Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
80-99)
DAME HELEN
GHOSH DCB, MR
MIKE ANDERSON
AND MS
ANNE MARIE
MILLAR
11 NOVEMBER 2009
Q80 Chairman: Yes, because otherwise
this is just a load of words. Also, can you, when you are printing
next year's report, make certain you choose a method of binding
that keeps the pages together?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is probably
very sustainable!
Q81 Chairman: But there is a diminished
quality in the way that this particular report operates to the
detriment of the reader.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Can I tell you
one other quick story? One of the things we did with the customer
insight was to get all the senior people in the Department out
to go through some of the same customer insight training, and
it was fascinating. I went round Sainsbury's at Holborn with a
customer—just a customer picked off the street—who
said that they tried to do the "green" thing, and we
walked round in pairs. We walked round the shop and just talked
to them and they just explained, as they went round, what was
the thing that determined them to get that meat rather than that
meat, and it was completely fascinating.
Q82 Chairman: So you have changed
your shopping habits?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, I now walk
round my local Sainsbury's, or wherever I go to shop—I cannot
do product placement or shop placement—with a different
view of the world. So we are doing very practical hands-on stuff.
Q83 Chairman: You made a great play
some time ago: you tried to explain to the Committee in about
one hour Renew Defra.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q84 Chairman: I think we were amazed
at the dazzling array of different programmes and things that
you were doing, but now it has bedded into the architecture at
Defra, how are you monitoring the progress, because we do not
hear much more about Renew? Are you now fully renewed?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is just the
way we do business. We have actually got an excellent leaflet,
which we must circulate to the Committee, called How Defra
Works, and it describes how we work, how we do our portfolio,
how we move staff around, the way we do performance and project
management.
Q85 Chairman: I recognise that as
an outcome of Renew Defra. The question I asked was: how are you
evaluating the programme? You started off with your list of things
you were doing. I presume somebody has done a body of work to
see if what you wanted to achieve has been achieved?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, we have
been tracking the achievements of Renew Defra actually in parallel
with the action plan on the back of our capability re-review;
so we have pulled those two things together. The kind of measures
we set ourselves were things like how quickly can we move staff
around—because, as you will recall, one of the key objects
was to be able to move flexibly when priorities changed—and
the speed with which we can move people round in the new structures
is much more effective. We wanted to make sure we were more joined
up, which was the whole object of joining up programmes across
the piece, and I think things like the work we have done on adaptation
and mitigation on climate change show that those cross-cutting
programmes work. We have a variety of ways of measuring how we
have made progress and, again, we would be very happy to give
you a quick account of how we measure, but we are absorbing it
into other measurement processes.
Q86 Chairman: You have, as I understand
it, what is described as a "new policy cycle", which
requires the signing off of business cases by what are described
as "approvals panels" at fixed points in the process.
That does not immediately suggest to me what happens, but just
give me a "for instance" and give me some indication
of how many policies have been through the process and what are
the benefits from this approach.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Because I deliberately
hold myself, as it were, above this process, I will ask Mike to
describe a particular instance, but what this is about is doing
the right thing for the right reason in the right way. When ministers
or officials identify a problem, how do you decide what do about
it? A policy cycle is the thing that says: "What is the problem
that we have got here? What are the various ways we might solve
it?" looking at the options for solving the problem and then
saying, "Is that the best value for money?", making
sure you engage, at every moment, both customer insight, economic
evidence, and so on, and also making sure, crucially, that your
delivery bodies are involved. So something like handling the CAP
Health Check last year and making sure that you knew what you
were going for, you knew what the options were, the RPA was fully
engaged, you were tracking it as a project—that is what
the policy cycle is all about. Programmes come to the various
approvals panels, like investment committees, at various stages:
when they first want people to start up a programme, when they
are looking at the various options for what we might do, when
we are putting advice to ministers, and so on.
Mr Anderson: It is quite a brutal
Star Chamber, actually, these days, Chairman, because every new
business plan that somebody wants to come up with as a head of
a section, head of a group, head of a team that they want to do
with a new idea, whether it is a minister's idea or their own
idea, has to come to this panel, and it is a sort of escalation
process. You can do this locally and you have to write a full
business case with what value you are going to get out of the
programme and how much it is going to cost. This is rigorously
checked by the finance team, by the performance team and by the
policy and by the evidence people: does this make sense? It then
comes to, initially, a small Star Chamber within a particular
group, who say, "Yes, actually this makes sense," or,
"No, you do not need that bit of the money", or, "You
do need that bit. Why are you doing that? Where does it align?"
If that particular team or group cannot afford it, it then gets
escalated up to the big Central Approvals Panel, where the director
generals sit, chaired by our colleague Bill Stow, who I think
came here last year, and, again, the person putting forward the
plan actually appears, a bit like here, today, and is left outside
and then comes in the room and is interrogated on the plan, and
if it is considered satisfactory, then we have to decide what
else in the budget will need adjusting to allow that piece of
activity to come forward. So it is a programme now that is being
modelled across other bits of Whitehall. Treasury have been in
to see us; the Department of Heath have been in to see us; DWP[27]
have been in to see us: "Can you actually produce a system
that is not too bureaucratic?"
