Examination of Witnesses (Questions 38-39)
Mr Phil Wynn Owen and Mr Richard Heaton
27 NOVEMBER 2007
Q38 Chairman: Could I welcome you
both and say we are very pleased to see you here. I think you
could have been accused of cheating really, having sat through
the previous session, although that is probably wise and to our
advantage as well as yours, I am sure. I am Lord Filkin. You can
see who the members of the Committee are, so if you will bear
with that I will not go into details or invite members to introduce
themselves. You probably heard what we said to the previous Department
about our interests, so we can leave that as understood because
you have heard it and do not need us to repeat it, you know where
we are coming from, and that saves your time as well as ours.
If you would kick off on the same question about describing about
each of your roles in overseeing and managing the quality of DWP's
secondary legislation.
Mr Wynn Owen: My Lord Chairman, I will begin,
if I may. I am Phil Wynn Owen. I am the Director General for Strategy
and Pensions at the Department for Work and Pensions. I have done
that job for about three years since November 2004. At official
level I am responsible both for Government pensions policy, which
includes the implementation of the Pensions Act 2004, and the
recent 2007 Act, and for the forthcoming Pensions Bill, and for
departmental wide strategy across DWP. I am also the Department's
champion for better regulation. The way all of that works in practice
is roughly as follows: we have got two policy Director Generals.
I am the one responsible for the "P" in "DWP",
pensions policy, and I have a colleague, Adam Sharples, who is
responsible for the "W", work, welfare and disability.
We ultimately have responsibility between us for policy development
at official level across the Department. In practice, what happens
when preparing a Bill or an SI is that each policy directorate,
headed by a Grade 3 Policy Director, and each division, headed
by a Deputy Director, Assistant Secretary in old speak, deals
with the issues for which they are responsible as they bring forward
items of secondary legislation, establishing that they are necessary,
desirable, consistent with government strategy, that the benefits
are proportionate to the costs and that they consult and prepare
the analysis as appropriate. They are guided not only by our departmental
lawyers, about which Richard will speak in a moment, but also
by the Better Regulation Unit who report to me, which I strengthened
this year. It has got a full-time Grade 7, SEO and a HEO. This
seeks to encourage policy makers to improve the quality of their
Impact Assessments, their guidance, to observe common commencement
dates where appropriate and to prepare intelligible Explanatory
Memoranda.
Q39 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr Heaton: My Lord Chairman, my name is Richard
Heaton. I am the Solicitor to the Department for Work and Pensions.
Like my colleague, Phil, I am a member of the Department's Executive
Team, which is what we call our Board. As the Solicitor, I head
the Department's in-house legal team. We litigate and prosecute
for the Department as well as providing a range of advisory drafting
services that you will be familiar with. As drafters we are technically
strong, and I will say a bit more about our drafting capacity
in a moment. As a Director-General in the Department I have got
a number of responsibilities beyond the legal team. I will just
mention one which may be relevant to the consolidation question.
One of my units based in Leeds provides advice and guidance to
our 20,000 or so decision-makers and their products include the
famous Social Security Blue Books or Blue Volumes—in fact,
there are Yellow Volumes and Green Volumes as well—the informal
consolidations, if you like. They also provide a decision-makers'
guide which is a compendium of case law and practice for decision-makers.
Those are public documents. I am very happy to share with the
Committee some thoughts about that process if you would like me
to later. Returning to my role in the creation of secondary legislation,
all the SIs that we produce are drafted by my team, or occasionally
commissioned by my team from external drafters. I have got Board
level responsibility for their accuracy, intelligibility, correct
use of powers and for their being drafted to the agreed timetable.
That is where my formal set of accountability ends, responsibility
for promoting SIs and policy content rests with my policy delivery
colleagues, but in practice my legal team has a role that goes
beyond the formal set of accountability and my role as well tracks
that. My Board level responsibility will include advising and
co-ordinating on formal and informal consolidation, advising on
timing, consultation requirements, publication and so on. It is
likely that I would also take Board level responsibility for identifying
and responding to systematic weaknesses if there are any in the
way we do things, in our performance in promoting and producing
SIs or driving forward the programme for improving what we do.
I should say, partly as a consequence of this Committee's inquiry,
Phil and I have agreed to present to our executive team, our Board
colleagues, in February of next year, an annual report on how
we are doing similar to the message that you were getting from
the previous witnesses. It is not something we have done before,
we are going to test it out and if it seems to make sense we will
either roll it out on an annual basis or more frequently than
that. That is something we have done as a direct response to preparing
for this Committee. I should also like to say, if I may, that
we would like to acknowledge the work that this Committee and
your colleagues on the Joint Committee have done in promoting
all sorts of changes and improvements to the way that we produce
statutory legislation and, as my colleague, Claire Johnston, said
in the previous session, responding to your Committee's questions
has been a tremendous stimulus. We look forward to engaging with
you and helping you to deliver further changes.
Chairman: That is very helpful. Undoubtedly
we will be asking you to speak in more detail about the specifics
of plans to improve policy delivery and process so I will not
go there, but I will turn to Lord Crisp.
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