Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CHILDREN, SCHOOLS
AND FAMILIES,
OFFICE OF
GOVERNMENT COMMERCE
& HM TREASURY
14 JANUARY 2008
Q40 Dr Pugh: They talk a good game
on this do they?
Mr Burt: They talk a good game
and they are actually putting things into place.
Q41 Dr Pugh: But it would help if
they gave you some figures so you knew that they were really doing
it.
Mr Burt: We will be getting figures
from the benchmarking activity over time.
Q42 Keith Hill: This is probably
for Mike Burt because you have been around longer. Can you explain
the disparity in the performance of the Treasury and the Foreign
Office whose main buildings are obviously side by side in Whitehall?
Both the Treasury and the FCO have the same number of buildings,
five. Both the Treasury and the FCO allocate the largest amount
of space per employee, which is perhaps not surprising if you
think at least of their main buildings with the Treasury offering,
as the Chairman has pointed out, rather more than the FCO yet
the Treasury have the third highest accommodation costs per square
metre and the FCO have the second lowest cost per square metre.
The Treasury have the highest cost per employee and the FCO have
the lowest cost per employee. What is the explanation for this?
Mr Burt: A lot of it is to do
with the estate strategy the FCO have employed over the last few
years where they have certainly moved more people into their main
headquarters building in London and rationalised some of their
estate by reducing the number of buildings. They have actually
deliberately gone for 12 square metres per person and maybe even
below that.
Q43 Keith Hill: But they have virtually
the same amount of space per employee as the Treasury.
Mr Burt: Indeed. The building
is rather differently configured but nevertheless the main reason
for that disparity is the estate strategy the FCO have adopted.
Q44 Keith Hill: How many buildings
did they have originally then?
Mr Burt: I do not have the figure
on the total number of buildings, but they certainly had large
holdings in Croydon and a number of buildings in London and they
have effectively rationalised down to some buildings in Croydon
and the main building in London.
Q45 Keith Hill: Would it be your
judgment that Treasury have the same scope for rationalisation?
Mr Burt: The Treasury estate is
not as big as the FCO's estate and therefore the scope for doing
that is not as great for the Treasury as it is for the FCO.
Q46 Keith Hill: On other and perhaps
broader issues, there have been a number of property initiatives
since the 1990s; really quite a large number. Why are you confident
that the high performing property will succeed when the rest of
the initiatives have failed to provide an efficient property portfolio?
Mr Smith: After four months I
can express some confidence, looking at the processes which are
being put in place at the moment. The first issue, which I do
not believe has been addressed before if we look at history, is
that there has not been a robust method for data collection across
Government. That is now going to be in place. The second thing
is governance. We talked earlier about whether it is not easy
to increase space density. The answer is that it is not. In my
experience, the first thing you have to do is have a very clear
business strategy from which a property strategy will support
that strategy. This is not, in my view, a situation where you
have a property strategy which you do irrespective of what you
are doing in business. We talk about back-office support and merging
for joint service centres, for example. That should be something
which the property strategy then supports. Generally speaking
we now have property champions in place and in every organisation
we have property boards in place. In every organisation the piece
of the jigsaw puzzle we have not yet got in place—if you
look at the 17 central departments I would say round about five
have—is detailed property asset management plans. The target
now is to drive very fast to get the other 11 departments with
property asset management plans in place so we can look at the
true detail.
Q47 Keith Hill: The NAO Report refers
to the two milestones due to be delivered last September. What
has been the experience on that?
Mr Smith: Overall, if you look
at the HPP, there are something like 91 milestones; about 80%
of them have been completed. For the two milestones that you are
talking about it actually comes back to my point I was just making
about the asset plans. Those were due to be delivered in December;
they have not been delivered; in total they have not been delivered.
There are plans, but not to the extent where we feel comfortable
that they are detailed plans which we can then monitor against
milestones.
Q48 Keith Hill: So five departments
have delivered. Have they delivered already or are there new ones
who have delivered amongst the five?
Mr Burt: The five have delivered.
Q49 Keith Hill: Are there new ones?
Does that include departments which had not delivered prior to
December?
Mr Burt: No, they have all delivered
prior to December.
Q50 Keith Hill: So the 11 which have
not delivered have failed to meet the December deadline.
Mr Burt: The 11 have failed to
meet the December deadline, but all the departments have actually
put in place asset management strategies as required under the
CSRO7 guidance. Strategies are in place but detailed plans that
underpin the strategies are still coming through.
Q51 Keith Hill: When do you expect
them to come through?
Mr Burt: We expect them to come
through over the next few months and certainly by September of
this year.
Q52 Keith Hill: September? Well I
am not inclined to be very dismissive of these things but that
is a bit of slippage is it not?
Mr Burt: It is some slippage against
the original targets that we put in place, but in many respects
we found that departments have actually found it quite difficult
in some cases to convert overall strategies into detailed implementation
plans.
Q53 Keith Hill: When I was a minister,
I used to say that when I died they would find the word "slippage"
engraved on my heart. It is a bit of a problem for Government.
Are you confident that these 11 miscreants will deliver by September?
Mr Burt: Yes, I am. We are having
regular one-to-ones with the departments concerned almost on a
monthly basis. We are supporting them in delivering their plans.
Q54 Keith Hill: When they are delivered
do you expect them to be of a proper quality?
Mr Burt: I would certainly expect
that.
Q55 Keith Hill: What if they are
not? What if it goes on?
Mr Burt: Then we would actually
be exercising our function of challenging departments as to why
they are not providing the sort of plans that we are expecting
and we will certainly be sitting alongside them and helping them
to develop them as we would expect.
Q56 Keith Hill: Have you done this
in the past with departments in the other incarnations of the
kind of government property institutions of which you have been
a luminary?
Mr Burt: Yes. It has certainly
happened in the context of relocation where a number of departments
were slipping badly on delivery of their relocation commitments
and we actually sent teams in to those departments to sit alongside
and develop a proper implementation plan. That has worked very
successfully.
Q57 Keith Hill: One final question.
You have set the pace on this as the Office of Government Commerce,
but achieving maximum improvement seems to require government
departments to share. What has been the experience on that so
far?
Mr Burt: The introduction of champions
has actually proved to be very beneficial in terms of departments
wanting to share their experience. The champions' forum that we
chair is in part a networking, experience-sharing forum and in
part a forum where we will talk about progress on HPP. We have
put in place tools in addition to the benchmarking activity to
allow departments to see what is happening across the piece. There
is a prototype of a tool which we are calling "property interrogator"
which allows a champion to see how their own department is performing
against their peers and how the department is performing within
its own family, so that is the parent department and its arm's-length
bodies. That interrogator tool will be available over the next
few months and will actually be the major tool to allow departments
to share information.
Q58 Keith Hill: I ought to know this.
Are the champions officials and not ministers?
Mr Burt: Yes. The champions are
usually at director-general level and they comprise either commercial
directors or chief operating officers of departments.
Q59 Keith Hill: Do ministers ever
get involved in this process?
Mr Burt: Not directly, but maybe
Jon Thompson, who is a champion, would be able to tell us. I am
sure that ministers are briefed by their champions on what is
happening.
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