Examination of Witness (Questions 20-25)
SIR JOHN
EGAN
28 APRIL 2008
Q20 John Cummings: What do you believe
is further required by the Government in order to improve the
situation?
Sir John Egan: I can only tell
you of the things that I thought the Academy should do. Whether
they have done them or not, I simply do not know. I simply would
not know whether they have been done.
Q21 Chair: Can I ask you about the
group that was under your chairmanship that wrote the report:
how often did you meet, as a matter of interest; roughly how many
times did you meet?
Sir John Egan: We met many times
over about a six-month period.
Q22 Chair: Then of course you wrote
the report.
Sir John Egan: Yes.
Q23 Chair: Then nothing?
Sir John Egan: I was on a committee
that the Prime Minster was chairing, which was to develop the
Thames Gateway, and I rather hoped that I would be able to keep
contact with the happenings of the report through that; but that
particular committee only met two or three times within the year
following the report, and then it seems to have been disbanded.
I do not know anything much beyond that.
Chair: I must say it seems a slightly
odd way of doing it, something I am sure we will wish to pursue
with the Minister when we finally getting round to hearing the
evidence.
Q24 Mr Betts: Do you think that once
you produce a report like that you should be asked to do maybe
an evaluation of progress a year or two years after it?
Sir John Egan: I think that is
absolutely the case. If somebody has written a report like this,
I would have thought it automatic that I should have had some
contact with it over time, yes. That seems not to have been the
case.
Chair: I think we are all feeling that.
We do not necessarily need you to explore that point any further,
so we will certainly explore it in due course with Ministers,
but not now. Are there any additional points that Members wanted
to ask Sir John?
Q25 Andrew George: It does follow
from that; when you took on the brief to undertake the review,
were you reassured that all of the efforts that you and your review
team would be making in this regard would be followed through?
To what extent were you reassured by the Department that all of
the efforts you had gone to in producing an extremely comprehensive
and well thought-through report would be followed through?
Sir John Egan: I was somewhat
mollified by the idea of being on the Prime Minister's committee
to advise on the development of the Thames Gateway, so I thought
that there seemed to be an almost automatic system for me to keep
contact with a real life development of the ideas that we produced
here. We were hoping that the major hope for the Academy was that
it could help in the process of delegating authority from central
government, that they could produce a system of checking that
could see that progress was being made towards creative, sustainable
communities; and also in making sure that the generic skills that
we were looking for were being taught to the various professionals
that are involved in the planning process. By the way, when it
comes to planning, if you try to see a comprehensive planning
system under development and being developed, you will see there
are literally dozens and dozens of different kinds of people involved
in the planning process itself. It is too simplistic just to think
of them as people planning by drawing lines on pieces of paper;
that is not necessarily the key part of the planning process.
We wanted to make sure that all of the people in the planning
process were indeed receiving these generic skill trainings.
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