Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-37)
Ms Lesley Longstone and Ms Claire Johnston
27 NOVEMBER 2007
Q20 Lord James of Blackheath: By
the definition that you give of "regulation" it plays
effectively to the external market with which you are engaged?
Ms Longstone: Yes.
Q21 Lord James of Blackheath: But
what about compliance, and how do the two functions separate within
the Department and are they run and controlled separately? Compliance
I interpret to be compliance with government procedure. Internal
control.
Ms Longstone: Yes.
Q22 Lord James of Blackheath: So
how do you distinguish between compliance and regulation in that?
They seem to have got rather merged up in your definition.
Ms Longstone: Our Director General of Corporate
Services is responsible for both, for the compliance of departmental
systems and also for regulatory work, but I am not sure I am confusing
them.
Q23 Lord James of Blackheath: Does
he not become the servant of two masters?
Ms Longstone: Unless you are saying that regulation
is inconsistent with compliance -
Q24 Lord James of Blackheath: I think
it could be. I am just intrigued as to how the Department consciously
separates the two and conducts a policy separately to control
each in the interests of its particular objective.
Ms Longstone: I think that is where I started
out, by saying that as Director General I am responsible for the
quality of Statutory Instruments that are produced, by people
who are line-managed by me. Some of that is about compliance with
proper process and systems and some of it is about quality, but
you are right, you cannot separate the policy from those compliance
issues, and that is my responsibility. What our Director General
of Corporate Services is responsible for is ensuring that the
systems that the Department has support that compliance, and what
we are saying is that part of the compliance is the regulatory
side as well. That is where his role is. So it is to support and
challenge and provide assurances to the Permanent Secretary.
Chairman: Lord James, I think we may have got
as far as we are going to get on this one. Did you want to ask
the second leg of your question?
Q25 Lord James of Blackheath: Yes.
Presumably you are faced at times with a very large number of
Statutory Instruments which have to be considered and marshalled
into some sort of order. What conscious process do you carry out
to elicit these in advance and then effectively ration them in
a period of time so that those which are closely related to each
other come together as a group, because it does facilitate our
consideration of them, and how far do you avoid fragmenting the
process of submission?
Ms Longstone: At the minute it is fair to say
we do that within policy areas, so if you have got an initiative
for schools they will have an overview of the different Statutory
Instruments that might be coming up. If I can give you an example,
when we did the Education and Inspections Act, there was a programme
board for over-seeing the Act itself, the legislation strand,
and also the implementation plan for how we are going to take
that forward, and one of the things we did is we developed a wall
planner which we then made available to all local authorities,
and for each policy area within the Act that set out when we expected
the primary legislation to come into force, when we intended to
issue the regulations for consultation, when we expected the regulations
to finally come into effect, when we would then consult and bring
into effect the guidance as well, to try and make it clear. To
be honest the recipients of this, the people it was aimed at,
were the people who would be affected by it, particularly in local
authorities but not exclusively, and we had lots of really good
feedback about that, but what we have not done is bring that together
at departmental level, so it happens around big programmes of
legislative work in particular areas but we have not yet got this
mechanism for bringing it together, and that is what we are going
to do through the Corporate Performance Report.
Lord James of Blackheath: I am satisfied with
that answer, my lord Chairman.
Q26 Baroness Deech: In a couple of
recent Statutory Instruments that we looked at it seemed to me
that they really needed input from school children and their parents.
One was the setting up of a Schools Meals Panel. Now, we know
there have been problems from on high wanting healthy food but
coming up from the bottom some resistance, and it struck me that
on that SI, setting up a School Meals Panel, the input from young
people themselves and their parents was conspicuously absent.
Another one was the frequency of inspection of children's homes
and in the Explanatory Memorandum I believe it said that the children
themselves wanted their homes more frequently inspected but that
was not to be the case, and it conjured up to me a rather sad
picture of children with problems longing to be inspected but
this was not being listened to. So I wondered why you do not put
more effort into, as it seems to me, finding out the views of
children and their parents in these issues. Obviously a great
deal of time is given to consulting institutional bodies, local
authorities and local councils and so on, but not the young children
and their parents. Is that deliberate? I know it is difficult
and how would you do it?
Ms Longstone: It is certainly not deliberate
and I think I said at the outset that there are two issues here;
one is the extent to which we are doing the proper consultation
that we need to, but the second is whether we are adequately explaining
and setting out in the Explanatory Memorandum what consultation
has happened. Part of the issue is that often the consultation
with young people does happen earlier on in the process before
you get to the regulation, so it is when you are starting to think
about the policies. Ideally that is when you should consult young
people and children and we are doing more and more of that, and
I think we have got some really good examples. At the minute we
are in the process, on the back of the creation of the new Department,
of developing a children's plan which is going to be our forward
plan for the next five to six years, and what we have done in
that case is we have had a bus drive around the schools with a
video chair that children sit in and we ask them questions about
what it is like to be a child, what would they like to see more
of, less of: we have provided lesson plans to get children engaged
in some of the issues so that citizenship teachers can use their
teaching time and get real two-way benefit and get children's
input, and they are also talking about active participation, et
cetera. We organised deliberative events which basically bring
together children, young people, practitioners, from schools,
social services, police—all these organisations that work
with children and young people—and we had some fantastic
young people, we had high achievers off to university and we had
young offenders, children from lots of different backgrounds,
involved in those consultations. But we know you can never do
enough, really. We have set up fairly recently a Customer Insight
Unit which is about saying it is no good just to think of parents,
children, young people; you need to start thinking about very
specific subsets of parents and children in different circumstances
and make sure that the input you are getting helps you really
understand what makes different people tick, so I think it is
an area that we are absolutely committed to, and I think actually
we do very well but not universally.
