Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
SIR CHRISTOPHER
FOSTER KT, SIR
NICHOLAS MONCK
KCB AND MR
PETER OWEN
CB
19 MARCH 2008
Q1 Chairman: Let me call the Committee
to order and welcome our witnesses this afternoon. We are delighted
to have Sir Christopher Foster, Sir Nicholas Monck and Peter Owen,
who are going to talk to us about their Better Government Initiative,
and that will, I am sure, contribute to the work that the Committee
itself is doing, has been doing and will do in the future. We
have all had copies of your summary document from the report[1]
and we have also had your memorandum[2]
for this meeting, so we are grateful for that. Unless you tell
us differently, that may dispense with the need for opening statements,
as this seems to be an opening statement, unless you particularly
want to say something briefly by way of introduction.
Sir Christopher Foster: Perhaps
one sentence. One has afterthoughts of one's own on these things,
but I would just like to stress the connectiveness of it all,
our belief that the whole thing depends in a sense on all our
recommendations being undertaken but, in particular, improvements
in both what the Executive presents to Parliament and in Parliament's
handling of it. I think it is that unity which I would just like
to stress in a sentence. I will then shut up and let you ask the
questions.
Q2 Chairman: No, that is very good.
Thank you. Let us get our bearings to start with. The proposition
underlying this whole body of work seems to be that we are less
well governed than we used to be. Is that true?
Sir Christopher Foster: I would
challenge that. I think that things are different. Life is vastly
more complicated than it used to be. There were always failings
in the past. If I think back even over my own lifetime, there
were many failures, many things that went wrong. I think it is
much more promising to think how we can improve the present rather
than to compare it with the past.
Q3 Chairman: I think that is a kind
of equivocation, because I think someone reading your report and
all the work around it would certainly be struck by the idea that
something has gone wrong with the British Government that needs
to be put right. If that is the case, then, clearly, it is the
proposition that there has been some kind of falling away.
Sir Christopher Foster: We would
rather put it the other way around. We do say that most of our
recommendations do not have a precedent. They do not amount to
something that is merely going back to the past. We also say,
and have said, that there are other reasons for change: the growing
Europeanisation of ministers' time, ministers spending much more
time in Europe, much more time internationally; the huge increase
in the volume of legislation, secondary legislation as well; the
pressure of constituency business, as well as a great many other
new factors which require, in our judgment, improved processes.
Q4 Chairman: To keep this going,
because I think it is important just to see where we are coming
from, and we have had this exchange privately before, but it is
the case that if you go back 30 years conventional opinion universally
was saying that British government was a complete basket case,
it had collapsed, and there was all kinds of analyses as to why
this was so. There was something inherently wrong with the way
in which we governed ourselves that produced all this inability
to produce decent policy outcomes over a sustained period. Compared
with that, this is the golden age and the Government frequently
refers in its document on public service reform to the fact that
all the international surveys seem to show that we do rather well,
comparatively, in terms of governance, so we need to know where
we are coming from, do we not?
Sir Christopher Foster: Yes, I
think we do. I can go back more than 30 years. My abiding memory
of working for Tony Crossland was of the Keynesian and anti-Keynesian
dilemma completely dominating British politics so that there were
endless arguments in Cabinet. All that I happened to be interested
in at the time, like housing and local government finance, and
a few other things, were driven out because Crossland simply did
not have the time to attend to them. Macroeconomic policy was
the overwhelming problem of that particular generation. I am not
suggesting one should go back to those days. I hope my colleagues
will chip in here. I remember many fights with permanent secretaries
when I was a young special adviser, but I still believe that when
you have admitted the errors of the past, given all the stresses
and strains and the huge increase in the complexity of government
business since, something better than what we have got is needed
by way of process.
