Examination of Witnesses (Questions 36
- 39)
TUESDAY 19 JUNE 2007
MR NICK
MABEY
Q36 Chairman: Good morning and welcome
to the Committee. It is our first session on this subject. You
have had a fair amount of experience of government in terms of
how the reality of developing policies and achieving outcomes
and so on works. Would you like to start by using that experience
to say how you think the structure of government and the way it
operates can help or achieve effective action on climate change
issues and sustainable development issues?
Mr Mabey: Thank you and good morning
to members of the Committee. That is a huge question but I will
try to boil it down to four core areas. Having tried to do this
in government, joined-up government, and also being in a department
where this is being done and an NGO lobbying outside government,
climate change fundamentally challenges any complex organisation
as does sustainable development. It is a non-trivial task of organisation
innovation and that is both an excuse for why it sometimes fails
but also it should make people focus on why we should not look
for incremental improvement but we should be looking for more
radical issues here. We do not know how to do this, so we should
be bold if we are taking international leadership in both our
targets but also our structures and implementation. Setting an
institutional lead in the UK is probably as important, to be honest,
as setting something about reducing tonnes of carbon because institutional
evolution is very, very hard, especially in the public sector.
The second point is that I think getting climate change, if not
right, at least better will be what drives sustainable development
more broadly across government, not the other way round. I am
happy to take questions on why I think that. There are four areas
in which you look for failure and where some of the problems are.
The first is strategic focus. On climate change we have had a
very strong strategic focus from the centre on the overall strategy
at high level. On sustainable development that has been completely
lacking—so very contrasting. At the next level down, in
terms of integrating innovative policymaking, we have failed to
identify synergies and do the innovation and capture the real
joint policymaking well, although the UK has probably explored
more different ways than any other government. We have often politically
failed to understand the implication of our decisions. We used
to call it "piranha-ing" the climate change programme:
it is all those thousands of little decisions which cut tonnes
of carbon here and tonnes of carbon there, and there was no way
of making the opportunity cost of that nibbling away at the programmes.
To be honest, the Treasury and others were often responsible for
that and the lack of transparency on the implications of not joining
up and Defra never had the capacity or power to really challenge
those decisions. Those are both policy and political failures,
I think. The third area—which in some ways is more mundane
but probably as important—is an enormous failure on project
management. The climate change programme, once you have decided
what to do, is essentially an enormously complex piece of project
management. You would not manage a sweet shop using the systems
we manage. When we asked to get a read out of how well we were
doing, it took three or four months to get the data back from
the departments. Ministers cannot be accountable to riskiness
in programmes. When the data came, we said, "What is the
risk around this? What is the range of likely outcomes of these
different programmes?" and they went back again, made up
some numbers and came back. As somebody who worked in the construction
industry, the engineering industry, this is just so poor, I cannot
believe it. Basic project management and risk management skills
are not up to the task. The last area concerns the skills sets
of the people trying to do this. I think we are trying to do very
complicated things with people who are under-trained and under-skilled.
The only professional skills in government are the Government
Economic Service and its predecessors which is not a very good
ground in these areas. We give hardly any training to people.
We do not second enough skills in and we do not open enough senior
posts to competitive management. We have an amazing set of people
in the UK in the private sector and the academic sector who do
this work and we do not use them inside the real policymaking
process, so we waste a lot of investment outside. You cannot drive
complex policies through substandard, unskilled staff. That is
one of the big areas, that unwillingness to draw on the outside
talent pool. I worry that people are mistaking the outcome of
sustainable development for how you achieve it, having been told
to do integrated policymaking, join up everything and do everything
all at once. I know that is not how you drive change in organisations.
How you drive change is very different. If we want to get environment
integrated and long-term decision making and risk management,
we drive those through the organisation; we do not ask people
to hit some mythical three pillar model of sustainable development.
I think that appraisal, three-pillar approach has held back us
doing real day-to-day sustainable development in real processes
as opposed to just tick-box assessment and nice reports, which
has dominated the discussion today.
Chairman: That is very helpful. Thank
you.
