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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 61-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE Defence Committee
MINISTRY OF DEFENCE ANNUAL REPORT AND ACCOUNTS 2006-07
Tuesday 13 November 2007 MR BILL JEFFREY and MR TREVOR WOOLLEY Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 12
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Tuesday 13 November 2007 Members present Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair Mr David S Borrow Mr David Crausby Linda Gilroy Mr Mike Hancock Mr Dai Havard Mr Adam Holloway Mr Bernard Jenkin Mr Brian Jenkins Robert Key ________________ Memorandum submitted by Ministry of Defence
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Bill Jeffrey CB, Permanent Under-Secretary of State, and Mr Trevor Woolley CB, Finance Director, Ministry of Defence, gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Good morning, Permanent Under-Secretary and Mr Woolley. You are welcome before the Committee. I have to say that we have a preliminary issue, which is that while we are taking evidence now on an annual basis on the Annual Reports and Accounts of the Ministry of Defence, we are grateful to you for sending answers to the inquiries that we asked about your report, but those answers only came in yesterday and they contain serious changes. For example, on the readiness target, in July I think you said that there was some risk. Yesterday we were told that you do not now expect to reach the target level by April 2008, and that is a crucial target level, a target level of generating forces which can be deployed, sustained and recovered at the scales of effort required to meet the Government's strategic objectives. We received this information yesterday. It then had to be disseminated to the Committee. The Committee staff had to consider it and to comment on it, and this was information which we had asked you to send us by 31 October to give time for the Committee staff to consider it and to advise the Committee on it. This, I have to tell you, has made the Committee distinctly angry. I wonder if you could, please, explain why it has taken so long to produce these answers. When you have explained that, the Committee will go into private session to consider whether the explanation is good enough and to consider whether we should postpone this evidence session to a time when we have had time to assimilate what it is that you have told us. Mr Jeffrey: Chairman, can I start with an apology because I realised last week that we were pushing the boundaries and that we were certainly going to exceed the timescale that you had set for us on this. I had not realised that it was as late as yesterday that this material reached you. The explanation lies to some extent in the fact - and you have picked a very cogent example which is the one about readiness - that the picture is changing quite steadily. We wanted in particular to give the Committee the most recent PSA performance report at the same time as responding to the detailed list of questions, but I do not think that is an excuse. I can only apologise to the Committee. I am very sorry that it has disrupted your business to the extent that it has. Q2 Linda Gilroy: I can understand that answer but would it not have been courteous and sensible to have informed the clerks to the Committee that that was what you were doing and to have given us the opportunity to consider in advance of this meeting whether we would wish to delay it somewhat? Mr Jeffrey: It would and I very much regret the fact that we did not. Q3 Mr Hancock: You say you did not know that we did not get this material until late yesterday. When were you given the material that we received? Mr Jeffrey: I saw it in draft at the end of last week. I know it had to be cleared with our Minister before it was sent to you. So I then, speaking for myself, was not sure exactly at what point it was going to be dispatched, but it clearly should have come to you earlier and I do apologise. Q4 Mr Hancock: There are at least four of us here who did not get it until this morning, minutes literally before we came into the meeting. Mr Jeffrey: That is not satisfactory. I acknowledge that completely. Q5 Mr Jenkin: Our Committee had this material I think yesterday afternoon, was it not? You talk about the assessment of performance and you wanted to get us the most up-to-date assessments. Do these changes themselves get signed off by Ministers? Is that what has held it up? Mr Jeffrey: They do indeed. Ministers need to clear these before they come to you, but I am not presenting that as the explanation. It was late anyway and it should have been submitted earlier. Q6 Chairman: When was it plain to you that the readiness targets would have to change? Mr Jeffrey: The first time I knew that our collective assessment was that they were now, in the language that is used here, unlikely to be met was when this material was submitted to me towards the end of last week. I think it is fair to say though, and the Committee itself will not be surprised at this, that it has been a process over time of examining our analysis of the force elements at readiness and the extent to which they reveal serious or particular weaknesses. At what point, we have had to ask ourselves, does one conclude that we are not going to get to these percentages by the end of the relevant period? We are getting closer to April 2008 all the time, obviously. Until I saw this most recent assessment, although I guess, like the Committee, I had at the back of my mind a sense that we were getting off course on this, I did not know that we were formally assessing it to be unlikely to be met. Q7 Chairman: In the summer you were saying that there was some risk that the Department might not return to manning balance before 1 April 2008. Was that not obviously rubbish in the summer? Mr Jeffrey: No, I do not think so. The manning balance target is a different one from the one we have been discussing. It is a complicated issue because it reflects not only the actual state of manpower but the requirement itself, and it varies as between the three Services. Our assessment earlier was that we might still get into manning balance on this timescale. It is becoming clear that for two of the Services, for completely different reasons - the Navy because the requirement is not falling as rapidly as had been assumed and the Army because of a mixture of equipment and retention issues - it is unlikely to be met. For the Air Force we think it will be but it is not by any means certain yet, and that in effect reflects to a large extent the fact that the RAF requirement is falling and the next significant fall is at the beginning of the next financial year. Q8 Robert Key: Could I ask the Permanent Under-Secretary on what date he received this latest information which is now in our possession? Mr Jeffrey: In order to be sure that