Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320
- 339)
TUESDAY 7 JULY 2009
BILL RAMMELL
MP, RT HON
LORD MALLOCH-BROWN,
KCMG, MICHAEL FOSTER
MP, MR RICHARD
TEUTEN, BRIGADIER
GORDON MESSENGER
DSO, OBE, ADC, AND MR
NICK PICKARD
Q320 Mr Jenkin:
How often do the Secretaries of State meet to discuss the Comprehensive
Approach?
Lord Malloch-Brown: There is a
meeting between the three Secretaries of State once a month which
previously dealt with Iraq and Afghanistan, it is now reduced
to just Afghanistan. I think I am right in saying it is once a
month or it is thereabouts. There is also the NSID structure which
is, when appropriate on Afghanistan, chaired by the Prime Minister.
Q321 Mr Jenkin:
How often does NSID meet because that is the formal Cabinet structure?
Lord Malloch-Brown: NSID meets
regularly, but I am not sure. Probably the better question which
I think you mean is how often does it take up Afghanistan.
Q322 Mr Jenkin:
No, I am asking about the Comprehensive Approach generally.
Lord Malloch-Brown: NSID meets
frequently, not always under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister
and sometimes at the sub-committee level dealing with different
regions.
Q323 Mr Jenkin:
I am informed that NSID meets infrequently and almost all its
business is transacted by correspondence.
Lord Malloch-Brown: The NSID sub-committee
I am a member of, which is the Africa one, meets probably every
couple of months.
Q324 Mr Jenkin:
Is there any sub-committee of NSID which oversees the Comprehensive
Approach or is this a tripartite meeting of the three departments?
Lord Malloch-Brown: The tripartite
meeting is really the principal vehicle for overseeing in the
case of Afghanistan.
Q325 Mr Jenkin:
Is that part of the formal Cabinet committee structure?
Lord Malloch-Brown: No, it is
not.
Q326 Mr Jenkin:
Does the Cabinet Office provide a secretariat?
Lord Malloch-Brown: The Cabinet
Office is represented. There are two forms of meeting. Very usefully
the three Secretaries of State sometimes meet just alone but a
note is made of the meeting, but when it is a broader meeting
the Cabinet Office is at that meeting.
Q327 Mr Jenkin:
NSID tries to meet once a month but does not always meet once
a month. When did the Prime Minister last chair NSID?
Lord Malloch-Brown: I am told
the Foreign Secretary chaired last week, but NSID met last week
and it was on Somalia, so it was a Comprehensive Approach discussion.
Q328 Mr Jenkin:
Just to summarise, the Prime Minister does not always chair this
committee. This committee has obviously got something like eight
sub-committees but not one of those sub-committees has a title
the Comprehensive Approach. The tri-departmental meeting which
meets once a month does not have a secretariat, though the Cabinet
Office does provide some support but there is no formal secretariat.
This does not sound like a very comprehensive approach to the
Comprehensive Approach, does it?
Lord Malloch-Brown: You would
have to accept that NSID meeting on a geographic basis to deal
with issues is a perfectly logical way of conducting its business.
The Afghanistan issues require Afghanistan teams to be at the
meeting and briefs. I am not sure to deal with it thematically
as a comprehensive approach would necessarily contribute. Let
me be clear that the meeting of the three Secretaries of State
is intended to supplement and give urgency and momentum to decision-making,
not to replace NSID.
Q329 Mr Jenkin:
I have to say in our other evidence sessions we have not seen
much evidence of urgency of decision-making and implementation,
it just has not been there.
Bill Rammell: May I comment. I
was at the NSID meeting last week which looked at tackling piracy
of the Horn of Africa. It was chaired by the Foreign Secretary
and I have to say, and I am saying this genuinely, it was one
of the most searching and challenging meetings as a Government
Minister I have been through in that we were looking across the
piste in terms of what more we could do to tackle piracy. Yes,
from the military perspective, but also in terms of development
in Somalia and also in terms of building judicial capacity within
the region. I think that is a practical example of it working.
Q330 Mr Jenkin:
May I follow up that example. You had a meeting, looking at the
sub-committees of NSID, presumably you made some policy decisions
which will be followed through, which sub-committee does that
go to? Given that you have got to deal with the land component
in Somalia, the naval component, the legal component, the diplomatic
component, the Home Office component with the potential for all
the immigration questions, et cetera, et cetera, which sub-committee
does it go to?
Bill Rammell: It will not. All
those bodies and departments you have mentioned were represented
at the meeting and now the outcome of that meeting is being concluded
and I believe it is quite substantive. If I can anticipate where
I think you are going with this question, I think were we to have
one ministry and one minister responsible for the Comprehensive
Approach, seven years as a Government minister has taught me,
whether this be right or wrong, whichever ministry you went for
and whichever minister, the other two departments would then see
it as a second-order priority. I do not think structural re-organisation
is the solution to all the problems.
Q331 Mr Jenkin:
It is kind of you to anticipate my questions, but that was not
it. What I was going to put to you is there should, in fact, be
an NSID sub-committee which is devoted to maintaining and promoting
the machinery which can deliver the Comprehensive Approach through
overseeing the three departments sitting in front of us here.
