House of Commons - Communities and Local Government Committee

Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee Second Report

2 The challenge of delivery

2. CLG was formed in May 2006, inheriting many of the former functions of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), plus some responsibilities moved from the Home Office and the former Department for Trade and Industry. CLG employed around 2,250 staff and was responsible for more than £33 billion of Government expenditure in 2006-07. Most of that—£23.7 billion—was spent in direct support of local government, principally through revenue support grant and business rates. The Department itself allocated just under £8 billion to its own priorities, including £3.3 billion for housing, £2.4 billion for tackling disadvantage and £1.8 billion for improving regional economic development. Most of that £8 billion is in turn spent through other public bodies, such as Regional Development Agencies and CLG's own sponsored bodies (the Housing Corporation, for example). It is immediately apparent that the Department conducts most of its work through long, devolved delivery chains.

The Capability Review

3. CLG's competence in co-ordinating those delivery chains faced its most sustained questions of the year in the Capability Review published in December 2006.[2] The review, conducted by the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit with assistance from the Audit Commission and the National Audit Office (NAO), aimed to measure capacity to deliver and to identify necessary improvements. Significant weaknesses were identified in setting out implementation plans and establishing a strategic lead across Whitehall and among strategic partners charged with practical delivery on the ground. These conclusions were in line with concerns we had raised in our reports on the Department's Annual Report in both 2005 and 2006. As we noted last year, these would be significant problems for any Government Department, but are particularly so for CLG because its work is so dependent on others—for example, local authorities, registered social landlords (RSLs) and bodies such as the Planning Inspectorate, the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships.

4. We noted that the Department needed to demonstrate significant improvement in setting clear strategic goals and persuading its many partners to act on them.[3] In response, the Department said that "refreshed and significantly smaller" corporate PSA goals would be set under the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in late 2007, as has occurred.[4] It also said that new partnership agreements would be forged with other Departments, and the Annual Report published shortly after that response makes the same point.[5] Those partnership agreements are the central links of CLG's delivery chains. We recommended last year that details of the new partnership agreements CLG is forging with the stakeholders responsible for delivery of its policy goals should be set out in the Annual Report so that we might judge their scope and effectiveness. This has not been done. We repeat the recommendation for future Annual Reports.

5. The NAO has outlined the key challenges facing CLG as: developing a clear view of what works across the full range of its responsibilities; more strategic management of staff; improved analytical capacity within the Department; and plugging skills gaps in project and programme management.[6] Once again, this conclusion mirrors the concerns we have highlighted for more than two years. The CLG Annual Report records steps taken on those points, including the reorganisation of the Department's senior management team into new directorates-general, the recruitment of more analysts (particularly economists, as the Permanent Secretary told us last year) and the creation of "expert panels with representation from academia, relevant think tanks and delivery partners to review and challenge the data and trends across our policy areas."[7]

6. Concern persists, however, about CLG's capacity to deliver. The NAO told us:

the Department is not strong at setting out clear implementation plans and does not have a reputation amongst its partners for having enough strategic influence to solve problems within Whitehall that are creating obstacles to local success.[8]

In November 2007, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), highlighted a specific example, the Thames Gateway development project, where CLG is perceived to be failing to set a clear lead and to manage a project properly. The PAC noted that the Department's "management of the programme has been weak" and that it "has not translated the vision for the programme into comprehensive and measurable objectives".[9]

7. The Annual Report notes that the Department takes a "strategic lead across Government" on better homes and neighbourhoods, local government, local services and environment, regeneration and investment in towns and cities, and safe, tolerant and inclusive communities.[10] The range and number of governmental and non-governmental organisations involved in those fields requires an immense amount of the influence, brokering and negotiation identified by the Secretary of State as her Department's key levers. The Annual Report further notes the Department's desire to ensure that every staff member has the skills to increase their contribution.[11] In spite of the transformation programme put in place after CLG was formed in May 2006, questions remain about the range of skills possessed by the front-line staff who manage the arms-length delivery chains on which the Department depends.[12]The Department needs urgently to tackle persistent concerns about its ability to deliver across the range of policies for which it is responsible and its ability to influence its strategic partners.

