Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 20-39)
RT HON
GORDON BROWN
MP
13 DECEMBER 2007
Q20 Sir George Young: Can I then
pick up the point at which I interrupted you. You were going to
go on to talk about the social care budgets where in the beginning
you said this enfranchised people, you gave them the money, they
could decide how to spend it and indeed they could add to it.
If you accept the logic of that in personal social care, why do
you not accept it in education?
Mr Brown: The way that we have
funded education over the last few years is to increase the diversity
of choice available to parents by having academy schools, specialist
schools and trust schools. In fact, in academies we are now inviting
independent schools in this category, as well as colleges and
universities, to play their part in the development of academies.
I think that is the best way forward and I do not propose that
we return to the state-assisted places scheme. I do not know if
you wish to return to it or not.
Q21 Sir George Young: No, I was just
pressing you on the logic of enfranchising people by giving them
budgets in one part of the public sector, but denying the same
freedom and liberty in another sector.
Mr Brown: You are essentially
talking about, in the social care sector, adults who have got
a chance to choose a range of provision that is suitable to them.
Q22 Sir George Young: Why can parents
not do that with their own children?
Mr Brown: In the state sector,
we are providing a range of choice, including of course the first
parent-created school in Hackney that has actually been set up
in the last few months, so the range of choice is available in
the state sector. The question you were asking is: should we have
a return to the state-assisted places scheme?
Q23 Sir George Young: That was not
my question.
Mr Brown: Well, that is the logic
of your position, that parents are given money. That is the logic
of your position, that you return to the state-assisted places
scheme, and I think that did not achieve the results that were
intended for it. I think our academies programme, our specialist
schools programme, our trust programme and the action that we
are now taking perhaps more ruthlessly than before to deal with
failing schools is the best way forward.
Q24 Sir George Young: Can I just
press you finally on this. We saw your predecessor here for about
20 hours, a lot of it on public sector—
Mr Brown: I certainly would not
get to Lisbon in those circumstances!
Q25 Sir George Young:— a lot
on public sector reform, and we heard about the scars on his back,
how he always wished he had gone further and faster with reform,
the forces of conservatism. Do you have the same impatience as
he displayed to us to drive this agenda forward or are you slightly
more cautious?
Mr Brown: No, we are just going
further and faster now and I have just described how we move in
increasing the diversity of supply through greater competition
and contestability, extending right across the board in the Health
Service moving obviously into social care, in education as well,
and I think you will see announcements in the future about how
we can do exactly the same in welfare, so I am describing how
that can happen. I am also saying, if you take health, education
and social service, let us root out failure. The culture of the
second best is not acceptable to me. It is a culture of excellence
that we have got to achieve and, therefore, we have got to root
out failing schools, we have got to deal, as we will, with failing
hospitals and failing trusts and, in every area of the public
services where there is failure or where there is a toleration
of second best, my motto will be, "Failure no more. Second
best no more. Tolerating failure no more".
Q26 Mr Sheerman: Prime Minister,
to have a successful public sector, we have to have a successful
economy. Even with the announcement of the tackling by the international
banks of this problem of lack of liquidity, are you sure that
the measures that your Government is taking at the moment fully
compensate for the problems that we have had and that you are
going to steer us away from recession?
Mr Brown: I think I have circulated
to the Committee this morning the statement I am going to make
when I get to the Lisbon Summit about measures that we can take
collectively to deal with the turbulence that now exists in the
global economy.[2]
I think the step forward that was made yesterday by the agreement
of the central banks in America, Europe and the UK, including
the Bank of Canada and the Bank of Switzerland, to inject what
was the equivalent of $100 billion into the world economy is an
important step forward. I do believe that the lessons of this
summer have shown that you need a better early warning system
in the global economy and you need greater co-operation between
the international authorities to head off difficulties and, given
that this was financial turbulence that started in the United
States of America but which has affected some of the smallest
organisations in Germany, France, European countries, as well
as in Britain, there is a case for looking very seriously at how
we can co-ordinate our activities better, so I do believe that
it is a wake-up call for the global economy. I do believe that
the existing institutions are not good enough and I am going to
make it my business to try and reform these institutions to make
them better able to deal with the sorts of problems that we have
got, for example, reforms that are needed in the credit rating
agencies. There is greater transparency needed in the banking
and financial institution sector, but also greater co-ordination
of the different institutions across frontiers to make possible
a better co-ordinated response to the difficulties that arise
in the world economy.
Q27 Mr Sheerman: So, Prime Minister,
the quintessential Brown stamp is going to be what—determination,
ruthlessness, or is it personalisation?
