Examination of Witnesses (Questions 106-119)
RT HON
RUTH KELLY
MP, MR PETER
UNWIN AND
MR RICHARD
MCCARTHY
4 DECEMBER 2006
Q106 Chair: Secretary for State may I
welcome you this afternoon? We have a very long list of issues
that we want to try to explore with you, so we shall try to be
brief and we should obviously appreciate full, but brief, responses.
Just to give you pre-warning, those issues we do not manage to
get the answers to or do not manage to get to this afternoon,
we intend to follow up with you in writing subsequently. May I
start off with the issue of the Winter Estimates memorandum? We
are pleased to see that we have received another version. I do
just want to make the point and ask for your comments on the fact
that this is actually the third time, as a Committee, that we
have asked for the Estimates memorandum to be provided in the
format requested by the Scrutiny Unit and we were disappointed
to have to ask so many times. Why do you think the Committee's
requests for improvements were ignored?
Ruth Kelly: First of all let me
say that I am disappointed that the Committee did not feel it
had sufficient information on the Supplementary Estimates. It
is extremely important that Parliament is properly informed as
it scrutinises the work of DCLG and before that of ODPM. I know
that the permanent secretary has been working closely with your
officials and the officials in the Scrutiny Committee Unit and
of course officials would be happy to brief this Committee further
if it thought that was desirable. All I have to add at this point
is that I shall take a personal interest in future in the information
that is provided to Parliament, make sure that it is as full as
possible, that it is as helpful as possible to the Committee and
indeed to Parliament more generally and I am very grateful to
the Committee for having raised this issue so that I have a chance
to make sure that it does not happen again.
Sir Paul Beresford: And will Mr Housden
be briefed about it before he comes next time?
Q107 Chair: May I ask you some specific
points arising from that? The first one is that pages 12 and 13
of the revised Estimate memorandum indicate that £10 million
has been spent on early exits. Can you say how many people are
leaving under these programmes and why and what the implications
are for the delivery of policy?
Ruth Kelly: Peter Unwin has been
crawling over these numbers since the officials last appeared
before the Select Committee so perhaps I could ask Peter to comment?
Mr Unwin: Last year something
like just over 100 staff left the department on early exits, so
that would be what that expenditure was for. As I said last week,
this year we are running another scheme of early exits under which
we hope about 150 staff will be released in a similar way.
Q108 Chair: And the effect on delivery?
Mr Unwin: This came from within
our administration budget, so, certainly last year, it did not
come from our programme money. This year we are discussing with
Treasury how that will be financed.
Q109 Chair: Sorry, I meant how will
the fact that you have nearly 150 fewer affect the performance
of the department?
Ruth Kelly: We are confident that
the performance of the department is improving over time and that
we are able to meet our efficiency targets in a way which will
not affect frontline delivery of targets.
Q110 Martin Horwood: The bottom line
is that this is supposed to be the justification for £1.3
billion worth of Supplementary Estimates. Do you accept that for
those of us who have schools and hospital wards closing, in the
case of the NHS because there is apparently no possibility of
cross-subsidy from other parts of government spending, that this
is rather difficult to take?
Ruth Kelly: I completely accept
that Parliament and indeed the Select Committee ought to have
the fullest possible information. Of course the £1.35 billion
in public spending is not an overall net increase; £845 million
of it reflects the impact on Estimates of transfers between existing
budgets and departmental expenditure limits. So, for example,
just to give the Committee an example, the figure would include
the conversion of local authority borrowing approvals into capital
grants for registered social landlords in line with the advice
of regional housing boards. Any transfers which are agreed within
government departments would be covered in that figure. The rest
of the £1.35 billion was accounted for by two factors: the
first, £360 million reflected a net drawdown from unallocated,
annually managed expenditure which is demand driven; the second
part of it, £147 million, was indeed an increase in spending
in their own departmental expenditure limit.
Q111 Martin Horwood: But in detail,
a lot of the material we have been given actually describes changes
rather than explains them. Do you accept that? It is very, very
difficult actually to work out why some of these increases or
even the transfers are taking place.
Ruth Kelly: I completely accept
that the initial memorandum to the Committee did not fully explain
the figures or explain them well. That is why we have been working
on a much more detailed explanation of the figures since that
hearing. The memorandum has been updated in a way which is helpful.
