Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
MR CHRIS
BANKS, MR
GEOFF RUSSELL
AND MR
DAVID HUGHES
20 MAY 2009
Q200 Chairman: You are passing the
buck again.
Mr Hughes: No, I am not passing
the buck.
Q201 Chairman: I want to ask you
a specific question. You had a key position here. The chief executive's
door was always open with the coffee on.
Mr Hughes: Yes.
Q202 Chairman: You wandered in and
out regularly.
Mr Hughes: Yes, I met Mark regularly.
Q203 Chairman: Why did you not say
to him, "Hey, Mark, there is clearly quite a difficult bit
of information we have here. The programme is going up the spout"?
Mr Hughes: It was not going up
the spout. Read the report and read the conclusion. The conclusion
says: we can manage this with some amendments to the programme.
Q204 Chairman: Did you tell him that?
Mr Hughes: I do not remember whether
I had that conversation with him. A year is a long time. I genuinely
cannot remember, but we had a report that said: "There are
problems on the horizon. You need to do something about it."
We said, "We will do something about it", and we had
been doing those things; we did it too late.
Q205 Mr Marsden: We interviewed Mark
Haysom last week and, obviously, we pressed him on these issues
as to why the focus had not been on the capital side of it. He
said because he was doing lots of other things as chief executive.
Given that this was 15%, or thereabouts, of the entire budget,
so I understand, did you have the same priorities as a regional
director for it as he had as chief executive?
Mr Hughes: I was overseeing a
budget of about 1.9 billion as regional director for London, and
I have always accounted for that money absolutely. We would never
overspend.
Q206 Mr Marsden: That was not my
question.
Mr Hughes: No, but my point is
we were overseeing that budget and we did that properly. Within
that some of it was capital and we had responsibility for making
sure good capital proposals were coming forward, and we did that
well.
Q207 Mr Marsden: Can I take you forward
on the regional budget issue. As I say, as the Chairman has pointed
out, I will not say unique, but you had a very good combination
of responsibilities and talents because you were both the regional
director but you were also chair of the Finance and Resources
Board, so you could see it from both ends of the telescope, if
I can put it that way. We have heard from the evidence session
previously (and I appreciate now that no college heads came forward
from your region) that at no time did they have any sense that
their region had an actual budget for the capital programme, it
was just a wish-list. What was the situation in your region?
Mr Hughes: It was a national budget
to which we were pushing through projects, so we had no regional
budget.
Q208 Mr Marsden: You did not have
at the back of your mind, or even on a sheet of paper somewhere,
"I have got X hundred million pounds for this budget"?
Mr Hughes: It did not work like
that.
Q209 Mr Marsden: So you did not have
that: understood. There was also reference in the previous evidence
session to the role of regional directors of infrastructure projects
in talking up this whole exercise, and the rest of it. What was
your relationship with your regional director of infrastructure
and projects and what advice or feedback did you get from him
or her about how they could communicate this programme with colleges?
Mr Hughes: In point of fact, we
do not actually have regional directors of infrastructure.
Q210 Mr Marsden: That is what we
were told. Let me put it another way. Phil Head is the National
Director.
Mr Hughes: Yes.
Q211 Mr Marsden: Who is the regional
person who does that?
Mr Hughes: He has nine regional
property advisers.
Q212 Mr Marsden: So it is a question
of nomenclature?
Mr Hughes: No, it is more than
that, because we would work up projects through our management
scheme, through our directors, so we were really in contact with
colleges making sure that the schemes were proportionate, making
sure that they were good value for money, making sure that they
were properly devised.
Q213 Mr Marsden: You have a regional
property adviser. That is the title?
Mr Hughes: Yes.
Q214 Mr Marsden: Did you have, at
any stage, conversations with him along the lines of whether it
was reasonable and realistic to advise colleges to go for this
once in a lifetime opportunity to build up or anything like that?
Mr Hughes: I have heard a lot
of anecdotes about this, but I have seen no evidence, and Foster
said the same. I have never talked up a project, I have never
bigged-up a project, I have never suggested to a college---. I
am absolutely confident that no-one in my team ever did that.
What I am clear about is that there was lots of ambition in the
sector and there were lots of iconic schemes being put up, and
other colleges looked at those and, I think, thought, "We
want one of those." I do not think we were in the game of
saying, "Go away and re-write and make it two or three times
as big." I certainly have never done that.
Q215 Mr Boswell: Conversely, you
were not in the game of saying, unless there was some incoherence
in the project, at this point we need at least to reflect on the
overall implications for the budget or otherwise?
Mr Hughes: On the contrary, at
project level I can think of many examples where we have gone
back to a college and said, "We think you are being over-ambitious
with the size and cost of your project." In London I can
think of some examples of that.
Q216 Mr Marsden: Can you clarify
something? Who in the LSC physically commissioned the Edwards
Report?
Mr Hughes: That was commissioned
by Phil.
Q217 Mr Marsden: By Phil Head?
Mr Hughes: Yes.
Q218 Mr Marsden: As Director of Infrastructure
and Projects?
Mr Hughes: Yes.
Q219 Mr Marsden: Did you have a conversation?
We have not got Phil Head before us, but it seems to me, on the
basis of what has been said, that there is an implication there
that he was concerned at a very early stage about the potential,
not the actual, road crash, and that is one of the reasons why
he commissioned this report. When that report had appeared before
your committee, did you have formal or informal conversations
with him subsequently as to what his thoughts were on it?
Mr Hughes: Yes.
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