Examination of Witness (Questions 1000-1019)
SIR BRIAN
BENDER, KCB, CB
6 DECEMBER 2006
Q1000 Chairman: My next question
may be a level of detail too far but nonetheless I will ask it.
Do you recall ever having to mark his various boxes on appraisal
with some critical observations about what he had done?
Sir Brian Bender: Broadly, no,
which means that as far as I recall there were no such examples.
The real issue was being able to assess the capability moving
forward as against business as usual, because it is very easy
to have a clear tick in terms of the targets to making payments
in the past. We did have discussions within the Ownership board
about how we could get meatier performance indicators looking
forward, but the short answer to your question is no.
Q1001 Chairman: Do you recall Mr
McDermott, the director of information systems?
Sir Brian Bender: Of course, yes.
Q1002 Chairman: What exactly was
his job? He seems to have ended up being paid about twice as much
as Mr McNeill. He was the IT expert and yet, as your inquiries
have adduced, failures in that area had some pretty serious consequences.
Tell us why you had such confidence in this gentleman.
Sir Brian Bender: First, I have
read what Mr Vry said to the Sub-Committee last week. From where
I was sitting it seemed to me to stack up. Again, he came with
a good track record in IT and seemed to be providing within the
agency what was necessary. I do not believe that it was simply
an IT issue; it was the interaction of IT and the business operations
of the Rural Payments Agency with the compliance side of it. I
thought that I was giving a consistent signal that the Rural Payments
Agency needed to strike an appropriate balance between the risk
of disallowance and the risk of failing to implement the single
payment system. I thought that several times I gave a very clear
signal that due weight had to be given to the second. In the end,
the agency had the worst of both worlds. My sense with hindsight
and talking to people, including one or two members of the board
of the agency, is that that culture at the time things went wrong
was still too compliance-focused as opposed to business operations
and customer-focused. I do not want to mince words about what
is and what is not IT, but it was the link between IT, the compliance
controls put onto it and the focus that the agency ought to have
had in terms of recognising that it had two responsibilities,
but a particular one towards the farmer customers in making the
payments and also to the taxpayer in terms of disallowance.
Q1003 Chairman: You had a one-to-one
relationship with Johnston McNeill?
Sir Brian Bender: Yes.
Q1004 Chairman: But there would have
been others within the Defra management board who would have been
more closely involved in monitoring what was happening with the
RPA. Can you tell us who would have been the day-to-day point
of liaison and commentator on what was going on inside the RPA
back up to the Defra board?
Sir Brian Bender: To make clear
the logic of what I am about to say perhaps I may make the following
statement. The core department is responsible for policy development
and the RPA is responsible for implementing that policy. One of
the issues throughout, particularly looking at it with hindsight
and the lessons, was how to ensure that the accountability of
the agency was not blurred by second-guessing and backseat driving,
but nonetheless there was sufficient challenge. In a way, I guess
that is at the heart of this Sub-Committee's inquiry. In the department
three people were mainly involved at board level. Andy Lebrecht
at the time was director general for sustainable farming and food.
His primary responsibility was policy development on this side
but he also had accountability as joint chairman of the CAP Reform
Programme board. Before Mark Addison became interim chief executive
at the time he had Bthe title in the department of Director General
for Operations and Service Delivery. He had within his purview
the IT part of the department and general overview of relationships
with arm's length bodies. The third person was the finance director
who at the time was Andrew Burchell. Those three people attended
all the meetings of the Executive Review Group, except when they
could not for some reason, and they were also members of the Ownership
board of the Rural Payments Agency on the department's side.
Chairman: No doubt we will come back
to how messages went up and down the line, but it is very helpful
to have that clarification.
Q1005 Mr Rogerson: I would like to
focus a little more on the change programme and how it interacted
with the introduction of the SPS. You told us back in May that
you personally checked with the chief executive that there would
not be a conflict between these two things. To explore that a
little more, what was the initial assessment of the effect of
the change programme on the ability to introduce SPS?
Sir Brian Bender: I have looked
back at the files again. The decision to merge the two was taken
in 2003 when the shape of CAP reform was known. The proposal came
from the Rural Payments Agency to the governance group that I
chaired. Clearly, one of the issues throughout all this was whether
the RPA had the capacity to do it all. What I am about to say
does not answer that, but it was not something that the department
imposed on the RPA; it was a proposition from the RPA. As I recall
it, the pros and cons were carefully considered and the issue
was then put to Defra ministers for endorsement. The question
was: with these two things happening, would it be more sensible
to handle them in parallel or put them together? There were risks
both ways, but the arguments at the time were compelling. Clearly,
with the wonderful gift of hindsight, one of the questions that
needed to be probed further was whether the RPA had the capacity
to do what it was proposing. But in meetings or in private no
one from the agency side said that we were asking too much of
it, or that it was offering too much.