I give the Committee an accurate answer, I had better check that. My recollection is that I saw this material, and unless Mr Woolley has a clearer recollection than I have or one of my colleagues can advise me immediately, I do not want to give the Committee the wrong information on this. My personal recollection is that it was towards the end of last week. Chairman: You are just about to have an opportunity. Q9 Robert Key: My second point is: and on what date were the papers which the Permanent Under-Secretary received dated? In other words, when were those papers actually prepared for the Permanent Under-Secretary? What was the date of those papers? Mr Jeffrey: We had better establish that clearly. I do not have that information in my head. Robert Key: You see, Chairman, I am most concerned here that we are in danger of drifting into the main body of the session, whereas I am extremely concerned that this Committee is being treated with enormous disrespect. It is the sort of problem that we hear our constituents and servicemen complaining about the whole time, about the sheer laziness of the Ministry of Defence in performing its duty. If the Ministry of Defence cannot inform the Defence Committee at the requested time of something as serious as this, there is something seriously wrong. I think we should not talk any more now but we should go into private session and decide how we are going to handle this situation. Chairman: There are still one or two more questions. Mr Jenkins: I totally agree with what Mr Key said. He voiced what my feeling is exactly. I would want to know when they disregarded the date they were given to supply us with this report; who decided to disregard that date; who decided not to take into account the time this would spend on the Minister's desk, etc. Do they think they are unaccountable? Do they think they do not have to bother with Parliament or with this Committee, or is this just indicative of the MoD's overall approach? I find it very, very frustrating, to say the least. Mr Borrow: I would be interested to know whether someone in the department is given the job of progress chasing the reports with the view that it had to be with the officials of this Committee by 31 October and who would have the job of informing the officers of this Committee if it was going to be a couple of days late. What I cannot understand is how it can be nearly a fortnight late and no intimation of that was given to the Committee prior to that. Chairman: As I understand it, we were told it was going to be late. We were kept well informed that it was going to be late. Mr Borrow: On 31st? Chairman: The Committee officers kept pressing for this and were told that it was going to be late, and so I think it comes down to the processes in the Ministry of Defence having completely ignored the timetable that was set by this Committee, which seems to us to have been a perfectly reasonable timetable. I think it would be right now to go into private session and to consider what we do about it. We will go into private session. While we are in private session, do you think you could find out the answers to the questions that Robert Key and Brian Jenkins asked? The witnesses and public were asked to withdraw and after a short time were again called in
Q10 Chairman: While we have been in private session we have decided that this extra information is so central to the things that we need to ask about and to the work that the Ministry of Defence does and the changes are so significant that we shall not continue with this session this morning but we will try to find an extra day, if at all possible, within the next few weeks to meet to resume this session. It is unlikely to be on a Tuesday morning as our normal meeting time is; it is likely to be at some other time, maybe in the evening, I do not know. We are extremely unhappy about this delay. While you were out, did you manage to find any answers to the questions that we were asking, Mr Jeffrey? Mr Jeffrey: I have some answers, Chairman. I want to write to you to apologise for this anyway, but it would be wise for me to write to you with answers to the questions that were raised. What I might say and would want to say in response to one of your questions is that I completely inadvertently gave the wrong answer in the session just before you broke, in particular when you were asking when I first received this material myself. I had a recollection of receiving it at the end of a week and clearing it over the weekend. In fact, it was a week earlier. It came to me on 1st or 2nd November; we are checking which. I looked at it over the weekend. The timescale had been extended I believe by the Clerk to 5th. I had a number of questions on it myself and I submitted it to the Secretary of State on 5 November. I do think we ought to give you a full account of this, but I did want immediately to correct one error that I slipped into when you were asking questions earlier. Chairman: I think you should give us a full account of it. One thing that I must make plain is that we have in the room the liaison officer who is the liaison link between the Ministry of Defence and the Defence Committee. We should make it absolutely plain that this was way above her pay grade and there is nothing whatever to blame her for, but it seems to me that if you submitted to the Secretary of State something on the day of the extended deadline, which itself was the final cut-off date, then that was unacceptable. Q11 Mr Jenkin: You may prefer to give an answer in your letter than now. I am holding the Performance Report for Quarter 1 2007-08, which refers to the quarter ended 31 June presumably. Am I to understand that this performance report was only signed off a few days ago? Mr Jeffrey: It was only finally signed off. There was a process between the end of June and when the information was gathered and we had a first discussion of it in September. I think it was becoming clear then that we were off-course on one or two of these targets, but the final submission and clearance of that PSA report took place very recently, around the timescales I have given. However, I would welcome the Committee's indulgence to send a letter to you. I want to be absolutely clear about this so that we do not mislead you at all. Chairman: We would like such a letter. Mr Hancock: But preferably before we meet next. Q12 Mr Jenkin: Would you observe that performance targets are really only relevant if they are treated with urgency and the department does not seem to be treating the performance targets and assessment of targets with sufficient urgency. Mr Jeffrey: The material that contributes to them is complex and it takes time to analyse but I take the general point that Mr Jenkin makes. Chairman: In rearranging this meeting, we shall expect considerable flexibility from your department as to when its coming about can be. Thank you. I declare the meeting closed. |