Mr Owen: You said you wanted us
to chip in, Chris. I think "process" is the word, in
a way. There are all sorts of reasons for bad government. We would
not claim that if the processes are right you will necessarily
have good outcomes; you will not necessarily. But the chances
of having good outcomes will be increased if you have good processes,
and the chances of not having good outcomes will be reduced if
you have got proper measured consideration of the issues built
in as a necessary part of reaching decisions. I noticed over the
weekend that Jonathan Powell, who was formerly Tony Blair's Chief
of Staff, was quoted as saying, "I am completely unrepentant
about sofa government ... The key is to have the right people
in the discussion and to make sure their views are aired".[3]
I could not agree more. That is quite clearly right. I think the
question is how do you decide who the "right people"
are? There is a natural tendency to listen to people who agree
with you. And how do you make sure their views are properly "aired"?
The most forceful presenter does not necessarily have the strongest
case. So there is something to be said for ensuring that you do
have proper procedures, through something like the Cabinet Committee
process, for making sure that all of those within government who
have a contribution to make to the issues are informed of what
is going on and that their views are properly presented in papers
put before the committee in good time and properly recorded.
Q5 Chairman: Is the proposition then
that there has been a slippage on the process front and that the
slippage on the process front has contributed to a more general
slippage in the quality of government? Is that the proposition?
Mr Owen: Yes.
Sir Nicholas Monck: Yes, although
I think the first half of the recommendations, as Christopher
said, are not restoring something that was there before. They
are things which never were there but would still make an improvement
in the present joint product of the Executive and Parliament.
Q6 Chairman: I know. I am sorry to
press you on this. It does not matter greatly whether we are simply
saying government can be improved—that is a truism, of course
government can be, and we are all interested in making government
better, and we can discuss how we might do that—or whether
you are saying something rather larger than that, which is that
actually there are things which have happened which have made
government worse, and we need to correct those to make it better.
That is a different proposition and I am pressing you on the analysis
really before we get to the prescription.
Sir Christopher Foster: I think
certain things can be true at the same time. I would argue that
service delivery in many respects, in spite of micro-management
and other problems, is probably considerably better certainly
in certain areas than it was in the past. We can all point—I
am certainly are prepared to point—to recent White Papers
that were good, bills that were fine. However, there are too many,
when they come to this House, that are not as good as they should
be and have not been properly explained in a good White Paper
or Green Paper. It is more than saying that government can be
improved. In certain respects, but not in others, the sheer volume
of legislation, all the pressures upon your time and upon government's
time, the fact that the Cabinet does not work terribly well and
has not done so for a good many years, are all part of the problem
and sufficiently important to be worth attention.
Q7 Chairman: What else strikes me
about this is that some of the things that you say correspond
with what some witness to this committee have said over the years,
but there are whole tracts of other things which you do not say
very much about at all. For example, the whole programme of Civil
Service reform, the argument, certainly since Fulton, that there
is something intrinsically deficient about the skill-base of the
British Civil Service, this underpins much of the Government's
and the Civil Service's own reform programme at the moment, the
whole upskilling agenda. It may be because you are all former
civil servants, but this whole area of argument hardly figures
at all in your analysis.
Sir Christopher Foster: We do
say how important it is that there should be more education. Our
call for better skilling of civil servants, I think, exemplifies
in a way our belief, indeed, that the Civil Service needs more
skills—they need procurement skills and financial skills—and
to a large extent they are getting them. Our concern is much more,
I think, not in that area. Rather it is our belief that Civil
Service skills, and certainly their use, has declined in certain
relations to policy-making. We have not gone into depth into how
one might improve the Civil Service because we did not see it
as actually relevant to our main concern.
Q8 Chairman: But when people like
Michael Bichard come and see us, very considerable figures with
vast experience inside government, he wants to tell us about how
he thinks, unless we fundamentally change the character of the
Civil Service, we shall not get better government.
Mr Owen: That was always Michael's
very strongly expressed view; he is basically a local government
officer and has an axe to grind!
Q9 Chairman: But it strikes me that
you are silent about things that he thinks absolutely top of the
list.