Q1006 Mr Rogerson: As you said, the
proposal to lose 1,800 staff in the run-up to that time came very
much from within the agency; it felt that it could deliver it?
Sir Brian Bender: Along the way
I was trying to give two messages to the agency. One was the balancing
of disallowance risk with the delivery risk; the other was balancing
the efficiency programme with single payment system delivery.
I thought I made clear several times—I hope the record shows
it—that if there was any risk of the Rural Payments Agency
failing to meet the single payment system delivery as a result
of what in shorthand we called the Gershon programme it should
be put to me because that would be an argument that I would have
to have with the Treasury and the Office of Government Commerce.
They should not assume that downsizing, to use an awful American
word, was paramount. As far as I was concerned, the single payment
system was the priority and the question was whether they could
do both. Obviously, with hindsight there were risks but at the
time they were not flagged up. One of the points that I looked
at, again with hindsight, was the extent to which the messages
that I thought I was giving were being heard through the organisation
rather than just at the very top levels.
Q1007 Chairman: You said that when
the change programme and single farm payment were pushed together
and you asked the Rural Payments Agency whether it could do both
it came back with reassuring noises. You then said that you put
it to Defra ministers. How did you explain to Defra ministers
that it would work? Ministers were not experts in what happens
in the guts of the RPA; they would have needed some reassurance,
in the way that minutes are put before ministers with recommendations.
They are followed by a series of paragraphs explaining why officials
recommend acceptance of what they propose. How did you give that
information to ministers?
Sir Brian Bender: My recollection
is that they probably received a copy of the presentation that
had been put to the relevant governance body.
Q1008 Chairman: Which body?
Sir Brian Bender: The governance
bodies were changed slightly. At the time there was something
which was subsequently replaced and became the Executive Review
Group. I think that at the time it was called a Restructuring
Board.[1]
That was a body I chaired which brought together basically the
policy and Rural Payments Agency. If I got this wrong I can correct
it afterwards. A presentation was made to that body by the RPA
in the way I described earlier and a submission would have been
made to ministers after that which I believe would have picked
up that presentation—it might even have attached it—and
spelled out the proposition and, I hope, though I have not double-checked
it, the risks involved.
Q1009 Chairman: Therefore, ministers
would have relied entirely on the senior official who presented
the submission to ministers and a presentation. Were they taken
through this presentation?
Sir Brian Bender: I cannot remember
whether or not they had a meeting on it. Again, we can come back
to you. They may have been.
Q1010 Chairman: The reason I ask
the question is that what you would have known about was the ability
of the RPA to do a certain amount of work because it was already
doing a lot of that in administering the existing payment schemes
and other areas of responsibility like the Intervention Board.
Therefore, it was not a body that was unused to a considerable
volume of work.
Sir Brian Bender: Exactly.
Q1011 Chairman: If I had been a minister
I would have thought somebody would show me some rough comparisons
between the volumes of work done before and after RPA and the
number of people who would be doing it. I would have been looking
for something that might have shown symmetry between the volume
of work and the resource available. Perhaps I would have wanted
a discussion with somebody about that. I am not getting the flavour
that there was much discussion on it.
Sir Brian Bender: I cannot remember
whether ministers had a meeting on it at the time. They may have
done so, but again we can check that.[2]
Q1012 Chairman: The reason I ask is that
when Lord Bach was with us and talked about his period of watch
he told us that he asked all the kinds of reasonable questions
that a layman would have asked about it. I am trying to get a
flavour as to how much ministers were able to probe this meaningfully
with objective information being given to them that all of the
various risk factors had been examined by people like yourself
and others with experience to give them the reassurance that when
they signed on the dotted line they knew what they were letting
themselves in for.
Sir Brian Bender: First, I do
believe that the submission outlined the risks involved, and there
were also risks in not doing it. Second, the quality of the independent
challenge was increased at a later stage. By that stage we were
having regular Office of Government Commerce Gateway reviews.
I believe it was after that that we brought into the relevant
governance arrangements, as I mentioned at the May hearing of
this Sub-Committee, somebody who was an experienced programme
manager in the private sector and who provided independent support
and challenge to the department and me.
Q1013 Chairman: Who was that person?
Sir Brian Bender: Her name is
Karen Jordan. I cannot remember whether she was around at that
point in time, but she was certainly there by late 2003 because
it was she who recommended the revised governance arrangements.
She had a strong track record in both audit and programme management.
We found her through a search with the Whitehall and Industry
Group. She became a member of the Defra audit committee but also
fulfilled a role which I would describe as quality assurance of
the delivery and provided a lot of challenge as well as support
in meetings and outside. From time to time, including in the last
couple of weeks of my time in Defra, she had private meetings
about where she felt more comfortable and where she had concerns.
