Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-339)
MS HELEN
GHOSH, SIR
BRIAN BENDER
AND MR
ANDY LEBRECHT
15 MAY 2006
Q320 Chairman: I am sorry; a moment
ago you said you might have to get some money back from people.
Ms Ghosh: Clearly if there had
been an overpayment of the partial payment—and I think we
assume it would be a very small group of cases—we may already
have overpaid, in which case there would be an issue, for example,
in netting off next year's payment. My understanding is that it
would be very small.
Mr Lebrecht: By paying 80% of
the claim, in the vast majority of cases we shall not be paying
farmers everything which they should ultimately get. There may
be a small minority of cases where, for one reason or another,
their claim is bigger than they are entitled to and that may mean
that by paying 80% we have overpaid. In that case, when we have
completed validation, we shall obviously have to claim back.
Q321 Chairman: Let me come to the
core of Defra. Who actually could be said to have been the link
between the RPA and ministers in terms of the flow up and down
the system of information to keep them posted as to what was happening
in this process?
Sir Brian Bender: In my time we
very deliberately set up a programme board, jointly chaired by
Andy and by Johnston McNeill, to avoid a situation in which there
were two separate halves not talking to one another. The policy
submissions went up from Andy's side, but they had an RPA bit
in them, which was discussed with the policy people about implementability.
Later in my time, when there was operational advice going up for
monthly meetings with Lord Bach, that operational advice often
went up either as a joint note from Andy and Johnston McNeill
or, if it was purely operational, just from the Rural Payments
Agency. We did not interpose ourselves unnecessarily, but where
there was a need to join up, we tried to ensure that happened.
Q322 Chairman: Did your ministers
solely receive their information about what was going on from
the mechanism you have just described or did they have stakeholder
meetings in which they were involved.
Ms Ghosh: Yes.
Q323 Chairman: They did?
Ms Ghosh: Oh, yes. We shall be
able to give you the full list, but ministers had a series of
meetings. Lord Whitty, for example, met stakeholders four times
in 2003. Lord Bach has been meeting stakeholders early this year
on a weekly basis. We are not the sole interlocutors. Just in
their daily contact with stakeholders ministers will have been
getting a great deal of feedback. I know even in my time Lord
Bach, for example, made at least two trips to Reading, on one
of which I accompanied him, to talk to staff locally and we met
a wide cross section of staff.
Q324 Chairman: When he went on those
visits what did he hear?
Ms Ghosh: He heard directly from
staff how the process of processing claims was going. For example,
he would stand over a member of staff handling a level one or
level two validation, talk them through the issues, talk them
through the IT process, talk about how they were assessing risk
one way or the other and get a very straightforward and open and
direct, face-to-face discussion with staff about what was happening.
There was no attempt—
Q325 Chairman: If the staff were
very candid with him, then he must have picked up that there were
some problems.
Ms Ghosh: I can only talk about
my personal experience. The kinds of problems he was picking up
then were precisely the kinds of problems which we were discussing
earlier about the process of validation. For example, I remember
standing over a staff member's shoulder and looking at the digitisation
of the maps. In fact we were getting very practical examples and
feedback from members of staff about the issues they were handling.
One very positive thing, for which I should like to give all credit
to the staff we met, is that on the whole the morale and the commitment
and the hard work of the staff absolutely could not be doubted;
it was extremely positive. That meant that when we got the more
detailed management information about how processing, for example,
was going, ministers and I and the whole of the senior team had
a very clear practical understanding of the issues which were
being described to us.
Q326 Chairman: When were those two
visits which Lord Bach actually made?
Ms Ghosh: Either just before or
just after Christmas. We shall tell you.
Q327 Chairman: Did he not go before
then to Reading?
Ms Ghosh: I am only talking about
my time. I think he did.
Sir Brian Bender: I think he did.
I have a recollection that between the May 2005 election and my
departure he went to Reading. We shall get you a note.
Ms Ghosh: That would be the other
time.
Q328 David Taylor: On this grand
royal visit to Reading were you always chaperoning him? Were you
always at his shoulder when he asked how things were or did he
have an opportunity to have an off-the-record briefing from people
with senior staff and particularly the Permanent Secretary absent?
People are not always frank.
Ms Ghosh: It was extremely informal;
he was walking around open-plan areas. The chief executive was
certainly not breathing down his neck. I certainly was not breathing
down his neck. My interest is in getting Defra projects and programmes
delivered successfully, so I would have no interest in seeking
to twist the evidence he was receiving.
Q329 David Taylor: Roger Williams
and I paid a visit to Reading at a similar time and concerns were
quite clearly emerging. I agree with you and fully endorse what
you said that nothing can be laid at the door of the poor RPA
staff who were working incredibly hard and were committed in the
most difficult of circumstances and we have made that point several
times. Nevertheless, not to have picked up some of the vibrations
which were symptomatic of concerns is somewhat surprising.
Ms Ghosh: No, I think you misunderstood
what I said in the sense that I entirely agree that people were
expressing concerns, for example about workarounds, about tasks
they were having to do manually. What I meant to emphasise was
that we were feeding those into the process so that when, for
example, we were having discussions—I was having discussions
in the executive review group or ministers were having discussions
with stakeholders or the RPA team—they understood what they
were talking about and they could challenge back. When we were
given, for example, confidence levels around the delivery of something,
then ministers were able to say "Are you sure? When I was
at Reading I was told X, I was told Y. The feedback we get from
the team in Exeter is Y or Z" and that was taken into account.
We were listening, we did hear and it was part of the challenge
and development process.
Q330 Chairman: You mentioned at the
beginning of this process the Office of Government Commerce and
the ticks in the box they had given you through these gateway
reviews. Can we have copies of that?