Public Service Agreements

8. CLG was responsible in 2006-07 for 10 PSAs, introduced by the Government with the 2004 CSR. In its Annual Report, the Department assessed itself as being "on course" to meet eight of those targets, while recording "slippage" on two—Decent Homes (PSA 7) and Race Equality and Community Cohesion (PSA 10). During our inquiry, it further accepted that it should not have reported itself as being "on course" to meet its Gender Equality (PSA 9) target.

9. The nature of the PSA targets CLG will be required to co-ordinate next year have changed as a result of the 2007 CSR. New and significantly smaller targets have been identified across Government. The 2007 Pre-Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review allocates responsibility to CLG for two of those:

CLG will lead delivery of the cross-governmental Public Service Agreement (PSA) to build more cohesive, empowered and active communities and improve long-term housing supply and affordability.[13]

CLG will lead work across government to increase participation in a range of services; change attitudes and perceptions; and improve local public services and quality of life.[14]

The Secretary of State told us that the Department would additionally contribute to 20 more PSAs across government: that says to me again that CLG is about negotiating, brokering, bringing other people to the table.[15]

As already noted, the Department's skills in those respects will need to be of the highest quality. The Department must continue to expand its analytical capability and to ensure that its staff possess the full range of skills its arms-length delivery chains require. Negotiation, brokering and persuasion are not the traditional levers of a Whitehall delivery department, and nor are they easy skills to find or to measure. The Secretary of State recognises that those skills are essential to the success of her Department and its ability to meet its public service agreements. The Department's stakeholders remain to be convinced that they are sufficiently embedded in its staff and culture. We share their doubts.

DECENT HOMES—PSA 7

10. The Decent Homes programme is arguably one of CLG's success stories. The Department has co-ordinated the investment of some £20 billion in improving sub-standard housing, and the Annual Report records that since 1997

"560,000 new kitchens, 400,000 new bathrooms and 770,000 new central heating systems have been installed into council homes. 510,000 council homes have been re-wired to ensure that they meet fire and safety requirements, and work is being carried out to improve energy efficiency."[16]

Most of this improvement is concentrated on the most deprived areas: the proportion of non-decent homes there fell from 52 per cent to 49 per cent between 2003-04 and 2004-05.[17] This translates, of course, into better living conditions for tens of thousands of people and is to be praised accordingly.

11. None the less, the Department recorded "slippage" against its Decent Homes target and has accepted that it will fail to deliver what it originally promised. Having set as its baseline the improvement by 2010 of all 1.65 million social sector homes classed non-decent in 2001—1.17 million run by local authorities, the remainder by RSLs—the Department conceded last year that it would not achieve more than 95 per cent of that target by that date. Two broad reasons are advanced for this. First, many landlords carry out "elemental" programmes of works, meaning, for example, that the windows of all relevant properties, then the kitchens, then the central heating systems are upgraded in sequence; and this means that those homes will not reach Decent Homes standard until all works are complete.[18] In addition, arms-length management organisations (ALMOs) have spent less than expected: "fewer ALMOs began spending in this year than we had programmed for."[19] This has happened, in part, because funding for the sixth round of the ALMO programme was released more slowly than CLG anticipated, partly in turn because the Department was waiting for ALMOs to be ready to receive it. The point, of course, is that ultimate delivery of the programme relies on the ALMOs, RSLs and landlords who use the funding to make the improvements on the ground, and CLG's task is to ensure that they are able to do what is planned at the time intended.