Mr Brown: In the public services
the issue is how services can not simply be public, but personal
and how you can organise them around people's needs and tailor
them to people's needs, but also ensure that the individual can
direct the development of that service in the future. I think
you will see in every area of the public services that that will
happen, but rooting out failure is going to be a very important
part of the next period of time because we are not going to tolerate
second best.
Mr Sheerman: Thank you, Prime Minister.
Chairman: I have Kevin Barron's apologies
incidentally. He was not walking out because he was dissatisfied
with your answers, but he is chairing his own Committee, so he
had to leave. We now move on to a subject which you claim very
much for yourself, constitutional reform.
Q28 Dr Wright: Prime Minister, we
wanted to ask you some questions about the Governance of Britain
proposals that you have brought forward. Before I do that, could
I just ask you to say one more thing about something that you
spoke about in Prime Minister's Questions yesterday because, as
you know, the Parliamentary Ombudsman some time ago made a report,
saying essentially that justice has to be done to all those people
who lost their occupational pensions through no fault of their
own. Yesterday, you seemed to say that, as a result of the Young
Review, the resources had been found, I thought you said, to bring
them up to the Pension Protection Fund level. Is that exactly
the case now?
Mr Brown: I think you will find
the Secretary for Work and Pensions will make a statement very
soon on this. The Young Review was intended to see whether within
these schemes there was sufficient money so that the guarantee
of the £8 billion that we have made as a government over
the next 30 or 40 years could be matched by additional money from
the schemes. We now believe it will be possible to pay the 90%
that obviously people have rightly wanted and the Young Report
will be published very soon with the recommendations about how
that is done, so I think you can be reasonably confident that
the demand that 90% protection be given, as is the case in the
specific of 90% of the Pension Protection Board, can be met, but
of course there are other issues which will be dealt with when
the Young Report is published.
Q29 Dr Wright: Thank you for that
and I am sure we shall look at it again in the next few days.
Could I then return to the broader constitutional prospectus that
you have laid out and which you have very much made your own mission.
When you produced the document back in July, you said that you
wanted, and I quote the document, your foreword to it, "to
begin the journey towards a new constitutional settlement".
I notice this morning in relation to Europe that you said Europe
should not waste its time worrying about these constitutional
questions about itself, it should concentrate on the things that
matter to people. If that applies to Europe, why does it not apply
here as well?
Mr Brown: Well, I think in Europe,
everybody who looks at what has been happening in Europe over
recent years knows that they have spent an enormous amount of
time, and we had to as well, looking at the building of the institutions
for a Europe of 27 and, whereas other people say that that has
been a waste of time, it was necessary to improve the institutional
framework within which the European Union develops. That, in a
sense, became the major item in Europe at the expense of the economy,
security, the environment and all the big issues that we know
we have to deal with. In Britain, I think the opposite is true
partly because our Constitution has been, in the traditional sense
of the word, unwritten and, partly because a lot of what we think
about Britain and Britishness has been implicit rather than explicit,
we have not spent the time in our country looking at how modern
relationships between the Executive, the Legislature, the judiciary
and the people can actually further both a strong sense of cohesion
in our country, a sense of national purpose and national unity,
and actually make for better governance. I think whereas in Europe
there has been an over-emphasis on institutions, and understandably
of course when you have had to grow to a Europe of 27, in Britain
we have not actually done what I think is of great benefit, looking
at how we can actually make our constitutional arrangements far
better to deal with the undoubted demands of people for better
forms of government in the future.
Q30 Dr Wright: Countries usually
have a new constitutional settlement as a result of some seismic
moment in their affairs. Now, unless I have missed it, I do not
think we have had such a seismic moment. We have had an intense
period of constitutional reform and I can hear people saying,
"Look, we've had all that constitutional reform. Surely the
task now is to let it bed down and to sort out some of the loose
ends that come from it and, above all, to concentrate upon sound
administration". Is that not what people really want?