Q87 Chairman: A sort of Defra version
of Dragons' Den!
Mr Anderson: It is a pretty frightening
thing for those who have not faced it before, Chairman.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is. Thinking
back to your point about telling stories, even things that are
obviously priorities have to come and argue their case. So the
Climate Change Adaptation Programme, which we set up this year,
had to come and say, "How many people do I need? What science
do I need?"
Mr Anderson: The mitigation programme
for farming has just come to us, the programme on the public value:
"How many people do you need to run the public value programme?"
"Why do you need 12 rather than ten," or, "Why
do you need 15?" Every single new programme is coming in
that way, some of them quite small and some of them larger. New
capital projects will also come in, so everything.
Q88 Miss McIntosh: How much time
to do you spend evaluating the programme and how much time do
you actually spend delivering the programme?
Mr Anderson: It depends on the
programme really. The delivery, I think, would be, arguably, the
most important, but if you do not evaluate it you cannot decide
whether you have delivered it, I would argue. So I think you have
to evaluate it in advance and you have to evaluate it during and
after.
Q89 Miss McIntosh: Where are you
on the adaptation programme?
Dame Helen Ghosh: As you will
know, we had the very successful launch of the climate change
projections in the summer. The team has now been out doing its
regional road shows on what adaptation means for you locally,
and I think now people can look at the more detailed projections
for themselves. We are working very closely with DECC[28]
and have issued guidance for all departments. We all have to produce
our adaptation plans and, of course, we have the longer-term target.
I think its 2012, is it not, for the risk adaptation, risk analysis
going on?
Q90 Miss McIntosh: Has the sub-committee
met?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Has the committee
met?
Q91 Miss McIntosh: Has the adaptation
sub-committee met?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The sub-committee?
It is now fully appointed, I think. John Krebs is Chair, with
various members. I do not know whether they have met. I think
they may have had their first meeting.
Q92 Miss McIntosh: It is just a small
point, but it was two and a half years ago that we had the summer
floods and it is 18 months since Pitt said that we should have
an adaptation sub-committee.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, the adaptation
sub-committee is nothing to do with Pitt. Obviously, the issue
of floods is closely related, but the adaptation sub-committee
was something set up in the Climate Change Bill at the instigation,
for example, of people like Barbara Young, which said that, as
well as climate change mitigation, we needed to make sure that
society was planning for adaptations. So it is a daughter of the
Climate Change Committee that Adair Turner chairs.
Chairman: Let us move on from that. We
may come back to it later.
Q93 David Taylor: Last year the Cabinet
Office introduced a single survey across Whitehall, did they not,
on employee engagement?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q94 David Taylor: There was a reasonable
response within Defra and you scored reasonably well on pay, perception
of pay and visibility of senior staff?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Q95 David Taylor: Is that day-glo
smocks or do you actually get round the Department?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, we do blogs.
So every week one of us is blogging—as it happens, this
week a farmer is blogging—and those get tremendously high
hit rates. That is the Management Board Diary. We just sit down
every day and say what we have done. We have things like the Management
Board Hot Seat, where each of us sits for an hour and answers
any question that is thrown at us by staff.
Q96 David Taylor: This is not tokenism
then: you actually follow up the points that are made to you?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Absolutely.
I can assure you it is not tokenism. I would be very happy to
show you the kinds of points that people make, and we respond.
We have observers in our Management Boards, so we have half a
dozen people, anybody in the Department, who come and then, locally,
I have a regular series of just visiting teams.
Mr Anderson: Every single team
has an action plan in relation to the staff survey. Every single
team has to take action about engagement. The Management Board
has to be a partner.
Q97 David Taylor: You encourage people,
we read, to come up with creative solutions at work. Does that
include your accountant?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Absolutely.
We want everybody to be innovative and creative. We do not want
them to do creative accounting, but we want them to be innovative
and creative, and that is what Anne Marie is in charge of and
is doing professional development stuff with them.
Q98 David Taylor: At the less pleasant
end of the spectrum, as it were, there seems to be a lack of clarity
about group purpose and objectives where you scored—
Dame Helen Ghosh: Sorry to interrupt
but that takes me back to the point about DSOs. Some departments
have perhaps two or three DSOs, people like the Foreign Office
or DFID[29].
It is very clear if you are in DFID that you are there to deliver
the Millennium Goals. I think what people find confusing about
this range of DSOs is the thing I am doing on agri-environment
schemes, is that a sustainable food supply? Is that a healthy
natural environment? Is it a thriving food and farming sector?
It is all those things, but we have been doing a lot of work this
year on what we call "telling the Defra story". So how
does everything we do join up? It is back to Mike's point about
telling a story that, actually, everything we do is about being
an economic department. We are part of economic growth, not a
barrier to economic growth, and so we are doing lots of stories
about that.
Q99 David Taylor: Do you still do anything
equivalent to—perhaps in electronic form—team briefing
and cascading information down?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We have a very
structured system called "Discuss Defra", where we suggest
on a quarterly basis, and give local team leaders materials to
talk about the things that are of interest to us all at the moment.
27 Department for Work and Pensions Back
28
Department of Energy and Climate Change Back
29
Department for International Development Back
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