Examination of Witnesses (Questions 920-939)
MR TONY
COOPER, MR
SIMON VRY
AND MR
IAN HEWETT
27 NOVEMBER 2006
Q920 David Taylor: The head count
of permanent staff must be driven down at all costs, so even if
you are recruiting some lowly-paid, ill-trained, expensive in
the long run, staff, it is at least partly responsible for the
position in which the RPA found itself in March 2006?
Mr Cooper: The position that RPA
found itself in means that the contribution that they were making
to the Gershon target has not been achieved.
Q921 David Taylor: On 16 March, which
I am sure is wired into people's psyche in the RPA and in Defra,
the then Secretary of State announced the Hunter Review, a fundamental
review looking at the then existing and possible future functions,
looking at the effectiveness of relationships of the RPA with
the parent department and other key stakeholders: 16 March; it
is almost nine months since that was launched. There must be some
early information feeding out of the Hunter Review, some early
conclusions, some summary data that you could share with us today,
in brief. What sorts of things does it say?
Mr Cooper: I do not have knowledge
of the final report that David Hunter will be writing, and I believe
that will be published or made available to ministers early in
the New Year. In the early stages of the Hunter Review, they identified
some areas that we needed to focus on, for example, the organisational
change, the strengthening of the leadership, the strengthening
of management and the suggestion that some of the processes had
to be redesigned, and those are the things that I have been taking
forward in the meantime.
Q922 David Taylor: Only three months
after that announcement, Defra contracted Corven Consulting to
look at the Single Payment Scheme, did it not?
Mr Cooper: They did.
Q923 David Taylor: Was there not
at least some potential overlap between the work of the Hunter
Review and what Corven Consulting were charged with, and how has
that worked, in practice?
Mr Cooper: The first stages of
the Hunter Review were undertaken by Corven, so those early findings
also are reflecting what the Corven report said.
Q924 David Taylor: How much has Corven
cost so far?
Mr Cooper: I do not know. That
contract was between Defra and Corven.
Q925 David Taylor: It is not going
to be coloured by commercial considerations? We are not going
to argue them now.
Mr Cooper: I can let you have
a note.[3]
Q926 David Taylor: Will you write to
the Committee with that information?
Mr Cooper: Yes.
Q927 David Taylor: Then the sister
committee, the PAC, last month, Helen Ghosh told them that you
had brought in a team of consultants from Gartner to look at the
Agency's IT. What is their role and how much will they cost?
Mr Cooper: Their role is to take
a look at all of the IT in the RPA.
Q928 David Taylor: Including the
SPS?
Mr Cooper: Including the SPS.
Q929 David Taylor: Are you going
to hold Corven Consulting aside so that they can have a look as
well?
Mr Cooper: No. Corven were not
asked to look at the IT by Defra.
Q930 David Taylor: That is interesting.
How can you look at the Single Payment Scheme without referring
to the IT applications, which are at the core of it; how can you
possibly do that?
Mr Cooper: They looked at it from
a business process perspective and looked at it from the RPA's
management capability, I guess, rather than looking at the technical
detail of the IT.
Q931 David Taylor: We have got all
these consultants and agencies and reviews going on, and consultants
are buzzing round the corpse of SPS like so many wasps at Wimbledon
on a hot day. You are a senior civil servant of very considerable
pedigree; do you agree with me that, in my experience in IT, public
sector IT, the decision to outsource by senior managers, or top
managers, was often driven by a lack of self-confidence about
learning IT language or a lack of confidence in the abilities
of their own internal IT staff? Which was it that led you to contract
out; why were they needed?
Mr Cooper: I asked Gartner for
two reasons: one because they would provide an independent assessment
and I needed a considered view of the condition of the IT.
Q932 David Taylor: At great cost.
Could you not get the information more quickly and more reliably
and more inexpensively from senior IT staff within the Department,
or have they all been outsourced because of Gershon's pressures?
Mr Cooper: I do not think I could
identify three or four people that we have freed up with the right
skills to be able to look at the systems and provide that independent
view that I need.
David Taylor: I find that astonishing,
quite frankly. With the 4,500 staff that you have got, you have
had to go outside for expensive, gilt-edged consultants. They
must be licking their lips.
Q933 Chairman: How much is Gartner
costing?
Mr Cooper: I knew you would ask
me that.
David Taylor: I did ask it, actually.
Q934 Chairman: You have not given
an answer; that is why I am asking the question again?
Mr Cooper: I need to confirm but
I think it is £300,000.[4]
Q935 David Taylor: A fixed price?
Mr Cooper: Yes, it is.
Q936 David Taylor: Until they find
them something else to do.
Mr Cooper: It is a short-term
piece of work. I have used Gartner before for various benchmarking
exercises.
Q937 David Taylor: How short-term,
and how many consultants is that?
Mr Cooper: They will report at
the end of December.
Q938 David Taylor: How many consultants
will have been in place for the six months of the contract?
Mr Cooper: It has not been six
months. The contract was let at the beginning of October.
Q939 David Taylor: I am sorry; in
the three months. How many consultants, on average, will there
be for that £300,000?
Mr Cooper: I think there are three
or four; there is a core team but there are some further personnel
reviewing and drawing on information that they have from their
global experience.
3 Ev 240 (RPA Sub 17). Back
4
Ev 240 (RPA Sub 17). Back
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