Mr Brown: Can I put the issue
the other way? If you look at every problem that a modern economy
and society like ours faces, whether it is the environment, whether
it is terrorism, whether it is community cohesion or whether it
is skills or facing the global economy, one of the lessons that
I have learnt is that you cannot have top-down government anymore,
you cannot make decisions and assume that people will simply follow
them. Most of the decisions you are having to make can only be
successful if people themselves are part of the process. If you
take climate change, you cannot solve the problem of climate change
without the personal and social responsibility of individuals,
so you cannot have a sort of top-down government dictating climate
change targets without at the same time having a debate about
the personal and social responsibility of people and people have,
therefore, got to be involved in that debate. It is true of community
cohesion. You are not going to have community cohesion in Britain
unless people themselves are involved in the building of their
communities. You will not solve our problems in relation to global
competition unless the people themselves recognise that they have
to change the way they behave, particularly in acquiring skills
for the future, so every issue that we face demands a greater
involvement by the public themselves in meeting these challenges
and you must, therefore, have a constitution that allows people
to play their part, sometimes in an unstructured way, but sometimes
in a far better structured way, such as some of the reforms that
we are proposing now.
Q31 Dr Wright: I am not sure if that
quite amounts to a case for a new constitutional settlement—
Mr Brown: It is surely telling
you that it does.
Dr Wright:— let alone for some
of these things like a written constitution, but I think Alan
Beith wants to come in on that.
Q32 Mr Beith: Prime Minister, you
have talked about involving the citizens, but you have produced
a document, a fascinating document, with all sorts of things from
war powers to ecclesiastical appointments, but some of the key
things seem to have been off limits. A written constitution itself,
which you mention, is not floated in here at all. The electoral
system, which clearly affects the balance of power in society,
is not considered at all, despite a Manifesto commitment, and
a shift in the balance of power between central and local government
is not mentioned at all. Did you at an early stage say that certain
of these things were off limits when the paper was being drafted?
Mr Brown: I do not accept that.
I think on the three issues that you raise, we have said not only
important things, but are actually doing important things. On
the question of the Constitution itself, what I actually said
in my statement was that we should discuss a Bill of Rights and
Responsibilities and we should discuss whether there is sufficient
support to move to the next stage of a discussion which would
include a written constitution.
Q33 Mr Beith: Those are different
points.
Mr Brown: On the electoral system,
if I may say so, there is a report being prepared, as promised,
and will be published soon on the electoral system, so that—
Q34 Mr Beith: We have been waiting
two years for that!
Mr Brown: Yes, I am saying it
is going to be published soon. Then, on central and local government,
you may have seen yesterday that a new concordat was signed between
the Government and local authorities, including local authorities
of all political colours, so the debate about local government
and its role in a future constitutional settlement is very much
part of the discussions, so I would not say that anything is off
limits from these discussions. I think a lot of this is waiting
also to hear what the people of different groups in society have
got to say about how they see this process moving forward themselves,
and part of Jack Straw's review is to consult around the country
with groups of people about what are the best next steps forward,
so this is a debate which again has got to be not just led by
the Government, but has got to involve large numbers of people
in different communities of the country.
Q35 Mr Beith: When people in the
communities in Northumberland voted as to what system of local
government they wanted, one authority or two, they voted for two
and the Government gave them one, so we start from a rather cynical
standpoint. Just looking at local government, surely, unless you
give local government a viable tax base and the ability to make
decisions which central government will not like and, therefore,
will not be delivering central government's priorities, you will
not have changed the balance of power, will you?
Mr Brown: Well, as you know, we
have had a review that has published its results on the future
of local government finance and there is a great deal of discussion
going on about how the changes recommended in that might be implemented,
so the debate about local government finance is not one that is
being ignored at all. There has been a report, we are looking
at what we can do and there is a number of suggestions that have
been made. This is a perennial problem, as you know: what is the
right balance between central and local government for the future
and can the balance be struck in a way that is satisfactory for
local communities if it excludes the tax base that is available
for local taxation? I think what we are seeing actually at the
moment is local people wanting to exercise more control, but not
necessarily in the ways that we have traditionally expected. People
want the authorities that they have in their areas, like the police
and the different social services authorities, to be answerable
to them and that is why the right of recall, that is why the right
to complain and that is why the right to hold some of these authorities
to account are regarded as very important. Therefore, I think
there is a debate going on, but it is not necessarily a debate
only about the future of local government, but it is also about
the future of local communities and how people can make authorities
more answerable to local communities, and I think that is a debate
which will also continue in the future.
Q36 Mr Beith: Do I detect from that
that you actually want to bypass local government, that you see
local government as not the best way?
Mr Brown: No.
Q37 Mr Beith: That carries the danger
that central government sets targets and then simply uses these
other mechanisms as some means of trying to ensure that the targets
it has set are delivered.
