Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-77)
SIR CHRISTOPHER
FOSTER KT, SIR
NICHOLAS MONCK
KCB AND MR
PETER OWEN
CB
19 MARCH 2008
Q60 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Not sometimes,
do you think it should be regular?
Sir Nicholas Monck: I would not
see anything wrong with it, provided the subject was clear. I
think it would be best if it came out of the programme of work
that the select committee was doing that made it more appropriate
to talk to the permanent secretary about some things than to the
minister or to the minister and the permanent secretary together.
I think if Parliament wants that, it can have it.
Q61 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I give
you an example. Sir Gus O'Donnell comes before this Committee
on a fairly regular basis. You can ask Gus things that you would
not really ask the minister. You can ask a much broader based
set of questions. You are not particularly being critical; you
are probing government and governance. I cannot speak for any
other select committees, I have only been on a couple, and Scotland
does not really count, but I suppose there are others, but that
is very useful to us. Do you think that should be more enshrined
within the system?
Sir Nicholas Monck: I am not quite
sure what kind of broader question you are asking about.
Q62 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Let us talk
about manning operations, the level people coming in and out.
The things that are the every day running which the permanent
secretary and, in the case of Gus O'Donnell, who is a cabinet
secretary, are involved in. Every permanent secretary tends to
have that broad brief. You would probably not expect a minister
to know that side. Would it not be therefore desirable that that
was a regular occurrence?
Sir Nicholas Monck: I would say
that if you want to talk about those kind of things, yes, that
would make a lot of sense, but that is what would come out of
the core tasks of the select committees if those are chosen, which
are not completely done, but one of the selected ones that is
done. I think it would make sense to talk to the Permanent Secretary
about that.
Sir Christopher Foster: We do
have a recommendation about the PSA. The PSAs have been a tremendous
development in many ways. They have developed a lot. It has become
not so complicated in certain ways and still rather more complicated
in others. We realise the time pressures on select committees
which prevent a good many of them, as yet, spending a session
or two on the PSA. If, as we would like to think, the PSAs were
to develop in such a way that it was select committee friendly,
and select committees were to take them seriously, I imagine that
could be just the sort of occasion where you could demand the
minister coming along and perhaps the Permanent Secretary being
ready to answer questions about implementation, numbers and manning
and so forth. Is that a fair point?
Sir Nicholas Monck: I think it
probably is. A lot would depend on how the PSA is actually fixed.
If it is a fiat out of somebody's head without any empirical backing,
there is probably not much point in talking to the Permanent Secretary
about it, but if it is calculated in a realistic but challenging
way, taking account of what people said (and I experienced that
in relation to the Employment Service), I think it would make
sense, although in that case you would probably speak to the Chief
Executive of the Employment Service for the same sort of reason.
Q63 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you look
back in sorrow?
Sir Nicholas Monck: At what?
Q64 Mr Liddell-Grainger: At the way
things have changed.
Sir Nicholas Monck: No, I do not
think I do.
Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am sorry; I just
wondered from what you were saying. Thank you.
Chairman: I think we have got one or
two quick final questions and one or two quick final answers if
we may.
Q65 Kelvin Hopkins: You were saying
it is easy for people to pop in and out; it is easy for people
to come from the private sector into the Civil Service and then
go back again?
Sir Nicholas Monck: Yes.
Kelvin Hopkins: Just one example, a chap
who came from Amey the PFI[15]
company, went straight into the Department for Health as Commercial
Director, spent two or three years there levering out PFI contracts
to his friends in the private sector and then went straight back
to the private sector as Managing Director of UBS Bank. He was
just cynically appointed presumably by a minister, and no doubt
the minister (although I should not say this) might benefit later
in life. Who knows?
Chairman: I think that is a commentary
rather than a question, but an interesting one.
Q66 Mr Prentice: At the very beginning
you talked about weaknesses in the Civil Service and you mentioned
negotiating contracts. At a time when the DWP[16]
is putting big advertisements in the press looking for private
sector, third sector organisations to deliver Jobcentre Plus,
are there still weaknesses in that area in the Civil Service?
I ask you that because you are a student of these matters; you
would know.
Sir Christopher Foster: I think
there are two points to make. I think these weaknesses have been
overcome. That is my understanding through the School of Government
and elsewhere. More and more people with the requisite skills
are being produced. It is not just a matter of skill, it is also
a matter of experience. The business of negotiating very difficult
contracts is one in which you need to have the right sort of temperament.
