Defra departmental Annual Report and Estimates - Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Contents


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


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2010
Prepared 14 April 2010