Baroness Deech: I certainly welcome that explanation
and I do assure you this Committee takes very seriously and is
very interested in feedback—more than feedback, input at
the beginning—from young children and their parents. You
said they get consulted at policy time but I imagine young children
and their parents probably feel they cannot do much about the
policy but they would be very interested in the implementation
of the detail, so perhaps in future EMs we could hear more about
the input from young people and their parents, because that is
something we do look at whenever it is that sort of issue, schools
and food and so on.
Q27 Lord Tunnicliffe: Fifteen SIs
laid after the recess are coming into effect on 1 September, and
you can imagine we did not feel very good about that because it
did rather seem that Parliament was not going to be involved de
facto. Do you think that was satisfactory? If not, what are you
going to do about it?
Ms Longstone: I do not think it is satisfactory,
and this is part of the discussions that Claire has been having
partly in preparation. Potentially, as I said earlier, in that
period some peak may be inevitable but my first look at the instruments
where that is happening suggests that it is not necessarily the
case and that we need to have a better way of checking, and this
is what our proposed change to the Corporate Performance Report
is about. If we can look six months ahead and see that statutory
instruments are being planned for July or during the recess we
can say that is not good, and we need to go back and look again
and see whether there is an alternative approach. The difficulty
we have is that the vast majority of our regulations need to come
into effect on 1 September and therefore if you miss that period
you have to wait a whole year in order to implement. It is less
often the fact that we have been dilatory in allowing regulations
to slip closer and closer to recess, and more likely that there
is a lot of pressure to bring forward instruments that otherwise
would have been laid during the recess period.
Q28 Lord Tunnicliffe: Pressure from
whom?
Ms Longstone: Pressure in the sense that we
have huge ambitions for the education system, and having decided
that this is a policy that is going to help children and young
people then pressure from ourselves. We want to implement those
policies as quickly and as effectively as possible, and not lose
a year. So I think there is potential for some bunching but we
want to make sure it bunches before the recess. You cannot get
rid of the bunching because we are going to want to bring things
forward, but if we can get it to happen before the recess rather
than during that is what we need to be doing.
Q29 Lord Tunnicliffe: So not good
enough, you could try harder, and you have a process you have
to deliver?
Ms Longstone: Yes.
Baroness Maddock: You have just said that you
are wanting to implement the policies effectively. Could I suggest
that unless they get proper scrutiny you have less chance of implementing
them effectively, which is why I think we are so concerned?
Chairman: Good. Thank you. I think we have dealt
with question six, so we can move on.
Q30 Baroness Maddock: One of the
problems we have covering such a wide area is that when we are
looking at the instruments we need really good Explanatory Memoranda
and we want to know what the consultations are, and we do not
always get things that help us to get to grips with what the instrument
is about. What sort of quality control do you have in the Department
over Explanatory Memoranda, for example?
Ms Longstone: The Explanatory Memoranda are
normally developed within policy teams and you certainly expect
that the team leader would quality-assure the Explanatory Memoranda.
In some instances—again, it depends on the significance
and the nature of the change, how significant the change was—you
would expect that to be done at a Deputy Director level, which
is a senior civil servant. I think what your Committee has thrown
up are some inconsistencies and some issues around quality in
some cases, and we have talked about what we need to do in order
to address that through better training development and support
for people who are engaged in this work, which we can do on the
back of the Professional Skills for Government and the work we
have recently done to conduct a skills audit across the department,
and on the back of that looking forward as to what kind of training
and development we need to do. So partly I think there is some
work for us to do there, and Claire and I have talked about developing
and delivering some workshops for policy colleagues involving
our legal team which is making really clear what kind of standards
and expectations we would have. There are also some practical
things we have decided we are going to do, and one is to make
sure we circulate the guidance of this Committee, because we have
two different bits of guidance at the moment, and when we get
to a point where we need to ask teams to develop Explanatory Memoranda,
we decided that in future we will circulate the guidance from
this Committee with the request. It is available now on our website,
but we will be a bit more proactive and bring it to people's attention.
Also, which we cannot do on our own, we need to see whether we
cannot investigate amending the pro forma that we use, because
one of the issues seems to be that we are missing some of the
subsets of the headings that you want, particularly around policy,
the consultation headings. There are four categories of things
that you want, and at the minute there is just one single over-arching
policy section. So I think a practical thing we might collectively
do in talking to OPSI is maybe think about trying to put in these
subheadings to signpost people a little bit better.