There is always a risk that if you are really good at it you will
be poached. Perhaps a further point is that, with PFIs and other
complications, public sector contracts are rather more complicated
than is normal in the private sector. There are usually rather
more parties involved. So I think that, while it is getting a
lot better, there is still probably, in certain directions, a
way to go. I was heartened, looking through the NAO reports, to
see how many actually said— and of IT too—that there
had been rather more successful examples recently. I think DWP
on job centres was tremendously praised in terms of how they had
reorganised the Department. In other areas there were plaudits
for certain sorts of contracts. These never find their way into
the press, one wonders why, but there are examples of success.
Q67 Mr Prentice: As long as the Civil
Service has got a handle on it, so to speak. My final question
is about the contracting out of policy-making. The Prime Minister,
I think, has got 52 reviews on the go and famously, over the years,
he has brought people in from outside the Civil Service to conduct
major reviews. I am thinking about the Barker Reviews on housing[17]
and planning,[18]
Gershon on efficiency,[19]
Lyon on relocation.[20]
Does it make for better government for the Prime Minister to contract
out policy-making in this way?
Mr Owen: I think it can be helpful.
I well remember a long time ago doing a major review of housing
policy and we brought a bloke in called Chris Foster, who was
quite helpful!
Q68 Mr Prentice: Touché.
Mr Owen: It is beneficial to have
an outside perspective, I would not argue about that. There is
a worry that you can become blinkered and too narrowly focused,
but to simply find somebody outside who has strong views on a
particular topic and say they then alone should develop the topic
is undesirable.
Q69 Mr Prentice: Do you think that
is happening too much? You have mentioned Stern. Stern was already
inside the system, but there are any number of examples where
people outside did policy-making.
Mr Owen: I am uneasy about it
for two reasons. One of them is that you then get parti pris;
you get a personal view of how the policy ought to develop in
a way you might not if it had been developed within the Civil
Service. The other thing, which we do refer to, is the worry about
the capacity of the Civil Service to undertake this sort of work
being hollowed out if the work is constantly put out. We recommended
that there should be more of a focus on developing the strength
of departments in just these areas of research, analysis and evaluation
in their specialist areas. Remember, they are specialists and
they stick with it, so they develop the sort of depth of expertise
and experience the Government needs to be able to rely on.
Sir Nicholas Monck: Which includes
knowledge of research and thought that is going on outside. That
is a very clear and important part of it, which has not always
happened in the past by any means.
Q70 Chairman: Have there been any
great governing successes in recent years, successes in governing,
producing good policy outcomes?
Sir Nicholas Monck: It just occurred
to me that the pension policy development, which was as a result
of putting out, I do not know, I am not an expert on it, but it
looks to me as though that has worked rather well.
Q71 Chairman: Is that the only one
you can think of?
Sir Nicholas Monck: It is the
most recent one that comes to mind, but Chris has already mentioned
the Nuclear White Paper, which was another good example.
Q72 Chairman: Most people normally
cite the monetary policy independence of the Bank of England.
Sir Nicholas Monck: I would cite
that.
Q73 Chairman: Which, of course, was
taken in defiance of all good process. Robin Butler warned that
this was defying all the rules of cabinet government and the sofa
prevailed and the sofa triumphed and it was a great success, as
you were just confirming.
Sir Nicholas Monck: I think you
can have successes with good policies with bad procedure; the
question is about the probabilities.
Q74 Chairman: What I am really asking
you is do you not think there may be more profit sometimes in
exploring the conditions of policy success rather than trawling
the idea of policy failure? We live in a culture which says everything
government touches goes wrong, not just this government but any
government, that is the stock in trade of political argument.
Much media commentary says, "Government can get nothing right",
which means that we have this cultural negativity all the time
and so that is the assumption that people carry about government.
There will be an audience for your work because it feeds into
that, it says that government has fallen off, something has gone
wrong. When it gets things right (and I think of the recent examples
coming from evaluations, one was about the Teach First programme
in schools getting very good young graduates to give some years
of teaching in schools, which has been shown to have a greatly
energising effect on the whole school system, virtually unreported,
a report just recently about the success of Sure Start, again,
virtually unreported) nobody wants to know about anything. This
is not an argument about a particular government, nobody wants
to know about anything that government does that goes right, what
it wants to know about is the fact that it always fails.
