Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
ENVIRONMENT, FOOD
AND RURAL
AFFAIRS AND
RURAL PAYMENTS
AGENCY
Q20 Mr Curry: Why? First of all you have
two whom you then get rid of in short order. Then you have two
interims; one stays a few months and I understood he then got
another job. Then you have Mr Pearce, who has been there for a
year, employed on a temporary basis for a whole year, earning
roughly twice what you earn, pretty well twice what you earn.
If this happened in any private company, would you not think there
was something wrong with the chief executive that he could not
keep a stable top management team?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The role is
the chief operating officer and it is a particularly challenging
task. Taking the Agency operations from a position where, putting
it crudely, it was pretty broken and unable to make payments to
farmers, to a position where we are able to make payments and
have reduced staff numbers, putting in place all of the mechanisms
which are needed to make all of that happen, then that chief operating
officer role is a very, very challenging role.
Q21 Mr Curry: So if it is particularly
important, I would have thought, that there should be some stability
in it, would you not? You have had four in three years. Something
has gone wrong, has it not?
Dame Helen Ghosh: May I clarify
one point and I suspect we may need to write to the Committee
on this point?[1]
Simon Vry in fact was engaged by the RPA before those dates you
have described. He was not there for a short period of time. He
had in fact been working on the project for quite a long time.
Q22 Mr Curry: And he was dismissed.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, he was not
dismissed
Q23 Mr Curry: Why did he walk away with
£95,652?
Dame Helen Ghosh: That is the
factual point on which I would want to get back to you because
I have to confess I am surprised by that.
Q24 Mr Curry: It is in the accounts.
Dame Helen Ghosh: He has come
from the private sector and he worked on the project and the conclusion
reached—I suspect it was by Tony's predecessor—was
that, given that he could show continuity we kept him on knowing
that it was for a very short period of time. May I just back what
Tony said? In fact in other parts of the Agency's operations we
have a history of replacing interims with permanent people: so
Tony himself, the FD, the HR director. The COO has proved particularly
difficult.
Q25 Mr Curry: With respect, if you look
at the little footnote with two asterisks, Mr Andrew Good, Robert
Kendall and William Burton were employed on a temporary basis
through recruitment agencies. You seem to have had the most terrible
difficulties in recruiting able people, willing to stay or able
to work with you, whichever way round you want to look at it.
What was the problem?
Mr Cooper: It was not a problem.
When I arrived I wanted to change the management team that existed
at the time and the interims were a quick fix to that.
Q26 Mr Curry: It was quite a long fix,
was it not? One has been here for a year.
Mr Cooper: As you said, there
is a need to have a balance between stability—
Q27 Mr Curry: And instability.
Mr Cooper: —and some continuity,
with the people engaged at the top of the organisation.
Q28 Mr Curry: We are now into the post
reform generation of chief operating officers, are we not? These
are not inheritees from the old system.
Mr Cooper: The third chief operating
officer that I had, Mr Burton, went off to become a chief executive
in another organisation.
Q29 Mr Curry: I appreciate that but am
I not right that equally you had a customer director who was paid
off in March last year with about £300,000?[2]
Mr Cooper: I do not think so.
We have advertised for a customer compliance director.
Q30 Mr Curry: You must admit, perhaps
you do not, just looking at it from the outside, when you look
at this instability in the senior management structure, you think
something is wrong and one instinctively then looks to see where
the leadership is coming from and there is clearly a problem.
Mr Cooper: The organisation posed
a number of challenges and it required some pretty good people
to come in at short notice and do some pretty rapid work.
Q31 Mr Curry: And then go out again at
short notice. This sounds like Lady Bracknell; it is like the
business of the parents where to lose one meant ... Could you
not quote that?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It looks like
carelessness. I could indeed quote that. There is a general issue
here possibly for the Committee which is that actually—and
we have used them in the core department as well—getting
in an interim for a short period of time to sort things out at
a price you simply could not afford in terms of the normal salary
of civil servants can be the right thing to do in some circumstances.
I think Tony is describing that at least in one of these cases.
Q32 Mr Curry: Let us continue on that
theme and let us look at the system of outdoor relief for Accenture,
which is very interesting. How many consultants from Accenture
worked in the RPA in 2007, 2008 and now and how much did their
daily fees total in each of those years? I understand you can
easily get around £3,000 a day for some of these characters.
Do you have anybody earning that sort of amount at the moment?
Mr Cooper: No.
Q33 Mr Curry: On fees? Anybody earning
£2,500 a day from Accenture?
Mr Cooper: No. May I explain that
the way the Accenture contract operates is through a fixed price?
When we agree an upgrade to the system, to adopt, for example,
the health check changes, we agree a fixed price and then it is
for Accenture to determine how many people they need to deliver
that. The number of people that they use through the development
lifecycle will vary from month to month.
Q34 Mr Curry: Do the Accenture consultants—these
are not just people who are checking the computers, these are
consultants—sit in on senior management meetings?
Mr Cooper: I have had the senior
person in Accenture sit in my executive group meetings. I try
to arrange for them to be a strategic partner of the organisation.
I have tried to get them to be part of the resolution of the problems
that we faced and therefore they have sat in and left the meeting
at any time when there is a potential conflict of interest.
Q35 Mr Curry: So you can let me have
what I asked for over the last three years. I would like to know
how many consultants from Accenture worked in the RPA in each
of the last three years, I would like to know their role and I
would like to know the daily fee which you paid for them.[3]
Dame Helen Ghosh: Can we just
be clear? That is not the way the contract works. It is not that
I am hiring a group of consultants on a daily fee. We agree with
Accenture, as I understand it from Tony's description, on the
payment for that bit of work. If you have to put 100 people on
it, it is that price. If you have to put 200 people on it, it
is that price. We would not know that fact. We just know what
the price is and we would know the benchmark.
Q36 Mr Curry: Mr Cooper said that when
he came to the Department the computer thing did not work.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed it did
not.
Q37 Mr Curry: And the people responsible
for the computer system were Accenture.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Right. The people
responsible for the fact that the IT system was not as good as
it should have been, were the people who commissioned it as much
as Accenture and we explored that previously. They asked for a
closed box, task based model developed not in partnership and
that is what Accenture provided.
Q38 Mr Curry: You have gone back to a
task base now, have you not, because the overpayments issue is
being dealt with on a task based basis?
Mr Cooper: What we have arrived
at is more of a hybrid arrangement. Sometimes it is necessary
to work on individual activities, sometimes it is sensible to
bring people together into a team and sometimes it is possible
to do the whole case working. We work in a range of ways.
Q39 Mr Curry: The total cost then for
the computers from start to finish, the IT, where are we, £300
million now?
Mr Cooper: The total spend for
all IT is, calculated slightly differently from the NAO Report,
in the region of about £285 million, but that includes all
of the IT that we buy from IBM and Steria. To date, in terms of
the sum of money that we have paid for the system and for some
support work that Accenture have done, it amounts to £148
million and that figure does not include VAT, which we recover.
1 Ev 16 Back
2
Ev 19 Back
3
Ev 17 Back
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