Mr Brown: No, I do not want to
bypass local government, but I recognise, however, that communities
are organised in different ways in trying to make authorities
answerable to them and some of the big advances in recent years
have been holding some of the authorities to account not through
local government, but through other mechanisms that are available
at a local level. The great story of the development of local
government in Britain is one that we should be very proud of and
the municipal initiative and enterprise that was shown in the
19th and 20th centuries by local authorities is something that
was very important to the development of our society. The concordat
that we are trying to strike with local government is to enhance
the power of local authorities in future and of course to make
them accountable more effectively to their citizens for what they
do.
Q38 Dr Wright: Could we just move
this on slightly and turn to this Britishness stuff which I am
having a bit of trouble with because it says that "the Government
is going to work with the public to develop the British statement
of values which will set out the ideals and principles that bind
us together as a nation". Now, that is not a modest undertaking.
Now, I do not understand what such a statement might contain that
could not be made in any decent western European society. Indeed,
in the document it talks about the principles of liberty, democracy,
tolerance, free speech, pluralism, fair play and civic duty. Well,
almost any Western society would recite those, so what would be
distinctive about ours? There are bits of distinctiveness of course,
and I can think of binge-drinking, I think of family breakdown,
I think of a growing incivility, but presumably those are not
British values that we want to articulate, are they?
Mr Brown: I think you are making
a case for this discussion actually happening rather than not
happening. We had some experience a few years ago in writing a
book together when we looked at all these different issues and
there is something uniquely British about the relationship between
liberty, civic duty or social responsibility and fairness. I think
Britain was the pioneer of liberty for the modern world, and I
think in later years America took it upon itself to claim that
it was the leading country in promoting liberty, but our view
of liberty is different from the American view of liberty. Our
view of liberty is not the `leave me alone' liberty that you characterise
with some of the American Constitution. Our view of liberty is
liberty in the context of social responsibility and, in the 19th
Century, the idea of civic duty that emerged in response to the
industrial revolution is something that also Britain can claim
some credit for pioneering, so it is the distinctive relationship
between liberty, civic duty and, in the 20th Century, the ideas
of fairness that, in my view, characterise what it is for people
to think of themselves as British, and that is why we find it
easy to accommodate both the liberty of the individual citizen
and having a National Health Service that is free to people at
the point of need. You rightly say that different countries have
different ideas about what the boundaries are between acceptable
and unacceptable behaviour, and you mentioned binge-drinking,
but guns is a very good example. Guns are tolerated in America,
but guns are anathema to people here if it is just citizens going
around carrying guns without a particular use that they have for
them that can be justified for their occupation or for some other
purpose, and bullying was not an issue that people thought important
in Britain in the 1970s or 1980s in the way that people think
of it as something that has got to be eradicated now. British
values, I think, can be set down. You can have a debate about
what it is to be British, and what is the importance of it? The
importance of a debate like that is that it brings people together
and it allows people to test what it is that holds them together
and gives them purpose as a nation. We are a multinational country
which cannot base our identity purely on ethnicity or simply on
the existence of institutions. At the end of the day, what holds
us together are the values that we can agree we hold in common
and I think it is possible for us to discuss and debate these
and then, out of that discussion and debate, we get a stronger
sense of national unity, so that is why I am proposing that we
have this debate.
Dr Wright: Andrew wants to explore this
in relation to a British Bill of Rights.
Q39 Mr Dismore: Just expanding on
that answer, Prime Minister, and you also talked earlier on about
the need to create a sense of cohesion, purpose and national unity,
do you see a Bill of Rights playing a role in that and, if so,
why is it apparently the case that the things that actually matter
to people are going to be excluded from that? You have just mentioned
the Health Service, for example, and 88% of people felt that the
right to hospital treatment within a reasonable time should be
in the Bill of Rights. Why will those things, the issues that
actually people think they have rights about, which they do not,
social and economic rights, why will they be excluded from the
Bill of Rights? Surely with the right draft of proportionality,
making sure we have got the resources to express it in an aspirational
way, that can be achieved? Albie Sachs said to me that a country
without social and economic rights in its Constitution is a country
without aspiration. Would you agree with that?
Mr Brown: This has been the debate
about modern constitutions round the world as to how far these
constitutions can accommodate people's desire not simply for political
rights to be enshrined in constitutions but social and economic
rights. The issue actually comes down to not being against social
and economic rights being accorded importance in constitutions
but whether they are justiciable, whether people actually go to
court or take actions in law on the basis of these rights being
set down. That is part of the debate that I think you will see
ushered in in January as to whether social and economic rights
should be included in this statement but I think the issue becomes
not so much whether you think they are important but whether you
agree that you should take judicial action on the basis of trying
to enforce these rights. That is where a lot of constitutions
have had a great deal of problems in recent years.
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