EXAMINATION
OF WITNESSES
(QUESTION NUMBERS
280-290)
Rt Hon Tessa Jowell
14 OCTOBER 2009
Q280 LORD
PESTON: I am still a bit lost
about the role of the Cabinet Office although you are doing the
best you can to tell us what you do. Lord Lyell's example is a
good example; everybody knows somehow that the anti-terrorist
legislation is being misused; there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever
that it is being called in when it does not apply. In a sense
everybody knows about it but no one seems to have responsibility
for dealing with the misuse. I do not see how you as Minister,
plus your department, can do your job unless you yourselves know
what is going on and it is not at all clear how you get to know
what is going on as it were.
Tessa Jowell: Addressing the misapplication
of legislation is a responsibility for Parliament but in turn
for the department that has responsibility. If we go back to your
central question, what is the relationship between the functions
of the centre and departmental responsibility, then the functions
of the centre are clear, as I have tried to set out: the constitutional
function, the responsibility for the civil service and the responsibility
for the good conduct of government. There are then other very
specific areas of responsibility that are held at the centre.
My ministerial team and I between us share responsibility for
the third sector, for supporting the Prime Minister in the development
of the national security report, the school of government, civil
contingency and a range of other functions that you will see published
today. In addition to that, as minister for the Cabinet Office,
I am also responsible for the Olympics, for London and for humanitarian
assistance. All of those are functions which are properly located
in the Cabinet Office, perhaps with the exception of Minister
for London, but certainly as Minister for the Olympics, Minister
for Humanitarian Assistance and Paymaster General. These are all
ministerial functions which require a very high level of bilateral
or multilateral co-ordination from the centre.
Q281 LORD
PESTON: I understand that; what
I cannot understand is the mechanism. Let us leave the Olympics
on one side, I can see that as a very straightforward job that
you have got which you do very well.
Tessa Jowell: Very straightforward!
Q282 LORD
PESTON: What I cannot see is do
you sit down every week and go through every department? You used
the word "supportive" and that word appears all the
time. Do you say, "Home Office: what are we doing this week
that supports the Home Office in what they are doing? Treasury:
the economy is in a mess, what are we doing?" For department
after department do you act supportively to find out where you
can support them, or do you wait for them to come to you—and
the last thing they are going to do is come to you as far as I
can see—and say "what can you do to help"?
Tessa Jowell: This is the role of both the Cabinet
committee discussion and the Cabinet itself. No, I certainly do
not review the top line issues for every department every week.
I am a senior member of the Cabinet and I know what is going on
as a member of the Cabinet. The Prime Minister might ask me to
work with X, Y or Z department on a particular issue but we have
a mature departmental structure and I think that is important,
that secretaries of state are responsible for their departments,
that permanent secretaries as accounting officers are responsible
for their departments. What the smooth conduct of government does
not want is something which is another layer of audit and could
be seen as meddling. The alternative view of that, I well understand,
could be: "well it might improve foresight". The volume
of effort that would go into such scrutiny would not be repaid
by identifying problems early, and where that degree of anticipation
is developed more is actually in Number 10. Remember also that
the Prime Minister has regular stocktakes with the secretaries
of state, which are intended to monitor the implementation of
policy and anticipate problems which are looming.
Q283 LORD
MORRIS OF
ABERAVON: Minister, in reply to
Lord Lyell's question you very politely reminded us that you were
not a minister in the Cabinet Office at that stage. Knowing the
facts as they are now, would you have acted differently?
Tessa Jowell: Of course with the benefit of
hindsight mistakes are identified, you think had we known then
what we know now we would no doubt have reached a different decision,
but with great respect it does not get you very far. The absolute
obligation, whether as a minister or a Permanent Secretary, is
to take decisions carefully on the basis of the best available
information and in a context that reflects the broad values and
priorities of the Government. It is incumbent on every minister
to pursue their responsibilities in that way, not driven by media
headlines or other distractions, but on the basis of an understanding
of the issue itself. It would be very hard for anyone to put their
hand on their heart and look back over the last 12 years and say
"Were there things that I could have done better? Were there
things that the government could have done better?" It would
be sheer arrogance to say that there are none.
CHAIRMAN: Minister,
you have duties in the other place at 12.00 I know, but we have
just got time for a question from Lord Rowlands and then finally
Lord Norton.
Q284 LORD
ROWLANDS: Minister, you said that
you have read quite a lot of the evidence that we have received
and you will know that we have been looking to find out how much
1997 and what has happened since 1997 has changed the role of
the Cabinet Office and changed the role of the Prime Minister's
Department. How would you characterise the changes that have occurred
since 1997? How much of a watershed is it in terms of the development
of the centre of government and how does the centre of the two
Prime Ministers since 1997 compare with that which went before?
Tessa Jowell: You have highlighted one of the
very important variables that makes a laboratory construction
of the centre of government very hard to do because the character
of the centre is very heavily defined by the phase of the electoral
cycle, so the role of the centre in 1997 was much more vigorously
interventionist. You had a government of ministers who were in
government for the first time, you had departments that were faced
with radically new policy priorities and you had a government
that was in a hurry to achieve results. Now the Government is
much more mature, you have much more self-confident departments
and self-confident ministers—that is a good thing. The role
of the centre changes in response to that and it also changes
in relation to the national climate. Obviously I have referred
to Building Britain's Future and the role of the Cabinet Office
in that. The centre for the last year to 18 months has been heavily
engaged in the impact of the economic downturn and the global
financial crisis—the Treasury, Number 10 and also the Cabinet
Office. You could almost write a 10-year story, narrative or account
of the development of the role of the centre and the role of the
Cabinet Office—the Cabinet Office in relation to Number
10, the Cabinet Office in relation to the business of Cabinet
committees, the Cabinet Office in relation to other departments—and
you would within that account capture the changing character,
priorities and dynamics of the Government.
