Agency, the
MCA, and now we have got the Government Car and Despatch Agency
as well.
Q24 Chairman: I am a bit worried
about this phrase "self-serving". Quite apart from the
fact it does not seem to me to be a very tactful phrase, what
logistical difficulties are the Agencies going to have if you
have got non-desk-based staff involved in this new system of self-serving?
Mr Hickey: There are clearly issues
there and we will need to work through those but the options include
where we need to have the continued use of paper and then collecting
the paper in and scanning it—
Q25 Chairman: No, no, wait a minute,
I understand that. We are talking about saving a vast sum on this
particular thing and it seems to be being done on the basis of
people in a sense self-certifying. I hope I am not using the wrong
words.
Mr Hickey: At the moment the typical
process is that I or a member of staff, if I want to for example
claim travel and subsistence or something, have to do something.
Typically I fill in a form on a bit of paper.
Q26 Chairman: Yes, that is right,
you have to actually explain, like Members of Parliament do, what
you have spent the money on. It is not an unreasonable question
when it is public money, is it?
Mr Hickey: Indeed, and I then
send this piece of paper to a finance division or an HR division
or somewhere and somebody gets this bit of paper and they take
that bit of paper and they do something. They put it into the
computer, it does the algorithms, and out at the end, hopefully,
pops my payment. The self-service idea is to try, where we can,
to cut through that, to cut out the middle man. I put in my claim
on the screen. If I have not got a screen—and you are quite
right there are staff who have not got access to screens—we
have to use a more Heath Robinson approach. There are some ideas
that are downstream, and Rosemary has responsibility for this,
not just in this but in other areas, things like digital pens
that bridge that gap, but this is all to be developed.
Q27 Chairman: I understand that but
you are telling us what the savings are going to be and then saying,
"Well of course, we have still got to develop the mechanisms
by which we can guarantee it can be done."
Mr Hickey: Most of the savings
are in the HR and finance functions, not in the frontline, if
you see what I mean.
Chairman: I see. Mrs Ellman?
Q28 Mrs Ellman: We are told that
there is inconsistency in terms and conditions for the staff in
the different Agencies. How serious a problem is that?
Mr Hickey: Well, it is deliberate.
It is not accidental because back in the 1990s or earlier, I cannot
remember when, responsibility for pay and conditions was delegated
to individual Agencies, again across the whole service, not just
here. So they have over time, as you would expect, diverged to
some extent. At the moment our judgment is that that is okay.
It is not a serious obstacle to delivering what we have to deliver,
so we are continuing as a department not just in the DVO Group
with the presumption that we will carry on with delegated pay
bargaining.
Q29 Mrs Ellman: Has that caused any
friction?
Mr Hickey: The unions do not like
it. The unions are pressing quite strongly for national bargaining.
Actually their argument is ideally they would like Civil Service-wide
national bargaining, as used to exist back in the 1970s and early
1980s. Failing that, they would like each department to do bargaining
at their level and, failing that, they would like the DVO to do
the bargaining. So their preference would be the Treasury does
the bargaining.
Q30 Chairman: It is not just that
though. Is it really true that you have not got a DfT-wide intranet?
Mr Hickey: There is not. The joining-upness
is rather limited at the moment.
Q31 Chairman: The "joining-upness"?
Now, Mr Hickey, that is almost as good as my assistant who said
this week he did not want to "big himself up". I think
we will stick with English if it is all right with you. Do you
have a DfT staff directory or an email directory?
Mr Hickey: No.
Q32 Chairman: Do you have common
IT systems?
Mr Hickey: No.
Q33 Chairman: So the co-operation
is not at what you might call a high level?
Mr Hickey: There is an awful lot
more opportunity; you are entirely right.
Chairman: Thank you. Sorry, Mrs Ellman,
they have a lot of opportunity and Mr Hickey is going to tell
you what it is, perhaps.
Q34 Mrs Ellman: How do you see the
balance between enforcers and service providers in relation to
the Agencies?
Mr Hickey: It is not either/or;
it is both. We clearly have to do both things and what we aim
to do is to do the enforcement because we are at the end of the
day heavily into enforcement. That is ultimately why we exist.
We are there to regulate certain things and to make sure that
certain things happen. Our aim is to do so in a way which minimises
the burden, if I can use that word, the hassle factor, whatever
you want to call it, on people who are perfectly legitimate and
complying with their obligations and all that and to come down
hard on those who are not. So what we are trying to do is both.
The other thing we think is that by being more customer friendly,
and I apologise for using this jargon but you will understand—
Q35 Chairman: If I do not, Mr Hickey,
I shall ask you to translate.
Mr Hickey: —by trying to
present our services in ways which are as accessible and easy
to use and friendly to customers as we can, that will actually
help people to comply, because the people who do not comply with
regulations and so on tend to fall into two broad groups. There
are people who just do not get around to it, possibly partly deliberately,
but with a bit more help if it was a bit easier, they might just
tip over, and then there are the much more hardened people who
are definitely into heavy-duty evasion. The category of people
who can be helped over the boundary by services which are more
accessible and easier to use, et cetera, reduces the total amount
of work of the DVO and it can go into tackling those who are choosing
not to comply much more deliberately.
Q36 Mrs Ellman: Do you have the right
mix and numbers of staff to carry out the changing role?
Mr Hickey: The right mix?
Q37 Mrs Ellman: Yes.
Mr Hickey: No-one would ever say
they had the right resources for anything because we could always
do with more and you could always change the mix. I think we are
trying to shift the focus of our staff resources, and Mr Tetlow
at VOSA can talk a little bit about what he is doing to try to
free up resource and within that to put more resource on the frontline,
as it were, in terms of tackling operators who are evading the
rules and so on, so that balance is one that we are seeking actively
to manage and improve.
Q38 Mrs Ellman: Concerns have been
expressed to us that you do not have enough staff to deal with
enforcement particularly as enforcement is becoming increasingly
important. Is that a concern to you?
Mr Hickey: I, like anyone, would
always happily have more staff. It would be foolish not to say
that and we are of course under pressure on our head count and
all sorts of different things, so the efficiency drive is quite
an important one for us. What we are trying to do is to use efficiency
savings not only to achieve absolute savings, because that is
right and proper, but also to free up resources for high priority
things, and that does include enforcement and, as I say, Stephen
could talk about in VOSA in particular how that is being done.
Q39 Mr Clelland: Does that mean you
are under-staffed? You gave us a long answer but what is the answer
to the question?
Mr Hickey: The answer is that
we, like anyone coming in front of you would say, could always
use more staff.
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