Mr Owen: To be fair, we are not
silent about it. We produced a whole report on the way departments
work, and it did contain recommendations specifically to strengthen
departmental expertise. They are in Governing Well; they
are recommendations 40 and 41.[4]
We do not dwell on them, but they are intended specifically to
strengthen departmental expertise, to strengthen the skills of
the Civil Service and, particularly delivery skills. I certainly
would hold my hands up as a former civil servant—Chris is
innocent because he was not—and say that actually delivery
was rather looked down on. For a long time the view of the Civil
Service was that if you were really good you were involved in
policy but if you were not really good you were involved in delivery.
Times have changed. They have not changed enough, but a lot more
emphasis has been put on delivery skills. More needs to be done
on this, particularly special expertise in relation to, for example,
handling contract management. It is a skill you do not automatically
acquire in the Civil Service—how you actually negotiate
with third parties who are going to deliver a service with you—so
there is stuff to be done. We do refer to that, it is there in
recommendation 41. Incidentally, we also said, going a little
beyond that, that with a lot of these skills, but not perhaps
in the same detail, training could, with benefit, be provided
to ministers and to potential ministers. That is because—and
this is all part of the picture—we do get ministers turning
up who have been professional politicians for the whole of their
lives. They find themselves in a position of great influence in
charge of very large departments with enormous budgets and huge
numbers of staff and they think they know how to run them. Well,
they do not, and they need some sort of training to enable them
to understand what some of the issues are.
Q10 Chairman: Okay; I just do not detect
that that area is one that figures largely in your summary of
what you are about, but I want to ask you one more question before
I hand over. It really goes to the question of how empirically
based are some of the things that you say. I am going to pick
something out almost at random from your report when you say the
involvement of the centre in departments' day-to-day operations
should be reduced to a demonstrably necessary minimum. For that
statement to carry force, there would have to be some sort of
empirical analysis behind it which said that interference from
the centre had been excessive, that it had been damaging to departmental
performance and that you could show this was the case. We have
heard evidence, both from civil servants and from ministers and
from sort of quasi-inside outside people, that in fact this is
not the case at all. We have had people, like Michael Barber,
here telling us that unless there was relentless pressure from
the centre, departments would not jump at all on all these targets.
What is the empirical basis for a recommendation of that kind?
Sir Christopher Foster: Let me
try. We talked a lot to local government and NHS people, to give
major examples. We also talked quite a lot to people at the head
or recently retired from the Armed Services. We produced some
papers based on local government. We heard various things: that
local government was much more effective in the use of national
resources than was the NHS, in part because local government had
rather more independence and they would more easily stand up to
ministers; and that the sheer volume and rapidity of change within
the NHS and the amount of intervention coming from above was counter-productive.
That is not to say that everything that ministers did was counter-productive.
It did mean that a kind of culture in which there were interventions
going on as frequently as in the NHS was counter-productive. In
local government we also had quite a lot of evidence put to us—our
report mentions it—of attempts to do the same but of local
government, up to a point, being better able to stand up to the
situation. The Armed Service case is a very special one.
Q11 Chairman: I can see that people
say this, and of course they say this, but there has also been
a longstanding critique of British government which talks about
departmentalitis, which is the British Government's lack of a
strong strategic centre, and this was very much behind the analysis
for think-tanks at the centre. This Government came in 1997 with
an analysis of this kind, an argument for a prime minister's department
to remedy the deficiency at the centre. In a sense you skate over
all that and simply say you should not interfere with departments.
Mr Owen: You talked about the
need for a stronger strategic centre, and I think "strategic"
is the key word here. The worry is that in terms of setting targets,
for example, you can spill over from setting genuinely strategic
targets with helpful effects. A department needs a strong centre.
It needs to know what the policy of government is; it needs to
know which direction it is pointing in. That is the proper role
of the centre, it needs to set the strategy, and it needs to keep
in touch with what is going on in terms of delivery. But if you
do too much in terms of the operational minutiae of what is going
on, then it simply is not going to produce effective results.