It seems there is only an informal structure without a secretariat
and we are fighting a war on this basis.
Mr Teuten: Can I elaborate on
that, NSID (Oversees Defence) sub-Committee does have that responsibility.
Q332 Mr Jenkin:
It has many, many other responsibilities.
Mr Teuten: Indeed, but, for example,
in January this year it did consider a number of papers on these
issues and its secretariat is in the Cabinet Office in the Foreign
and Defence Policy Secretariat, so there is a capacity there.
Q333 Mr Jenkin:
May I end with an open question, how do you think the machinery
of government could be improved in order to improve the buy-in
of all the necessary departments and the overall political direction
of the Comprehensive Approach?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me, just
for factual accuracy, make sure that—as you obviously are
aware—the Committee is aware that officials coming out of
this work have been asked to develop a cross-government conflict
strategy to guide interventions that seek to prevent or reduce
conflict. At the beginning of this year, Ministers endorsed an
interim document, the Strategic Framework for Conflict. While
it is correct that there is not an NSID committee specially tasked
with this, and with the word "comprehensive" in its
title, this effort to pull the strands together to get a commonality
of approach, which can then be put through the prism of different
geographic situations, in the NSID sub-committees, I think is
in place. If I might say so, Mr Jenkin, you and I have discussed
this quite a bit, and I think we both share some of the reservations
about a three-departmental approach. I came from an institution,
the UN, where in a situation like this we would have put one individual
senior official in charge. But having wrestled with this now for
a couple of years, and having seen the way the UK Government has
organised with the permanent secretaries of departments, having
financial responsibility for the affairs and expenditures of those
departments, having seen the Whitehall machinery at work, with
a great bureaucratic skill for making things work through a committee
structure, I have become persuaded that it is the best of the
alternatives. It is not perfect, and one hankers for a Patton
occasionally—General, not Chris—to do this kind of
thing. In truth, this is the way Whitehall works, and it does
it well.
Q334 Mr Jenkin:
I am bound to say that when we had the permanent secretaries in
front of us it was difficult to divine a firm sense of direction
from the three of them sitting in front of us. They tried valiantly,
but it was like stirring treacle.
Bill Rammell: I think practically
they have demonstrated leadership on this issue, by, for example,
undertaking joint visits where they are demonstrating physically
to the people who report to them that the Comprehensive Approach
is a real priority. I respect where you are coming from, but I
am just not a fan of structural reorganisation as a solution to
the problem. I think if we went down that route, you would have
a capacity gap of quite a period of time whilst the organisation
built up to living with that structure. I do not actually think,
over the urgent timescales that we need to improve results, that
we would get the best outcome.
Q335 Mr Jenkin:
We have been in Afghanistan for six years now and we do not seem
to have cracked it yet. You say the Prime Minister is in charge,
of course; how can he possibly have the time to take a sufficiently
active interest in this subject to make the machinery work more
effectively?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Let me say
to you, he has made several visits there.
Mr Jenkin: If visits was the outcome—
Q336 Chairman:
Allow the Minister to answer.
Lord Malloch-Brown: So to say
he does not have time, he has given this really significant priority
and has involved himself in decision-making. I follow very closely
the American efforts to grapple with this, where an envoy has
been appointed, who reports directly to the President as well
as to the Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke. As a good friend,
I do not think he would feel I was breaching any confidence if
I said he struggles to get the US system to respond to somebody
who is in that case based in the State Department but has a presidential
reporting line. It is very difficult, you have very powerful figures,
General Petraeus at the Department of Defense and others. Ultimately,
he would argue, I think, that the only way you can make this work
is through the different departments committing together, through
some kind of committee approach, to a clarity of decisions. That
last phrase is the difficulty, because obviously committees do
not always comport themselves in that way. The American example
shows there is not an easy fix. It is not just a matter of appointing
a big beast, you have got to support it with committee systems
that allow all departments to work.
Q337 Chairman:
What, then, do you say about Sherard Cowper-Coles's position?
Lord Malloch-Brown: Well, it is
not analogous to that of Richard Holbrooke's. He reports to the
Foreign Secretary. It is an FCO appointment. It is not the same
as the American position in that regard.
Q338 Chairman:
Bill Rammell, you said that if there were a single minister in
charge of this, the other departments would treat it as a second
order question. Do you believe that the Prime Minister treats
it as a second order question?
Bill Rammell: No, I do not. What
I was trying to do was to be very candid with the Committee about
my perception of the way Whitehall works. If you remove it from
that frontline responsibility for a department, inevitably you
do not have the push within the department to give it the priority
it should have. I am very convinced that the Prime Minister is
behind this. I know from—how do I describe this—regular
promptings that come from Number 10 on the Prime Minister's behalf
about how we are facing up to particular elements of this, this
is given a high priority.
Q339 Mr Jenkin:
When it comes to homeland security, we have a very senior official
in the Cabinet Office who co-ordinates homeland security: why
do we not have the same for the Comprehensive Approach? Thank
you!
Bill Rammell: I am hesitating
because I do not think you add value necessarily through that
approach.
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