I would not say it was perfect, but, as I have said, officials
are available to brief this Committee in more depth before Thursday's
debate if that would be helpful.
Q112 Anne Main: Do you feel that
briefing the Committee before Thursday's debate is good enough
for other members of the House who may not be able to understand
the figures released comprehensively in such a short space of
time?
Ruth Kelly: I do think that the
memorandum, as it now stands, is much more helpful to members
of the House than the previous one, in line with standards of
other government departments. Certainly today I and my officials
are willing to answer questions on these figures and officials
will be available after this hearing as well.
Q113 Sir Paul Beresford: Page two
of the new explanation mentions the new Deputy Prime Minister's
Office or committee or department. Is there any money transferring
in either direction with that office?
Ruth Kelly: The responsibility
for the work of the Deputy Prime Minister's Office was transferred
to the new arrangements, to the new Deputy Prime Minister's Office
and out of the old ODPM, now DCLG. So there was a transfer of
resources.
Q114 Sir Paul Beresford: At that
time the money went, but is there anything new in the Estimates
going in either direction?
Mr Unwin: The Estimates this time
reflect the money that went at the time of transfer because these
were the first Estimates since the machinery of government change.
They reflect the money that was transferred to the Deputy Prime
Minister's Office in respect of his responsibilities as Deputy
Prime Minister as opposed to his responsibilities for the policies
of the previous ODPM.
Q115 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you have
a figure?
Mr Unwin: I believe £1.2
million.
Q116 Anne Main: May I seek clarification
of page 14, section K? What was the error in the Estimates that
needed the £117,000 drawdown? It says drawdown flexibility
to correct an error in the main Estimates. What was the error?
Ruth Kelly: It was in relation
to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre Executive Agency.
Mr Unwin: This would have been
in the Estimate of the budget for the agency or the surplus that
the agency would have provided us in the year; £117,000 further
was needed.
Q117 Chair: May I move on to another
issue that we raised last week which was the issue of information
provided, or rather not provided, in written parliamentary answers?
We cited the examples of four different written questions that
have been put in by members of parliament where, essentially,
they have been told that information prior to the creation of
DCLG was not readily available and could not be provided. Obviously
we accept that there are parts of DCLG which were formerly in
the Home Office and bits of the ODPM, notably the Deputy Prime
Minister's Office, which are not in DCLG, but there is a huge
overlap between what was ODPM and what is DCLG. We would expect
that in written questions the department would be able to provide
that sort of information from those bits that were common to the
two departments.
Ruth Kelly: The Committee is right
to expect that and I should like to clarify that there is absolutely
no prohibition on providing information in relation to the former
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Indeed, we have done so in
a number of parliamentary answers. In some cases the information
that was requested could only be provided at disproportionate
cost and of course that is a factor which is taken into consideration
when answering parliamentary questions across Government. However,
in light of the Committee drawing my attention to this issue,
I have reviewed a number of recent parliamentary questions and
it is imperative that we provide answers which are as helpful
as possible to Parliament. I have therefore issued, through my
private office, new guidance to all senior civil servants in the
department on standards that I expect to apply in preparing answers
to parliamentary questions. Of course that will mean providing
the fullest possible advice and answers in line with proportionate
cost.
Q118 Mr Hands: So for example, on
Mr Prisk's and Mr Cable's questions on IT projects and on consultants,
are you saying that the Department has not been monitoring expenditure
on IT projects and consultants until now, until you have intervened,
or are you saying that the information was always available but
you have intervened to make sure it goes out?
Ruth Kelly: We are reviewing guidance
to make the presumption that information should be provided if
it is readily available. In any particular instance, if someone
feels that more information could helpfully have been provided,
then I am very happy to provide that information to the member
concerned and indeed to the House.
Q119 Martin Horwood: One of the examples
that came up related to basic HR questions about numbers of temporary
staff and so on. Is it now your expectation that a statistic like
that, where the HR department has presumably been largely unchanged
through the transfer from ODPM to DCLG, will now be provided to
MPs who ask for it?
Ruth Kelly: The presumption is
that information that can readily be provided should be provided.
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