You need to be sure that departments are doing in general terms
what they are supposed to be doing but not try to steer the details.
I worked with Michael, I have a lot of time for him. I always
felt that so far as schools were concerned, I was not too worried
about targets that every child should be able to read and do sums.
As far as I was concerned, if that pushed out some of the rather
more esoteric skills, there you go: children need to be able to
read and do sums. But when you get a multiplicity of targets they
do have unintended effects, they push things in strange directions.
I have always been a little bit doubtful, for example, about having
targets on the number of good GCSEs, because any rational school
confronted with that will try to push children towards the areas
where they think they are more likely to get passes, which may
not necessarily be the areas you want to get into.
Q12 Chairman: My point, though, was
that here is someone coming into government from the outside with
a fresh mind, charged with making government better, and his conclusion
is diametrically opposite to yours.
Mr Owen: Yes; he was wrong!
Chairman: Okay, that is what I was pointing
out. I am going to move on.
Q13 Mr Walker: I am going to come
from a parliamentary perspective. Why do you think, in your considered
view, Parliament is held in such low esteem? It is not to do with
the additional cost allowances: that is a symptom not a cause.
What has gone wrong to allow the current situation we are in to
have occurred?
Sir Christopher Foster: Again
I will ask my colleagues to come in, but I think this is quite
difficult. Again, I think it comes to the broad causal factors.
You are trying to do too much. The volume of legislation over
20 years has roughly doubled. You have all the weight of constituency
business, which is tremendously important but, nevertheless, does
take a great deal of time. You are both a legislature and interested
in scrutinising to achieve greater accountability, trying to hold
the Government to account. We think all these things have put
such pressure on you that—and I can give a number of examples—quite
important sections of bills do not really get scrutinised at all.
At the same time, very important issues (and in this case I can
instance one of the best White Papers of recent times, which is
the recent nuclear one) do not really get discussed. There is
a statement and a very brief debate, but the issues in that are
so tremendous that they are certainly worth a couple of select
committee sessions, in my judgment. So many things are going on,
ministers are spending so much time, much more time than their
predecessors, overseas, one way or another, many of them; all
of this is why you are under such pressure and why I think it
is imperative to raise your standards, that you do some thing
to modernise your approach. I know when we were on You and
Yours, if you can accept mention of it, two weeks ago, we
were astonished by just how many phone calls and emails came in,
far more than usual, and by the number of people who said, "Why
do they not keep their promises? Why do they say they are going
to do one thing and end up doing another?" These concerns
relate to all sorts of issues. They are much more important than
expenses and pay. They are about this feeling that somehow or
other the Government is changing its mind, doing too many things,
not really delivering as much as it could. Of course there are
successes—we are all know there are successes—but
there are enough failures or difficulties to create this adverse
atmosphere.
Q14 Mr Walker: In my own constituency
I think I am quite liked, but if you were to take a straw poll
of the public, we are all on the take, we are only in it for the
money. There has been this complete breakdown of trust between
the public and their elected representatives that goes actually
beyond broken promises by government. I think that actually what
they now see, or perceive to see, is a whole group of careerists
who have actually lost interest in representing the views of their
constituents and are more interested in promoting their own advancement
and careers. It sounds a bit like a statement, but it was meant
to be a question that elicited a response!
Sir Nicholas Monck: I think some
of these things are what people see on the TV screen and to some
extent hear on the radio: sort of bear-baiting type scenes, Prime
Ministers Questions, scenes of great uproar on the floor. They
also see that some of the things that come through from the joint
product of government and Parliament are disappointing in their
outcome or sometimes failures and they do not see the successful
interventions by backbench committees, select committees, and
so on, and maybe there are not enough of them, straightening things
out which come to Parliament in a state that is not good or workable.