12. Richard McCarthy, Director-General for Programme, Policy and Innovation, argued that achieving 95 per cent by 2010 was "a tall order in itself" and would represent "an outstanding record of delivery by local government in particular".[20] With the caveat that the remaining 5 per cent represents perhaps 80,000 homes not fully brought up to the Decent Homes standard, we broadly concur with that view. We commend the work CLG has done with its partners on the Decent Homes programme, which is indeed an example of outstanding local government delivery. We express deep disappointment, however, that the Department proved unable to co-ordinate the work required down its delivery chains sufficiently to achieve its initial target of bringing all home up to decent standard by 2010, and we seek a clear indication of what will be done to improve those homes which will not be upgraded by then.

FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICES—PSA 3

13. Fire and Rescue is also an area of achievement for CLG. The Annual Report records that during 2006-07 "there were just 227 accidental fire-related deaths compared with an average of 349 per annum over the five years to 1998-99."[21] CLG attributes this to a shift of resources from dealing with fire and its consequences towards prevention. For example, a Fire Kills national media campaign and a Home Fire Risk Check initiative have each encouraged more use of smoke alarms and awareness of how to act when fire breaks out. The NAO, however, enters a note of caution, on this achievement, noting that "the number of fire related deaths has been dropping fairly consistently over the past 30 years and it is not clear that recent reforms have accelerated this decrease."[22]

14. In spite of meeting its principal target, CLG recorded "slippage" against a sub-target requiring it to ensure that no local fire and rescue authority had an annual fatality rate from accidental fires in homes of more than 1.25 times the national average. Only four of the 47 English fire services fail to meet this target—Merseyside, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and Lancashire—a figure that has fallen from 11 in 2005. Research to establish why those authorities perform poorly identified a strong correlation between deprived communities and fire risk.[23]Fire services in those areas are consulting others on how reductions were achieved.

15. A target measuring departure from the average is of course not wholly satisfactory: if death rates rose in the other 43 fire authority areas, the average would rise, bringing the four worst authorities closer to it.[24] It does provide a measure of achievement, but the different challenges faced by fire authorities in different areas are not factored in. Mr Chris Wormald, Director-General for Governance and Communication, told us that the target had "served its purpose" and was being replaced with one based on a broader range of fire and rescue service measurements and on more choices determined more locally by the Fire Service about service provision and prevention.[25]

16. The NAO told us that while overall death rates were falling, the time taken by fire services to respond to emergency calls is rising. While 46 per cent of fires were responded to within five minutes in 2001, the figure fell to 37 per cent in 2006, and in 2005 it was taking an average 7.11 minutes for the first fire engine to arrive on the scene after an emergency call.[26] Mr Wormald accepted those figures, but argued that "around 80 per cent of fire deaths have already happened at the point at which the fire brigade is called. The actual effect of response times on the death rate is really comparatively small".[27]

17. Among factors that explain slower response, rising traffic volumes may be significant—"For England, response times to primary fires have increased by 16 per cent and traffic has increased by 15 per cent since 1995. It is frequently reported by local fire and rescue services that traffic has an impact on the time taken to respond to an incident."[28] The Department will conduct research into the impact of traffic on response times, and that is welcome. Mr Wormald appeared to suggest, however, that slower responses to emergencies were not a matter of grave concern: "I am not denying that the number has gone up, it clearly has. What I am saying is that it does not equate to a worse service."[29] We disagree. Slower response to fires is a worse service. Even if 80 per cent of fire deaths occur before an emergency call is made, speed of response still matters in the remaining 20 per cent of cases, to those who may be injured by fire and to the owners of property on fire. We recommend that research into the impact of traffic on response times be extended to consider means of achieving quicker response.

RACE EQUALITY AND COMMUNITY COHESION—PSA 10

18. CLG inherited responsibility for delivering the Government's race equality strategy from the Home Office in May 2006, having previously been responsible for equality and cohesion. Performance in its first year in charge of the overarching strategy was not, on the face of it, encouraging. The headline target was to "reduce race inequalities and build community cohesion", and three sub-targets were set, focusing on perceptions among black and minority ethnic (BME) communities of unfair treatment by public services, of discrimination in the labour market, and of rising community cohesion in areas where the "risk of disturbance is high".[30] On all three, the Department records "slippage", making this the only one of its 10 PSAs for 2006-07 on which it missed all its targets. As noted above, the PSAs are being replaced with two developed in the current CSR process, but CLG will continue to lead governmental work on changing attitudes and perceptions.