She may now be a member of the RPA Board. She came on board at
some point and that fulfilled the requirement which the Office
of Government Commerce later introduced into high-risk projects
of making sure that on the relevant programme boards there was
some independent challenge.
Q1014 Mr Rogerson: If we move to
the task-based approach, you have a system coming in which is
new to those who are completing the forms. Obviously, it is a
new way of working for those who have to deal with things at the
other end. Was there any reassessment of the programme given the
complexities and newness of the SPS to see how new conflicts and
problems might be emerging?
Sir Brian Bender: Plainly, there
was a question whether the IT system was right, which it obviously
was not, for the single payment system. There was a renegotiation
and change in the scope of the contract between RPA and Accenture.
I do not recall any discussion, task-based or otherwise, at that
point. As the Sub-Committee knows probably better than I, the
original proposition for task-based working came out of the 1999
business case to set up the RPA. I know what the current chief
executive said to the Sub-Committee last week about the inefficiencies
of the system. The point I make is that this was a proper issue
for the agency; it was not for the department to second guess
because it was an operational issue. That is not intended to be
a cop-out on my part, but I think that it would be quite a brave
core department that said it was wrong. Plainly, there are questions
that one can ask in terms of challenge.
Q1015 Chairman: Had anybody ever
done task-based working elsewhere in government at which you could
have had a look?
Sir Brian Bender: I cannot answer
that.
Lynne Jones: The Child Support Agency?
Q1016 Chairman: I am just intrigued
to know whether there was some justification that as a piece of
methodology it was proven, or whether somebody just plucked it
off the shelf or out of the blue as a good idea.
Sir Brian Bender: I cannot answer
your direct question. I will probably say what you already know.
The original business case set the objective of a workflow-based
system that would allow management by tasks so that it would provide
flexibility for staff to manage more than one scheme at a time.
That was relevant to 1999-2000. Obviously, Mr Rogerson's question
is: what review was made when the single payment system came in?
The answer to that is that certainly the scope of the IT was refined
and revised and there was renegotiation with the supplying company.
I do not recall any discussion of whether or not task-based working
was still appropriate. Whether or not that happened in the RPA
I do not recall, but I do not remember it happening in a meeting
at which I was present.
Q1017 Mr Rogerson: One of the biggest
frustrations on the other side—the system is also new to
the claimants—is the ability to engage in an individual
case and develop a relationship with someone in order to overcome
the complexities. There was the continued need to explain things
to a new person each time without making much progress, and the
maps coming out were still inaccurate and gave rise to the same
problems.
Sir Brian Bender: I absolutely
understand that. I was very struck that one of the things Mark
Addison did in the period he was interim chief executive was remove
some of the controls so that, for example, things could be dealt
with by phone rather than having to consider letters coming in
and going out. That does not quite answer your question, but in
part it comes back to my point—I am not trying to mince
words—about the extent to which this was an IT problem rather
than understanding the business operation and applying it. I do
not think that it was quite as clear cut as some of the questioning
suggests. Mark Addison came in and said that there were controls
which meant that it was not working efficiently in getting out
payments and was unnecessarily restrictive in the way it was operating.
I think that there is a blur between the pure IT and controls
that the agency built in.
Q1018 Chairman: In April 2001 the
change programme was established and the process of office rationalisation
came in. If I have understood it correctly—if not, correct
me—task-based working was a key element in the deliverability
of the change programme. When you took over the department how
rigorously did you probe how this method of working, which is
absolutely central to achieving your savings in cutting back on
the old MAFF offices and reducing the number of personnel, would
work?
Sir Brian Bender: The answer is
fairly strongly. I did not get into the detail of the task-based
system, but I recall quite a lot of discussion. I arrived in the
department in June and the announcement was in the context of
July spending review. It was probably the single matter on which
I spent most time in that few weeks in the context of the closing
stages of the spending review. Does this stack up? Is it deliverable?
Nick Brown as minister was quite understandably asking questions
about it. What I do not recall is any discussion about the fundamental
IT underpinning of it.
Q1019 Chairman: Put aside the IT
bit because I think it is right to park it as a technical piece
of mechanism to make something work. The implication of the task-based
system and the fact that it had enough process and could be managed
was central to the ability of Defra to make these substantial
savings. It is the foundation of it.
Sir Brian Bender: Yes.
1 Note by witness: The predecessor of the Executive
Review Group was the MAFF Restructuring Board, which was chaired
by Sir Brian Bender. There was also a Common Agricultural Policy
Paying Agency Board reporting to the Restructuring Board. Back
2
Note by witness: The witness is unable to find files with
dates. Back
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