Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
MR CHRISTIAN
BISHOP, MR
GLENN FORD
AND MS
NORINA O'HARE
24 APRIL 2006
Q100 Chairman: Do you see the minutes
of those meetings?
Mr Bishop: Yes.
Q101 Chairman: Did the minutes of
the subsequent meetings to your alerting the RPA that there were
these problems indicate there had been any discussion or action
taken as a result of what you said?
Mr Bishop: Some minutes did but
not all of them. We can check back through the minutes about what
we did raise and when we raised it.
Q102 Chairman: Were you getting feedback
from your members about, if you like, the degradation that was
occurring as the system ran slower and slower and problems were
known? Did they feed back to you? I do not know if you have a
fact-gathering mechanism.
Mr Ford: Certainly, they were
feeding back to us. We meet on a quarterly basis and there were
representatives of all the branches at those meetings and they
report back. There is also a lot of communication with branches:
Christian works in the Reading office, I work in the Exeter office,
our Secretary works in the Newcastle office. We have officers
in each of the offices as well. We are on the ground knowing what
is happening. The frustrating thing has always been that whenever
we have raised the issues, we have had the same feedback that
the previous witnesses had, "No, everything is fine. Your
members are only seeing a small part of it, they are not seeing
the wider picture. The wider picture will be that we will be fine
in the end and get the payments through". It was almost as
though everything you were saying was being dismissed.
Q103 James Duddridge: Did you have
any direct communications with ministers or have you any evidence
that your views were forwarded to ministers?
Mr Ford: No, we have had nothing.
Mr Bishop: In actual fact the
Defra Trade Union side has had quite a bad experience really in
terms of organising meetings with ministers and certainly Margaret
Beckett is reluctant to meet on a number of issues.
Q104 James Duddridge: You have asked
for those meetings?
Mr Bishop: Certainly DTUS has
on a number of occasions, yes.
Q105 James Duddridge: She has said
no?
Mr Bishop: She has been reluctant
to meet. I do not know whether she knows, but she has certainly
been reluctant to meet.
Q106 James Duddridge: Have ministers
visited your site?
Mr Bishop: We do get occasional
visitors. Occasionally, we do get an opportunity to meet them
but that is not very frequent.
Q107 Chairman: When I was a minister
and used to go around different government offices for which I
had responsibility, one of the most valuable things I used to
do was to sit down with the staff who would tell me very straightforwardly
what was good and what was bad. I learned a lot from them. Did
Lord Bach or his predecessor, Lord Whitty, come and sit down with
any groups of your staff and hear it straight from the horse's
mouth about what was going on?
Mr Bishop: Certainly, I do not
remember him coming to Reading and speaking to us. He spoke to
sections of staff but he did not speak to trade unions.
Q108 Chairman: It is perhaps conjecture
but nonetheless, I will ask the question, did you get any feedback
that those sections of staff had told him of the kind of problems
they were encountering?
Mr Ford: I cannot remember any
formal meetings with ministers.
Q109 Chairman: Or even informal?
Mr Ford: I think there might well
have been one or two informal ones, but, how can I say, it would
not have been an open forum.
Chairman: One thing I would be grateful
for, in the light of your observations, would be if you make some
inquiries of any members who had even just conversations with
the minister because it would be helpful to us to know whether
in fact when he said, "How are things going?", because
that is the normal sort of ordinary ministerial opening gambit,
what kind of issues were discussed? David, there are some issues
about the staff you want to follow up on?
Q110 David Taylor: You have reiterated
again, quite rightly, the things you put to Roger Williams and
myself in December about the working environment, the pressure
of working around the clock, seven days a week et cetera and then,
a moment or two ago, the staff were being encouraged to work weekends.
Were they bullied and intimidated into working weekends?
Mr Ford: That is a very difficult
one to answer. From a trade union perspective, we would say yes,
there was certainly intimidation, there is bullying and there
is pressure. When we have spoken with the executive board on this,
they dispute it completely because they look at bullying as how
many cases have been taken through the RPA's formal procedures
on bullying. The answer to that, of course, is none, but when
you ask the staff and our members, as we did after the last meeting
through a quick, unofficial email survey whether they felt there
was a bullying and intimidation culture, we got 40% of our members
responding to that email question. Out of the 40% that responded,
73% of those said yes, which equates to nearly 30% of our membership
felt there was a culture of bullying and intimidation. Whether
that is actual bullying and intimidation or whether it is a perception,
our view is that even if it is a perception that 73% of those
who responded said yes, they felt there was, then the perception
has to be dealt with and there must be something in that to go
along with.
Q111 David Taylor: Johnston McNeill,
it has to be said, hotly refuted that allegation, but nevertheless,
whoever is right, how do you feel this alleged body and culture
must have affected the delivery of this SPS system?