Q37 Dr Turner: That does not give
us much joy to grasp at, I have to say. It occurs to me that what
you have been describing is obviously a very dysfunctional Whitehall
as far as organised change is concerned. Do you think this is
a cultural problem as far as Whitehall is concerned, and that
the people in Whitehall do not understand there is a problem here?
Obviously, if they do not understand there is a problem, they
will not be able to do very much about it. Do you feel this is
the case?
Mr Mabey: I would say they will
respond to problems set by their political masters. Until recently,
these were not problems. Now it is very clear to the structure
that dealing with climate change is a problem big enough to look
at internal structures. In the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit,
we tried to look at them after the White Paper in 2003. It bounced
off the bureaucracy: they did not take the political momentum
seriously enough to make those decisions. I think that has changed.
In essence, across other parts of government, in domestic policy
and in foreign and intelligence policy, we have seen much more
radical structural reforms in terms of blending departments, building
new joint departments, joint conflict prevention pools. The Post-Conflict
Reconstruction Unit is blended of three departments. We see it
on drugs policy, we see it on criminal justice. There are many
innovations in joint, long-term strategic policymaking in Whitehall,
but, funnily enough, they have not been picked up in this area.
That is more a reflection of the seriousness of the political
signals that have gone through and perhaps of the lack of clear
understanding by the policymakers involved about what they needed
to do. That has changed. With the new political impetus, we are
starting to see the type of experimentation we have seen in other
areas in Whitehall.
Q38 Dr Turner: You have quoted examples
which have been more successful. Is that because they happen to
involve the skill sets that were there? When we come to either
sustainable development or dealing with climate change, there
is a much more subtle and complex set of issues and these are
not readily understood. How are we going to get that understanding
into the system and who do you think is best placed to do it?
Mr Mabey: I agree with you on
that. I have worked a lot on looking at how government joined
up on conflict prevention and failed states and on organised crime
and it was interesting. As you say, where there was an established
body of expertise—and organised crime looked quite like
it—they could change quite rapidly, given a political signal.
Where you were inventing a new field, potentially, and you were
trying to plug together lots of different people—and conflict
prevention was like that—it has taken a lot longer. Some
of the innovations there include having created a new intelligence
analyst area from the post-Iraq reform, where people can have
a career now as an intelligence analyst across government, across
many departments, and therefore keep the expertise and judgment
skills growing over their career, whereas it used to be, if you
were an analyst, that you stopped at a certain grade and had to
go into management, even if you were a very experienced and very
knowledgeable analyst. You have to give people those incentives
to skill-up and grow and think they can become senior and powerful.
This is back to the clever use of broad specialisation, as opposed
to generalisation, which even under the Gus O'Donnell reforms
still tried to be all things to all people and did not and did
not really recognise the complexity of some of these areas and
the skills they need.
Q39 Dr Turner: We are still talking
about the Civil Service culture which is perhaps one of the greatest
obstacles to positive change that we have. One would hope that
the strategy and delivery units, of which you have had some experience,
are there to try to change this. Have they really got to grips
with the culture?
Mr Mabey: I think we were getting
somewhere before the Strategy Unit or the PIU, as it was, changed
base. The beast that was the Strategy Unit, in particular, changed
phases many times and I think it was at its best when it was driven
by clear Cabinet decisions backed by the PM to do something in
a place that added value with a full public process and departmental
process and a clear follow-up. For two, three, four years it worked
in that mode and also was working with departmental strategic
units and working on training. It started to lay the foundation
for something which was culture shifting: people saw there were
rewards in standing up and doing things a bit differently and
ministers saw that if they gave a mandate they could get something
interesting back. Unfortunately, it then, partly because of the
political lifecycle, collapsed back to something which was a little
more short-term and more private and less rigorous. One of my
fears and certainly of my other colleagues at the Strategy Unit
is that we will forget the good lessons of that broader public,
which gave us the Energy Review—the first Energy Review
in 2002-03—which I think has shown how high quality works
stands the test of time in the High Court better than things that
are dreamt up in shorter periods of time.
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