Sir Christopher Foster: Cancer
is another programme. A lot has been done to help the treatment
of cancer. But to take the one you mentioned about Gordon Brown
handing over interest rate determination to the Bank of England:
they thought that through, they knew what they wanted to do. But
at much the same time—actually a fortnight later—they
took away the regulatory powers of the Bank of England and divided
it three ways between the FSA,[21]
the Bank of England and the Treasury. The Treasury, my understanding
is, asked for a month or so to work through all the detail on
that so as to work out what might happen in various eventualities.
They were not given it and the consequences of that have come
to haunt us very recently. I am not saying I can vouch for that,
but that is what I have read and that is my understanding.
Q75 Chairman: Let me ask you one thing
to end with. A question behind the work that you do is who actually
within government drives a process of performance improvement?
Normally inside organisations you know where the centre is that
is driving this. I think in government we have difficulty in identifying
this and it is something which cabinet secretaries are expected
to do but there are all kinds of limitations on that that prompted
Robin Butler to suggest to us that we needed a body. He suggested
something equivalent to the NAO that would be concerned with performance
inside government. Whether the remedy is the right one or not,
has he not identified the real issue there and would it not have
been good for you to come up with a recommendation that showed
not only a list of process issues that would be beneficial but
some mechanism of driving them forward which, frankly, is more
realistic than the idea of a parliamentary resolution? Parliament
does not drive administrative performance in government; it has
to be a mechanism inside government to drive it. In the absence
of that, we shall go round in circles.
Sir Nicholas Monck: I think Parliament
saying something does affect what goes on in the Executive, and
I think your resolution to this Committee, which the predecessor
was behind, has been something that has been reflected in all
ministerial codes since then. As I think I said last time, it
is a necessary part of getting reform done to have some new obligations
imposed by Parliament. That is my position.
Sir Christopher Foster: It is
not the only thought relevant to what you just said. We talk quite
a lot about select committees having more expert staff and staff
with NAO style powers. It is very important they are NAO style
powers. We see parliamentary scrutiny looking straight into the
problem of, shall we say, lost computer discs. You need to have
people who can investigate right away, who are trusted, like the
NAO, to actually look at the direct evidence and not spread themselves
around and look at other policy issues. The Scrutiny Unit has
some expertise of this kind. We do see them performing this sort
of gingering up, galvanising function to try and spot things which
are not going well and to come up with a view, and that will motivate
the Executive to do a lot better. It is bound to. As for developments
within the Executive, we have talked to a great many people, ministers
and civil servants. I think there is a lot of good will. I hope
that there will be general ministerial feeling that this is worthwhile,
for reasons we have already discussed, but do not discount the
importance of Parliament in this regard. Somehow or other you
do have a great influence on how people think of things.
Q76 Chairman: You would be surprised.
I say that as someone who, to go back to a previous session, was
told by the Chief Whip that I would never chair this committee
and several members of this committee were resolutely kept off
select committees for some years, so I think the political side
we probably understand slightly better than you do.
Sir Christopher Foster: True.
Q77 Chairman: And to pin hopes on
Parliament, I think, is possibly too overstated. We are interested
very much in the whole spread of what you say, and we take your
point about the need to see them all in the round and I think
we particularly take the point about the importance of process,
even though process can and should change from time to time, but
the idea of process itself is right and, if you have not done
anything else, to direct our attention to that is valuable and
we shall shamelessly draw upon your work in work that we want
ourselves to do; so thank you very much indeed for coming and
sharing all this with us.
Sir Christopher Foster: Thank
you very much, Chairman. As I said, there are other members of
our committee who would be delighted, if you have time for them,
to talk to you as well. Many thanks.
15 Private Finance Initiative Back
16
Department for Work and Pensions Back
17
HM Treasury, Delivering Stability: Securing our Future Housing
Needs, March 2004 Back
18
HM Treasury, Barker Review of Land Use Planning, December
2006 Back
19
HM Treasury, Releasing resources to the front line, July
2004 Back
20
HM Treasury, Well Placed to Deliver?- Shaping the Pattern
of Government Service, March 2004 Back
21
Financial Services Authority Back
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