19. Once again, the Department's capacity to set clear programmes and drive implementation of policy by a range of stakeholders lies at the heart of its difficulties. The Annual Report notes that last year's two PSA targets were

challenging and ambitious, and the success of our work depends on our ability to work with a wide range of external stakeholders and other Government departments. Our challenge is to articulate our objectives so that they can be captured easily by partners at a national and local level and reflect the key policy questions we have about how a modern multicultural society can best function.[31]

Once again, the Secretary of State's recognition that influence, brokering and negotiation are crucial to her Department's ability to deliver remains to be translated into front-line skills in those areas.

20. On the first sub-target, which sought a reduction in the number of people from BME communities who perceived unfair treatment from eight key public sector organisations, CLG argued that the headline "slippage" disguised progress within the target:

For example, although little progress appears to have been made in improving the perceptions of discrimination for the aggregate, the proportion of Black and minority ethnic people who think that they would be treated worse than people of other races has fallen significantly since 2001 for four of the eight PSA organisations.[32]

On the second target, related to perceptions of discrimination at work, the number of people from BME communities who said they were unfairly discriminated against when seeking employment fell from 24 per cent to 22 per cent, but the target slipped because the number saying they were unfairly discriminated against when seeking promotion rose from 46 per cent to 50 per cent.[33]

21. The three sub-targets CLG inherited, relying as they do on perceptions, are difficult to measure accurately. The new PSA is intended to supply clearer data reflecting what CLG is doing to improve community cohesion, but the three sub-targets on cohesion are. once again, based entirely on subjective measurements—the perceptions of those who believe people from different backgrounds get on well, on those who have meaningful interactions with people from different backgrounds, and on those who feel that they belong to their neighbourhood. We welcome the introduction of a new, sharper PSA for community cohesion as part of the 2007 CSR process. However, we are concerned that performance in this area is being measured entirely against perceptions of cohesion, and not against more objective criteria of disadvantage such as rates of employment, educational attainment or housing standards. In addition, the new performance indicators focus on the national picture, and we recommend that CLG look beyond the precise terms of its high-level PSA target to seek to influence change in local areas where cohesion is in question or where new threats to cohesion arise.

GENDER EQUALITY—PSA 9

22. CLG's Annual Report for 2007 may well turn out to be the only one in the Department's history to comment directly on gender equality, a policy area for which it was given responsibility by the former Prime Minister in May 2006 on the appointment of the rt hon. Ruth Kelly MP as Secretary of State, but which, following the appointment of the rt hon. Hazel Blears MP as Secretary of State, the new Prime Minister transferred to the new Government Equalities Office in July 2007. The Department managed during its year or so in charge of the policy to implement the Equality Act 2006 and the public sector gender equality duty. Otherwise, having only just had time to appoint a Director-General to lead its equalities work, CLG recorded a mixed performance across the 15 indicators within the PSA, hitting the target on five, failing to assess five and missing the remaining five. The Annual Report incorrectly records overall progress as "on course", but CLG subsequently told us that that officials had reassessed the data and "the PSA is not now on course to be met."[34] The NAO's review of the data systems underlying PSA 9 in fact found the target "unfit for the purpose of reporting improvements in gender equality", saying that the indicators used did not collectively give a clear picture of performance.[35] The fact that CLG wrongly reported itself as being on course to meet its Equality PSA target is not only unacceptable but a further indication of confusion about precisely what the Government wants to do in this area, what mechanisms it means to employ, and how urgently it needs to act.

