Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR PETER
HOUSDEN, MR
PETER UNWIN,
MR JOE
MONTGOMERY AND
MS CHRISTINA
BIENKOWSKA
27 NOVEMBER 2006
Q60 Sir Paul Beresford: Will it be
published?
Mr Housden: Ruth Kelly has made
clear in her answer to a parliamentary question that it will be
published. No timescale has been set for that.
Q61 Mr Betts: Ideally, given that
Lyons is an independent review, all right, attached to government
but outside of government in that sense, it would have been ideal,
would it not, to have had that report from Sir Michael before
the White Paper had been produced, to have informed the thinking
on the White Paper rather than to have come after it.
Mr Housden: The place shaping
idea that formed the core of Michael Lyons's interim report was
important to ministers in striking the balances and the flavour
of the White Paper. In that sense, it does reflect his thinking.
Q62 Mr Betts: It would have been
ideal, would it not?
Mr Housden: That is not a matter
for me.
Q63 Sir Paul Beresford: You think
it is going to be published in due course. What do you mean? One
week? One month? Two months? Three years?
Mr Housden: No timescale has been
set for that.
Chair: We now know what "in due
course" means. It means some time indeterminately in the
future.
Q64 Mr Betts: Last time we spoke
to you city regions were very much flavour of the year inside
the department but in the White Paper we simply get a passing
reference to some future report on city regions in due course.
In the production of that, do we have assurances that we are genuinely
going to get some joined-up government on this one with the Department
for Transport and even, dare we say it, the Department for Education
and Skills signing up to something as well?
Mr Housden: We talked about this,
did we not? The Local Government White Paper of course comes at
a particular moment in relation to the government cycles of policy
making and resourcing, so it is very close, is it not, to the
spending review? The sub-national review of economic development
is an important feeder into the spending review. The steps that
the White Paper took and its antecedents will be important in
that sense. The climate of opinion on cities and their contribution
to the UK economy has changed. Michael Parkinson's report on the
state of cities brought that into the public domain. It brought
very strongly the renaissance of English cities and the powerful
progress they have made into relief. It also made it clear that,
if you looked at them in comparison to their European counterparts,
we still have a long way to go. In the White Paper you saw I thought
important commitments from the Department for Transport about
passenger transport authorities and executives. You saw things
about skills, coalitions against worklessness, so I thought there
was a number of important pointers there as a direction of travel
which the government will now need to think about in the broader
context of the spending review.
Q65 Mr Betts: I have had assurances
that the Department for Transport is cooperating from both Secretaries
of State and I probably accept that. The Department for Education
and Skills track record on these things is hardly glorious, is
it? It contributed nothing at all to the regional assemblies legislation.
There were no commitments there at all. It completely scuppered
the previous Minister for Local Government's promises not to create
more ring- fenced grants by ring fencing all the grants to schools.
The working relationship between the two departments has not had
a great history in recent years.
Mr Housden: On the specifics of
the skills agenda, we have seen first of all in the proposals
and shortly in the Greater London Authority Bill a real reformation
of how skills are handled in London and a move away from five
Learning and Skills Councils areas into a more unified programme.
Similarly, I am not sure what your experience on this will be
but regional skills partnerships have sought to bring regional
and subregional players more strongly to the table in shaping
skills priorities. I cannot speak for the Department for Education
and Skills. I can say that in terms of working with them on the
new performance framework for local government they were very
much party to the cross-government agreement that was made. Alan
Johnson and his colleagues were clear that that was the direction
they wanted to take.
Q66 Sir Paul Beresford: On a similar
theme, the numbers of targets and so forth have been hit in local
government and your department is talking of reducing them. What
are the other departments doing in local government? Are they
reducing them too?
Mr Housden: Yes, and I think that
is a really important point because the agreement that was reflected
in the White Paper was a cross-government agreement that every
department whose work impacted on local government—you made
this point in January—would be a party to this agreement.
When we talk about 1,200 going to 200 in terms of targets and
information requirements, when we talk about something like 35
local priorities, those reflect the totality of government. They
are not just the issues that we are responsible for. We have some
confidence in the support because the guidance that underpins
the Treasury's spending review, which goes to all departments
and structures the way they make their bids, reflects this agreement.
Similarly in terms of the structure of grants that they may wish
to give for local services, those too are now channelled through
the local area agreement process. We think this is important progress
but we have further to go in two respects. We need to make sure
that the process of setting local area agreements is genuinely
robust and challenging and does not require significant bureaucracy
and paperwork to secure it. It needs to be a sharp, evidence-based
process. We need also to be sure that our overall systems have
this continual pressure to deregulate for light-touch systems.
You might have noticed that Ruth Kelly has asked Michael Frater,
who is an experienced local authority chief executive now in the
City of Nottingham, to chair a professional task force for us
to be sure that we have some external expertise as we go forward
in reducing unnecessary burdens.
Q67 Mr Betts: Can I ask a question
on a quite significant change recently in the government's approach
to Home Information Packs? I doubt that ministers suddenly had
a wonderful house buying-experience themselves and changed their
view about the state of the current house-buying process in Britain.
It seems more likely that they were presented with the situation
where the department simply did not have the mechanics in place
to deliver HIPs, particularly their house condition reports as
part of that, on time. Is that a fair assessment?
Mr Housden: Elements of that do
strike me as the actual position, yes. There were two particular
things that were weighing in ministers' minds in the decisions
they took recently and they are related. One was the availability
of trained and accredited inspectors and the second was the continuing
concern of some major stakeholders about going for what they called
a big bang, introducing home information packs on a statutory
basis with a complete suite of information to hand from 2007.