Ms Ghosh: You may be aware that
there is currently a case with the Information Commissioner on
an application not for any of these gateway reviews but others.
If you can leave it with us to talk to the Office of Government
Commerce, obviously we are keen to be as open as possible. I hope
at the very least we shall be able to give you summaries of what
was in the gateway reviews.
Chairman: That would be very helpful
indeed.
Q331 Mr Williams: Could we also have
risk assessments of other policies which could have delivered
the Single Farm Payment Scheme, including some of the nightmare
ones?
Ms Ghosh: I am assuming, just
from reading the back papers, that a lot of that material is in
the papers which, for example, David Hunter's stakeholders' meeting
discussed and that would be open anyway.
Mr Lebrecht: We shall do what
we can. I have to say that we did not do detailed risk assessments
on options which were unlikely to come to fruition. We shall see
what we can do.
Ms Ghosh: We did them on the others.
Mr Williams: It would be nice to see
the nightmares and compare them with this one.
Q332 Chairman: You said earlier about
Mr Cooper that you had very great confidence in his ability to
take matters forward. May I ask you, Sir Brian, why it was that
you had such confidence in Johnston McNeill to deliver this process?
Sir Brian Bender: He was recruited
via an open competition which we ran in autumn 2000 and a panel
which included the then chairman of the Intervention Board, a
Civil Service Commissioner, and Kate Timms from the Department[2].
We went through a due diligence test process, taking up references
and everything else, before we appointed him and he seemed and
was indeed a good appointee.
Q333 Chairman: Why?
Sir Brian Bender: Because if you
then look at some bits of empirical evidence in terms of the Rural
Payments Agency hitting their targets over recent years, they
hit the vast majority of their published targets successfully
and in 2004 they were accredited with Investors in People, with
some pretty positive things said about the way in which both business
as usual and the Change Programme were being run. Both at the
time of appointment and subsequently I felt that we had someone
who was leading the organisation effectively.
Q334 Chairman: Did he have any experience
in his previous incarnation of large-scale IT projects?
Sir Brian Bender: Probably not
IT. In the Meat Hygiene Service he certainly had responsibility
for a very significant Change Programme, of bringing together
about 180 different organisations into one. He certainly had change
responsibility. One of his first tasks, in which I took a close
interest, was the recruitment of his top team, including his IT
director, who came from the private sector and his business development
director, currently chief operating officer, Simon Vry, who came
in from the private sector. He put around him, as a top team,
people with particular skills in those areas.
Q335 Chairman: If they had these
skills, have you, in what enquiries you have made, got to the
bottom of how they see the problems which occurred? There is a
blind spot somewhere which somebody did not see. It only manifested
itself when you came to press the button in February and then
you had the difficult task of seeing Mrs Beckett and saying "Secretary
of State, I'm very sorry, we can't deliver". You got all
the way to the endgame and finally you did not see something.
Where is the blind spot then?
Ms Ghosh: May I just challenge
that interpretation? I am sorry if that is the impression you
have that nothing else went less well than we might have expected
apart from that last bit.
Q336 Chairman: We have explored lots
that have gone wrong.
Ms Ghosh: In one sense that last
bit, when the system did not pay out when we pressed the button,
is the simplest bit to explain. It must be some combination of
the way the IT was built, the extent of testing we did or did
not do, the understanding that collectively the RPA team had about
that effect. I think the challenge of the history of this project
for us is to see how individual bits of challenge built themselves
up into the delay which we so much regret. We have already mentioned
some of them today in terms of the fact that there were delays
in IT delivery which meant we lost some contingency; we may have
lost some testing time. There were significantly challenging issues
for us about the mapping and building up the rural land register
which then had a forward impact elsewhere. There were issues for
us around a fundamentally risk-averse approach to payment and
fear of disallowance. If we look back on it, and Sir Brian said
in his opening remarks, yes, it probably was challenging but it
was inevitable that we would do a change process and build CAP
reform on top of it. We might not have predicted that at the time.
We can all see that there were various factors which added to
the delay. The question of pressing the button and the payment
going out was, as it were, the ultimate and immediate cause.
Q337 Chairman: It was an accumulating
series of events which could only be discovered at the endgame.
Clearly they were not picked up on the way through. Sir Brian,
you are shaking your head.
Ms Ghosh: We managed the risks
around all the things that happened. I should be very sorry, as
I know Sir Brian would be, if you went away from this hearing
thinking we were just sitting there thinking "Oh dear, things
are going wrong, what are we doing?". With the material we
give you, you will get a very strong impression of a very tight,
praised by OGC, quality assessed by external advisers, very tight
risk-management process.
Q338 David Taylor: The patient died
though, did he not? SPS was Accenture's entry into the IT Grand
National. They negotiated two laps of hurdles and you, the owners,
were delighted by all of this and then, when it collapsed, Devon
Loch style, in the easy run-up to the finishing tape, you were
more shocked than most people, but it was nothing to do with you.
Ms Ghosh: No, I was not saying
that for a moment and I hope that we have come to the Committee
with the right approach, which is to be absolutely open about
what our analyses of the issues were.
Q339 Chairman: You have been very
open, but, maybe out of ignorance, what I am struggling with is
that I get the impression that an awful lot of professional input
has gone into designing and making the system supposedly work.
A vast amount of reassuring information has been coming back from
the Rural Payments Agency and no doubt their IT partners, sending
back to Defra messages of reassurance which you have been happy
enough to pass on to ministers so that ministers can make their
public announcements.
Ms Ghosh: No, absolutely not.
2 Note by witness: He was also a member of
the interview board. Back
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