23. We were further concerned by difficulties in creating the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights and by delays in introducing a single Equalities Bill to harmonise existing equalities legislation. As our report on Equality made clear, we fear that these difficulties and delays, allied to the fact that responsibility for equality policy appears to shift with every governmental reorganisation, may imply that equality policy has been lower on the Government's agenda than its statements on the subject would seek to persuade us.[36] Responsibility for gender equality rested with the Department for Communities and Local Government for little over a year before passing to the Government's new Equalities Office. During the three-year period of the PSA targets set in 2004, responsibility also rested at times with a Women's Unit within the Cabinet Office and with the Department for Work and Pensions. We welcome both the new Office and the creation of a new PSA as part of the CSR 2007 process. We recommend strongly that responsibility for achieving the targets set under that PSA remain with a single body throughout the period of their existence to enable the maintenance of a continued, coherent focus on their achievement.

Home Information Packs

24. The introduction across the housing market of Home Information Packs (HIPs) was another major challenge for CLG in 2006-07, and one on which it again failed to deliver. The 2006 Annual Report identified HIPs as a "key priority" for the coming year. Within weeks of its publication, the then Secretary of State, Ruth Kelly MP, announced that the packs would not include a mandatory Home Condition Report, intended to save housebuyers the cost and time spent purchasing expensive surveys of their own. HIPs should have then been rolled out in June 2007; in fact, they were introduced two months late in August, following considerable uncertainty, and then only for homes with four or more bedrooms. Three-bedroomed homes were added in September. Only now, in December 2007, six months behind schedule, are the weakened HIPs being introduced for all homes marketed for sale.

25. Anyone reading only the Annual Report to find out what had happened to this "key priority" might be forgiven for thinking all was well. Among its 120 pages, the Report makes only one uninformative reference to HIPs:

Regulations implementing Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) were laid in March and the first EPCs will come into force in relation to the marketed sale of existing dwellings alongside Home Information Packs (HIPs) as from June 2007.[37]

In 2005, we criticised the Department for overstating its achievements in its Annual Report.[38] Simply omitting to mention failures such as the troubled implementation of HIPs is no less unacceptable.

26. Nor were officials or Ministers vastly more forthcoming in oral evidence. Mr Housden advanced three reasons why Ministers had delayed introducing HIPs. The first two related to home inspectors: there were not enough of them and nor was there an adequate regional spread. There were, indeed, too few qualified inspectors in June 2007 but this was because potential candidates were understandably reluctant to invest personal savings in training and in certification fees for jobs the Government would not guarantee would exist. Mr Housden himself said as much:

What actually happened, we are pretty sure, is that … people deferred because they were not sure that actually the policy was going to be introduced. Because of the noise in the media and opposition people did not undertake their five practice assessments quickly enough or if they did do they held off paying the fee.[39]

The earnings potential of those jobs dropped dramatically the day CLG cancelled mandatory HCRs: to this day, newspaper advertisements for the training programme promise inspectors "£200 to £300" for conducting each of up to six Home Condition Reports a week, without mentioning that since these are now voluntary most home owners will not commission them.[40] The delay in introducing HIPs was a further discouragement. The inspectors required for the job emerged fully only once it became clear that HIPs would be introduced, even if partially. For the Permanent Secretary to suggest HIPS could not be introduced because there were not enough inspectors is casuistry. There were not enough inspectors because CLG first watered down and then repeatedly delayed the introduction of HIPs.

27. Mr Housden thirdly placed the blame for the delay squarely on CLG's Ministers, saying:

the third [reason] was about the operation of home information packs and general conditions. I think it is the third one that has held ministers back … conditions in the housing and mortgage market generally in the last little while need to be examined.[41]

Questioned on which particular market conditions had caused the delay, the Minister for Housing was repeatedly unclear, leading eventually to the following exchange:

Mr Hands: But it is a specific phrase about the general conditions of the market. What is it in those general conditions? Is it the price? Is it the supply? Is it the number of transactions? What is it that you are looking at?