Ministers' decision reflected their weighing of those issues.
Q68 Mr Betts: Is it not slightly
difficult to work that issue back with any logic given that the
decision itself came so late in the process after many people
had spent quite a lot of personal money getting themselves trained
as home inspectors? Both those points were made by the Committee
when we considered the draft proposals three years ago or so now
and in the Committee stage of the Bill itself. The issues of rolling
forward HIPs on a steady basis across the country and the problem
about training enough inspectors were both mentioned repeatedly,
so why were they so late in being picked up?
Mr Housden: They were. They were
real issues and it was right to raise them. Those issues were
being kept under review by ministers as the programme developed.
The important thing for me and for the ministers in all of this
was that the key framework and concepts of the home information
packs are intact and being trialled. You refer to concerns about
people who have invested their own time and money in gaining qualifications.
We looked at that hard. If you look at the range of opportunities
that will be there for people who have been undertaking those
programmes, they remain very significant because energy performance
certificates have become statutory. There is no deviation on that.
The market testing of home condition reports and other information
like that we think does provide a significant range of opportunities
for people going forward.
Q69 Mr Betts: Have you a time frame
to decide whether the voluntary approach to HCRs is working or
whether you are going to have to use a degree of compulsion? What
is the time period of when you get to do your assessment?
Mr Housden: We have this programme
of trials under way at the moment which are trialling a range
of the components of home information packs and assessing their
impact on transactions and their attractiveness for consumers.
The expectation is that during the first half of 2007 the results
of those trials will be brought together for ministers to decide
their next steps.
Q70 Anne Main: I wondered who is
paying the costs of the trials.
Mr Housden: The costs are being
met by the department.
Q71 Chair: From within its own budget?
Mr Housden: Yes.
Q72 Martin Horwood: This is a question
partly about the way you present some of the performance indicators.
I am particularly going to focus on PSA1, roughly pages 50 to
55 in the annual report. It relates to an aspect of a claim to
joined-up government. PSA1 in particular depends on other departments
to deliver these indicators. When you look in detail at the kind
of performance against floor targets, we have quite crucial ones
like education where you present the target as: "At least
50% of pupils achieve level five or above in each of English,
maths and science." You then present analysis of the 2003/04
data—in other words, two years out of date—confirming
that in Neighbourhood Renewal Fund areas 32% of schools were below
the floor target. It sounds as though two years ago we were badly
off course on this. Has DfES not provided you with data? Have
you not asked for it? What mechanisms are in place for you to
present us with an annual report that reflects the last year's
figures? The other one I would draw attention to is life expectancy
which confusingly is not under health but over the page under
a heading of its own, where it shows that the gap in 2002/04,
which is the most recent figure you seem to be presenting, was
widening. I have an eight-year gap in life expectancy in different
areas in my constituency or in the area of my Primary Care Trust,
which is extremely serious. This is a serious issue but this seems
to be hopelessly out of date and with rather skimpy analysis.
Mr Montgomery: The floor target
data often reflect a time lag in their collection and publication.
On the health indicator, we use typically three-year rolling averages
which are sometimes out of date in that the up-to-date data for
this year will only be published obviously in a subsequent period.
Q73 Martin Horwood: A three-year
rolling average is fine but that should in this case be from 2003
to 2006. There is no reason why an annual report produced after
the end of the governmental or financial year should not be up
to date, is there?
Mr Montgomery: For the current
year, 2006, we would not typically get that data on all the indicators
until 2007 and in some cases we can get it slightly earlier but,
for health, the three- year rolling average data do tend to come
in significantly lagged. You are right in the overall analysis.
The health inequalities gap is widening or at least not closing
in the way that the target would suggest it is required to. This
is a particular challenge for us. It is the only one of the main
target areas where the gap is not narrowing at the rate required.
We are working closely with the Department of Health and with
primary care trusts, first to identify which specific localities
are the drivers of the problem and then to assess ways in which
new interventions, new shifts in resource balances, can try and
address this more effectively.
Q74 Martin Horwood: Even in education
we have one in three schools missing the floor target two years
ago. You do not say, because it is not very consistently presented,
whether that is widening or narrowing but that is a fairly disastrous
statistic. Is that widening or is it narrowing?
Mr Montgomery: The gaps on the
education floor targets are narrowing both on key stage three
targets and on GCSE pass grade targets.
Q75 Martin Horwood: According to
the data to 2004.
Mr Montgomery: In the case of
education statistics we do tend to get the data a little bit earlier
so we know that there is more confidence that the gaps are narrowing
on both indicators there.
Q76 Martin Horwood: Are you saying
you have data more recent than 2004?
Mr Montgomery: Yes, we have.
Q77 Chair: Some of the data in the
annual report were wrongly given for the 2003 year, not the 2004
year. That is one of the issues we raised at the beginning.
Mr Montgomery: I can give you
more up-to-date data than the 2003 data. The story that tells
is that the gap is narrowing. The rate of the narrowing of the
gap has slowed down but there is some confidence, first, that
we will meet the GCSE pass rate target which was the first target
under SR02.
Q78 Martin Horwood: On health and
education, on life expectancy and the Key Stage 3 attainment targets,
what is the most recent data you actually have?
Mr Montgomery: On life expectancy,
I have data that is valid to 2004, and on education, Key Stage
3, I also have 2004-2005 data.
Q79 Chair: Does the Department of
Health have more up-to-data data that it just has not given to
you?
Mr Montgomery: The data does tend
to be heavily lagged, especially on life expectancy.
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