Q31 Baroness Maddock: You have partly
covered my follow-up question which is about how you communicate
to people in the Department what we say. For example, each week
we get our papers and if we are not quite sure that there is enough
in there we will go to our clerks who come to you. Do you monitor
how many times they come and is it the same person all the time?
Do you use that information?
Ms Longstone: I do not think we do at the moment
and this is the point of the quarterly reporting, that that will
be an opportunity for Claire to say on a quarterly basis: we are
getting consistent queries about this aspect. This needs to be
addressed, and that will be discussed by the Directors General,
so at the minute the feedback is going to be teams and it is sort
of in the consciousness of our lawyers who have a role in the
instruments as well, but there is not a systematic way of picking
up generic problems and communicating them, and that is what we
are hoping to do.
Q32 Viscount Eccles: Could we follow
some of the guidance of the impact on secondary legislation? It
is quite a complicated matter and the people upon whom it impacts
have a different allocation of time. For example teachers. Whether
they should have a lot of time spent understanding statutory instruments
is another question but they do, they are full-time professionals,
and parents are not. The children are in a sense full-time but
they are not going to be tremendously interested in the detail
of Statutory Instruments, and indeed there are other of the stakeholders
who have to, governors, voluntary people again, with a certain
amount of time. We are very interested in how you go about making
sure that people are given the right amount of guidance about
what does this mean for them and what should they pay attention
to?
Ms Longstone: We would not expect teachers to
be spending their time reading the detail in Statutory Instruments.
I think it is really important that as a Department we do that
for all of our stakeholders. Generally speaking, if we have a
policy programme of work that is going to result in new regulations
or new statutory guidance then that programme of work would have
a communications strand, and we would work with our communications
colleagues who are central in the department but work with all
of us, on how we can then get these messages out on a need-to-know
basis, because it is really important that if you give people
too much information they do not hear any of it; they turn off.
So we do attempt to do that and importantly, by keeping the communications
function in the Department central, rather than having communications
teams in different parts of the Department, we need to make sure
that where messages are aimed at the same people at the same time
it is a coherent message that covers all of the things they are
meant to do rather than lots of different bits of paper, et cetera.
And we have systems of communicating with local authorities and
we have e-mail systems to schools, and that is about really saying:
"Here are the headlines you need to know, and behind them
this is where you can access more information if you need it".
So there is quite a lot of information. Also, sometimes the communication
with parents and young people is a local authority function as
well, so they are our intermediaries and admissions is a pretty
good example where yes, we have to be able to explain our policies
to parents but information about how admissions to schools work
in particular local authorities is a duty that is placed on local
authorities, and as a parent I know this, because I have received
one recently. When your child is in year 6 you get a very nice
brochure, and it differs from local authority to local authority,
which sets out how the admissions system works, these are the
schools that your child can go to, here are the closing dates,
this is the process, et cetera. Sometimes that communication is
happening but it is not necessarily happening from the centre
of the Department, it is part of the delivery system that is out
there.
Q33 Viscount Eccles: What sort of
feedback do you get about the level of understanding and clarity
of what everybody is supposed to be doing?
Ms Longstone: It will differ from area to area.
One of the things that came out of the Children's Fund consultation
events that I went to, and I went to an event in Leeds, was the
feedback parents were giving about what they felt they needed
was very consistent with a number of our policy developments.
I can give a particular example. Parents were saying that for
young people, which is my area, 14-upwards, we really need to
engage young people in positive activities and get them doing
things that enable them to develop skills outside school as well
as inside and yet information about what opportunities are available
and where is difficult for parents to access. That is the kind
of feedback we have received and we are going to do quite a bit
of work to try and improve on that and make it clearer and more
accessible.
Q34 Viscount Eccles: I hope you take
that on board. The point of this Committee you will understand,
will you not, is that we are very interested in the impact on
individual people.
Ms Longstone: Yes.
Q35 Viscount Eccles: However the
responsibility for conveying the guidance is delegated to others,
would you please make sure in your Explanatory Memoranda we understand
how you are going about the delivery of guidance.
Ms Longstone: Yes. That is a legitimate point.
It has been interpreted too narrowly in some cases about what
guidance we issue at the centre rather than thinking about what
you need to know.
Q36 Baroness Maddock: This is referring
to ContactPoint again. This is one of the things that affects
all the children in England and I do not know how you were intending
to enable people to know about this. I know from my own experience
that people I know, including my daughter, had no idea about this
and it is rather important. How are you getting that sort of information
out?
Ms Longstone: I do not know the detail of that
but I am very happy to write to you and let you have more details.
Q37 Chairman: Lord Crisp, I think
given the time the role of the LEA is a philosophical question
for another day. Thank you, you have been most helpful and direct.
Is there anything further that you would like to convey to us
or have you put across to us all that you would wish on your plans
for change and development?
Ms Johnston: I think so. We have found it very
helpful to be able to stand back and look at the last year and
at some of the themes that have emerged. For me, in a new position,
it is quite inspiring to think we can take this forward and help
the Committee get what it wants and at the same time look at how
the Department manages. We were grateful for the opportunity to
have looked at ourselves in preparation.
Chairman: Thank you very much. We are always
delighted to hear that, it is a winning phrase. Thank you both
very much indeed.
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