Q285 LORD
ROWLANDS: Are you saying basically
it is the personal chemistry and the political strength or weakness
of the Prime Minister that is actually the determinant factor
in how these institutions operate and work?
Tessa Jowell: It is not the determinant and
if it becomes the determinant you create a position of weakness;
you create a position of weakness in the long-term sustainability
of policy. It is never a very good idea in government for policy
to be owned by one person; you have to have a fact of shared responsibility
across all the departments.
Q286 LORD
ROWLANDS: Is that the lesson that
has been learnt over the last 12 years?
Tessa Jowell: It is a fact that develops as
a result of the maturity of a government.
Q287 LORD
NORTON OF
LOUTH: I want to follow up the
point that you made about the centre earlier—you said the
centre was primarily Number 10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury
and you touched upon some of the relationships in relation to
Number 10 but only briefly in relation to the Treasury. Could
you just tease out a little more what the relationship is between
the Cabinet Office and the Treasury and to what extent that has
actually changed over the past 12 years?
Tessa Jowell: There is, as I was saying earlier,
this shared responsibility for public service reform and what
was the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, now the Delivery Unit,
which is based in the Treasury. It reports jointly but in fact
the real axis is with Treasury and the whole public expenditure
programme. What is the relationship? The relationship again changes
over time; in the run-up to the Budget or the pre-Budget Report,
in the context of a spending review obviously there are endless
bilateral meetings between the Chancellor, the Chief Secretary
and other secretaries of state and Number 10 will be very heavily
engaged in that exercise, and the character of the relationship
between Number 10 and the Treasury in perhaps the first five years
of a government is different from the relationship in the subsequent
period that we are in now.
Q288 LORD
NORTON OF
LOUTH: The meetings that take
place, would it be fair to characterise them as meetings of equals
or is there a hierarchy?
Tessa Jowell: At official level there is a very
high level of collaboration between the Cabinet Office and the
Treasury. This is not the stuff of political poetry but there
are meetings of the boards, both of the Cabinet Office and of
the Treasury. The Commissioning Board which co-ordinates policy
across these areas of shared interest and shared responsibility
would be a second, and then I have already referred to the fact
that although the Public Services Unit, which is responsible for
the work on public service reform, sits in the Cabinet Office
it works to the Chief Secretary, so you can see all these interconnecting
relationships which are important in making sure that the boundary
between the Treasury and Number 10, the Treasury and the Cabinet
Office, has a high level of osmosis going on all the time.
CHAIRMAN: The
last question from Lord Rodgers.
Q289 LORD
RODGERS OF
QUARRY BANK:
The Treasury has always been represented in official and ministerial
Cabinet committees; my question is, is the Cabinet Office represented
in Ministerial Cabinet committees and if not is there a possibility
that there is a move away from ministers discussing issues about
families, for example, to officials because so many matters are
solved within the Cabinet committees with so few ministers in
the Cabinet Office? Is there not a transfer away from parliamentary
government to a different kind of government altogether?
Tessa Jowell: There is a very important point
in your question and certainly I attend a very large number of
Cabinet committees, but I do not attend all 46 Cabinet committees—the
management of all my responsibilities would be impossible if I
did. This is where the machinery of government comes into play,
because the secretariat is provided by the Cabinet Office to all
Cabinet committees and I would certainly expect to be alerted
were an issue to arise in a Cabinet committee that I was not a
member of or I had not attended for some reason that I ought to
attend to. I would expect to be alerted in that way. You are right,
there is an interaction here between the machinery of government
which is the servicing of Cabinet committees, securing decisions
and disseminating those decisions and ensuring that departments
take on their responsibility for implementing those decisions,
and the degree of political oversight. The political oversight
in a way is not that the Cabinet committees are sovereign, but
they do a very important job in supporting Cabinet government
because important decisions from Cabinet committees will come
as recommendations before the whole Cabinet, but with a degree
of confidence that the arguments and the complexity of the difficulties
will have been addressed in the discussion in Cabinet committee
and will be reflected in the recommended conclusion. The three
major councils, for instance, that have been established in the
last year—the National Economic Council, the Democratic
Renewal Council and the Domestic Policy Council—I attend
the Domestic Policy Council but yesterday spent quite a lot of
time at a Cabinet committee considering House of Lords reform
which will make recommendations to the Democratic Renewal Council,
no doubt, for further consideration there before recommendations
come to the Cabinet.
Q290 CHAIRMAN:
Minister, thank you so much for coming to be with us. There are
a number of points that time has precluded us from raising and
there are others that we would like to pursue in correspondence
if we may. In the meantime thank you very much for coming.
Tessa Jowell: Thank you very much indeed and
I will be delighted to supply any further information that you
would like and also perhaps to answer the questions that time
has not allowed for.
CHAIRMAN: Thank you
very much indeed.
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