Yvette Cooper: The fact that we had a very quiet August, for example, meant that we needed to take time to ensure that the implications and the impact and the rollout throughout August and September were operating as we expected. Obviously, the quietness of the market is something that you have to take into account. We also simply need to make sure that we have taken full advice from all appropriate areas to make sure that we are taking the right decision at the right time. I do not think there is anything particularly mysterious about this. It is simply to say that had the housing market been operating last year continually in the way that it was, had we not had the greater uncertainty, you can come to decisions much more quickly.[42]

28. A further major reason for the delay was the decision of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)—backed by other organisations working within the housing market and supported by a highly critical section of the media—to seek judicial review of the decision to introduce HIPs at all. Mr Housden, accepted that there had been a failure of process here: he was, he said, reflecting on "whether we could have done more to take, particularly, industry stakeholders with us".[43] A stakeholder group has somewhat belatedly been set up involving CLG Ministers and players within the market, including RICS itself, and the existence of that group has assisted in the eventual rollout of HIPs.[44] CLG's failure to engage effectively early enough with stakeholders is both one of the principal reasons why HIPs were delayed and a further example of the Department's inability to build the relationships it needs if it is to succeed in taking partners with it across the whole range of policy.

29. It is too early to say precisely what impact HIPs will have on the housing market or on easing individual sales, and the Department has begun conducting research in both areas. Early indications are that, as originally envisaged, the costs of local authority searches are falling and the time taken for searches is speeding up, both of which make life easier for anyone seeking to buy a house or flat. EPCs, which are mandatory rather than voluntary, should, by recommending environmental improvements, help reduce carbon emissions from the UK's housing stock. Over time, CLG will gain data telling whether overall transaction times have speeded up.

30. Whether HIPs might discourage vendors, and therefore reduce the availability of properties for sale and in turn depress house prices, is rather more difficult to judge. Ministers, said Mr Housden, were monitoring the general conditions of the housing market to enable them to measure the impact HIPs would have. He said the introduction of HIPs for larger houses in August had been accompanied by a short-term spike in property marketed for sale immediately before the introduction date, followed by a short-term decline before the figures headed back towards equilibrium by the time he spoke to us in November.[45] Over time, CLG will gain data showing whether overall transaction times have speeded up or not.

31. But the cost of a HIP, which on the most recent data averages £300 to £350, is just one of the myriad factors any householder considers when deciding to offer a home for sale.[46] It is also a comparatively minor one: a credit squeeze like that affecting Northern Rock, the state of interest rates, the condition of the wider economy, including growth and employment rates, and the level of pay rises and bonuses cannot be disentangled from HIPs and potentially have a much greater effect on the market. Unless it were unexpectedly, and disproportionately, large, the impact of HIPs simply would not be apparent against the bigger picture of the market shifts driven by those other factors. It is unclear to us precisely what within the market the Government was monitoring and how Ministers could have concluded on market conditions alone that HIPs were, or were not, likely to have such a negative market impact that they had to be delayed, then phased in.

32. The long and tortuous process of introducing Home Information Packs signals another failure of delivery on CLG's part, and the reasons for that failure lie in poor preparation and a retreat by the Department's ministerial team. The Permanent Secretary made it clear that decisions on when and whether to roll out the programme were ultimately taken by Ministers with the general conditions of the housing market as the final arbiter. By 22 November, three weeks after we took evidence from the Minister, no obvious changes had occurred in either numbers of assessors or the housing market, but Ministers considered conditions sufficiently robust to announce the full roll-out of HIPS from 14 December. We can only conclude that decisions to delay the introduction of Home Information Packs and then to phase them in for homes of different sizes across a period of months were taken on political rather than economic grounds, owing more to a failure of nerve in the face of vocal opposition from the press and others than to the general conditions prevailing in the housing market itself.

Firelink and FiReControl

33. CLG is responsible for the Government's fire and resilience policy. Two major technology projects are currently under way: Firelink, which will replace telecommunications for the Fire Service throughout Great Britain with a digital network, and FiReControl, which centralises Fire Service control rooms in England. Both projects will miss their originally planned completion dates, and FiReControl is likely to overrun its initial IT budget by more than 50 per cent.