Mr Bishop: Can I make one point,
David. Certainly, yes, we were aware that Johnston did refute
that at the interim hearing. We first raised this in December
at the main RPA Whitley committee meeting—we put it on the
agenda because these were the concerns we were getting from our
members. Johnston was not at that meeting; I think it is the first
meeting of a Whitley committee I have known of where the chief
executive is not present. Of course, when he went to the hearing
early in January, he was not aware of it; he should have been
aware of it, he should have been at the meeting. Certainly none
of his directors who were present at the meeting reported back
to him. Yes, we were quite horrified quite honestly when we read
the minutes of the hearing to say that he had no knowledge of
bullying in the RPA.
Q112 David Taylor: My final question
is, it sounds a bit of a disingenuous question really, if a bullying
culture existed, how do you feel it impacted on the delivery of
the SPS system?
Ms O'Hare: You could look at it
in two different ways, one of which is the fact that you have
got a highly complex system, process, being introduced in a very
short period of time with an IT system which is web-based, therefore
not allowing all the people who are employed to be able to access
it all of the time, and pressures from middle managers to meet
targets. That is where you get the culture of bullying and people
feeling pressured to go behind their line managers all the way
up the chain to do more and more work, to come in, to work longer
hours and to do overtime. Management will say overtime is voluntary,
and in the terms and conditions of the service, yes, it is, but
if you are constantly being told you have to meet targets, and
those targets are really crucial, and each office is being told
that nobody can fail—Grade 7s are told, "We will not
tolerate being told that you cannot deliver"—that creates,
right the way through the organisation, a sense that you cannot
speak out, you cannot speak out as civil servants. Civil servants
should be able to say to ministers, to their senior civil servants,
"What you are asking for is not going to be possible for
this reason." People in RPA at lower levels, our members
have been telling us, we, as their representatives, have been
telling the executive board and the chief executive and the Permanent
Secretary of our concerns about whether or not it was going to
be achieved.
Q113 David Taylor: It was not compulsion
but it was fully-fledged coercion?
Ms O'Hare: I think what we have
seen is a culture develop which has been because of the timescales
and people not being willing to say at key points, "We may
well have to go back to ministers and tell them we are not going
to deliver this on time."
Q114 Chairman: Thank you, that is
very helpful. One of the antidotes to this problem was, as we
understand it, the introduction of a vast swathe and army of agency
staff. Why was it they had to take on these large numbers of staff?
When did that process begin?
Mr Bishop: First of all, I think
it is worth making the point that not all of the RPA has a huge
number of agency staff. I am not sure what the latest figure is
but in terms of contingent workers it was something in the region
of 1,500 at one point. The bulk of them came across with the British
Cattle Movement Service merger with RPA, so there were about 400
of them for that. Slowly, over time, there have been an increase
in contingent workers, and that is made up of agency staff, fixed
term appointees, casual staff, and that number is fluctuating
all the time. It is still a very vast figure.
Ms O'Hare: The one reason why
I think there is a huge increase in agency staff, notwithstanding
what Christian has said about the fact there was a big group coming
over from the British Cattle Movement Service, is that it comes
out of operational costs and not the staffing figure. It is not
staff-in-post figures. If you ask the RPA how many staff they
employ directly, it will be something in the region of 1,500.
They have more agency staff than they have permanent staff in
RPA and it is because it does not count, it does not have a headcount
figure, it is a service which is being procured.
Q115 Chairman: So the Change Programme
might be reducing the number of stated permanent staff but it
is not reducing the wage bill?
Ms O'Hare: No.
Q116 Chairman: Because, as we understand
it, the labour costs of the IT system in relation to the RPA introduction
have effectively doubled from the initial estimate. I presume
that must be reflected by the temporary staff who have been brought
in. What functions were these temporary staff being invited to
do that clearly the permanent staff could not do themselves because
there were not enough of them?
Mr Ford: The majority of the agency
staff have been brought in at the admin officer level to do data
inputting because the computer system was not able to do that.
One of the reasons—
Q117 Chairman: Sorry, when you say
"the computer system was not able to do that", is that
because—you mentioned earlier about the automaticity of
what they hoped to do—the original system as designed did
not work?
Mr Ford: Yes, because the document
management unit was not able to cope with the scanning-in of all
the 120,000 applications last year, and all the details which
were on those forms had to be manually typed in.
Q118 Chairman: Can you confirm if
there was any testing of any part of this new system prior to
it going live, when the window opened for applications to be made
for the first tranche of Single Farm Payments?
Mr Ford: As far as I know, and
I would not be able to confirm it, there was some testing going
on but it was not ready at that stage. They are hoping the full
optical-reader will be ready for 2006 now. What happened, and
again this is only what I heard, was that the development team
who were put on for the optical-read were then taken off to do
the policy changes and the computer changes which were needed
because it was to become a single payment scheme. So where you
had a team working on one area of it, they would move to another
area which was deemed to be the priority which was to get the
policies right.
Q119 Chairman: When ministers agreed
what has now become the dynamic hybrid model, was there a noticeable
change in pace of activity so that this more complex arrangement
could be incorporated onto your system?
Mr Ford: I would not have seen
any changes because the changes would have been taking place in
the back whilst the majority of the staff were still working on
the old legacy schemes.
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