Sir Christopher Foster: I have
been through all the NAO[5]
reports, just about, and it is amazing and exhilarating that a
lot of them are favourable: they say that good things have been
done. I am not talking just about this Government, I am talking
about the Major years as well. But while there are successes,
there are sufficient cock-ups, sufficient problems, things which
in a sense ought to have been avoided. These we believe good process
would never completely have annihilated but would still have helped
to restore your reputation. Again, the sort of modernisation we
are talking about, we would want to vary on the detail, is what
is needed to make people feel that Parliament is in charge, that
you really are on top of the summit of something which is delivering
good laws, challenging policies and ones for which the state is
genuinely accountable.
Q15 Mr Walker: A final question. Do you
think that Members of Parliament should be more robust in holding
the Executive to account, regardless of whether they are MPs within
the Government or opposition to that Government, and perhaps I
as a Conservative Member of Parliament should be more robust in
holding my own front bench to account because at the end of the
day is that not what the public want to see, someone with independent
thoughts who cannot be bullied?
Sir Christopher Foster: Yes.
Sir Nicholas Monck: I think there
is evidence that more independence by MPs is precisely what the
public want. I have seen that.
Sir Christopher Foster: We would
argue, because people have actually asked us, "Why should
turkeys vote for Christmas?" We believe that everyone would
gain, the Prime Minister, ministers, MPs and civil servants from
a more robust environment.
Q16 Paul Flynn: Can I congratulate
you on the paper and wish it well. One of the points I would like
to raise is that part of the improvements you would like to see
is to have the selection of the chairmen of the select committees
taken out of the hands of the whips and you want better advice
for the select committees. Can I give a very rare example where
a chairman of a select committee was selected in defiance of the
whips of all parties, and that was Robert Adley. The whips had
agreed that another MP should have that job.
Sir Christopher Foster: Gwyneth
Dunwoody as well, was she not?
Q17 Paul Flynn: Robert Adley, who
was encumbered by the fact that he was an expert on the railways,
so he was clearly unacceptable to the whips. He produced a report,
which was possibly one of the best in recent years, opposing privatisation,
a very prophetic report which every danger it pointed out actually
happened, and the committee also had the best experts in the country
on it. Are you not depressed when you look at that and find that
the report of that select committee and Robert Adley's role in
it did not change anything? The Government went ahead with misplaced
and disastrous privatisation, which I think you were involved
in.
Sir Christopher Foster: Yes, indeed.
I could go into great detail on that. I am all for the Robert
Adleys, I am all for the Gwyneth Dunwoodys, also someone who they
wanted to get rid of. It is marvellous when there is strong, searching
investigation and challenge by select committees. Governments
will then take their own view as to whether they override that
or whether they go along with it. You will have the opportunity,
in a well constructed role—we talk about this—on the
basis of your reports, of firing up debates. There are all sorts
of ways in which the Robert Adleys of this world can do down what
they see as bad policy.
Q18 Paul Flynn: Did it have any effect
on you in your role as a civil servant?
Sir Christopher Foster: I was
not a civil servant, but I was involved. I hope so. There is so
much else. It is one of the examples seared on my mind. There
were five ministers involved in the privatisation of the railways.
I only advised one fairly early on. There was so little decision
on what form privatisation would take that the Bill was designed
so any privatisation scheme out of many could be adopted and in
any order. Otherwise there was no very definite content in it
and there was no White Paper. So, although I would argue that
an awful lot went right, a certain number of things went wrong
which, I believe, in a more considered process, scrutinised by
such as your Robert Adley, would have led to a better result.
I think that is almost axiomatic.
Q19 Paul Flynn: You reject the idea
of the golden age of government, but surely there was a better
age of government that can demonstrated in the 1945-1951 Government
in implementing their policies, in things that have lasted to
this day.
Sir Christopher Foster: That is
before even my time, but, yes, my view of it is that that is true.
It was an excellent government.
1 Better Government Initiative, Governing Well,
January 2008 Back
2
Ev 18 Back
3
"The inside man", The Guardian, 15 March 2008,
Weekend p22 Back
4
Better Government Initiative, Governing Well, January
2008, p10 Back
5
National Audit Office Back
|