34. Firelink is designed to connect the Fire Service with the other primary emergency services and bodies such as the Ministry of Defence and the Coastguard. The project, which will see new radio systems fitted to 3,000 Fire and Rescue service vehicles, is due for completion in June 2009 and will cost £350 million in England, paid via CLG, with a further £50 million allocated for Wales and Scotland, through devolved budgets. The original completion date was December 2007.[47]FiReControl will create nine amalgamated Regional Control Centres to replace 46 existing control rooms in England, on the model already used to merge three control rooms into one in London in 1990. IT costs were originally budgeted at £120 million, with a planned completion date for the IT part of the project of 2009. The latter has slipped to 2011, with the cost now estimated at £190 million.[48]

35. In spite of these difficulties, the Department in its written evidence to us cites the FiReControl project as a specific example of how its delivery focus has sharpened over the period since the Capability Review identified its weakness in that area.

The Board has provided robust challenge to our key delivery projects e.g. FiReControl which was a high risk project and, following Board intervention, has now awarded contract and is moving to its delivery phase.[49]

Mr Wormald told us good progress was now being made towards the completion of both projects, although he accepted that

it did not come in at the speed we originally envisaged. It has been a complicated scheme to implement both with technical innovations and the large number of stakeholders and players.[50]

Among those stakeholders, the Chief Fire Officers' Association now supports the scheme, but Mr Wormald accepted that implementation would have been easier if such bodies had been on board from day one.[51] Even now, not all fire authority boards are fully convinced: "I would not say that every single one is signed up enthusiastically", Mr Wormald told us.[52] Mr Housden acknowledged that our own report on the Fire Service had said 18 months ago that greater stakeholder engagement in Firelink would be necessary to make the project work, commenting that we had identified an issue that was "difficult and which may have been obscuring the level of effective support that the programme now has."[53]

36. The running theme of our report is that CLG needs to become better at co-ordinating complicated schemes involving a large number of stakeholders, to use the negotiating, brokering and persuasive skills to which the Secretary of State referred, and to the absence of which we, the Capability Review, the NAO and the PAC have drawn attention. The way the Department is structured, the range of its targets and the arms-length nature of its delivery mechanisms make that method of working the very essence of its performance. The fact that FiReControl is progressing towards completion is, of course, to be welcomed. However, the fact that the Department cites a project two years behind schedule and 50 per cent over its initial IT budget as an example of how it is improving its delivery mechanisms highlights the persistent challenge that CLG continues to face. It needs urgently to establish what the NAO calls "a reputation amongst its partners for having enough strategic influence to solve problems within Whitehall that are creating obstacles to local success."[54]

2 Cabinet Office, Capability Review of Communities and Local Government, December 2006, pp 9-11. See http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/reform/capability_reviews/reports.asphttp://www.civilservice.gov.uk/reform/capability_reviews/reports.asp Back

3 Communities and Local Government Committee, Third Report of Session 2006-07, DCLG Annual Report 2006, HC 106, para 26 Back

4 Communities and Local Government, Government Response to the Communities and Local Government Committee's Report on the Department of Communities and Local Government's Annual Report 2006, May 2007, Cm 7125, p. 4 Back

5 Communities and Local Government, Community, opportunity, prosperity: Annual Report 2007, May 2007, Cm 7094, p. 27 Back

6 Ev 76 Back

7 Cm 7094 (2006-07), p. 27. See also, HC 106 (2006-07), Ev 2-3 Back

8 Ev 76 Back

9 Public Accounts Committee, Sixty-Second Report of Session 2006-07, The Thames Gateway: Laying the Foundations, HC 693, paras 1 and 3 Back

10 Cm 7094 (2006-07), p. 9 Back

11 Cm 7094 (2006-07), p. 27 Back

12 Ev 76 to 78 Back

13 HM Treasury, 2007 Pre-Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review, October 2007, p 218 Back