THURSDAY 13 MARCH 2003

__________

Members present:

Tony Wright, in the Chair
Kevin Brennan
Annette Brooke
Mr David Heyes
Mr Kelvin Hopkins
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger
Mr Gordon Prentice
Brian White

__________

Examination of Witnesses

SIR ANDREW TURNBULL KCB CVO, Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil Service, Cabinet Office, examined.

Chairman

Can I call the Committee to order, and welcome our guest, Sir Andrew Turnbull, who is the fairly recently arrived Cabinet Secretary. We saw you as you were just beginning to get your feet under the table; now we hold you wholly accountable for what is going on. So it is a great pleasure to have you here again. Would you like to say something generally, to start with? We have got you here on a number of pretexts, we are looking at a whole range of things that come under your umbrella; so if you would like to start us off then hopefully we could get stuck into you?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Let me start with four brief points. The first I will describe as a request; now it is not for me to draft your report for you, but a request that when you come to draft the report you revisit Michael Barber's opening statement of last week, which is very important actually in setting the context, in particular, emphasising that targets are not a self-standing management process but part of a wider process to raise performance and increase accountability. He borrowed John Brown's metaphor of targets being part of the tapestry of things, I think that is a very important piece of context. The second is an observation. I have not had time to read all the transcripts of previous evidence, but in all the bits that I have read one thing comes over. I do not think anyone seriously is advocating dropping targets', no-one really has got an alternative framework to propose; so the issue which comes out of this review is how can we do things better, how can we refine targets and the way they are used going forward. The third is a proposal, which is, where do I think the next advances come. The first I will describe as in the area of validation and assurance. Is there game-playing, at worst fiddling the figures? How can we be sure that the achievements claimed in fact are valid? In my view, this is an area where the degree of scrutiny is rising very rapidly. Many of the PSA numbers are national statistics, subject to all the integrity standards, each of the series used in the targets is the subject of a technical note. The NAO will be starting its programme of validation shortly, and the Audit Commission, most notably last week, is active in this field. So that is an area which I think we can see change quite quickly. But distilling out of the discussion, I think the most fundamental issue is giving the front line a greater role in setting targets and getting more of the accountability flowing downwards rather than upwards. There are examples of good practice in this area, but I think in the next round of target-setting probably this is the area where we want to make most progress and also it is the most difficult. Fourthly, a caveat, which is, the debate on targets is still what I would call an immature one. I think you may have used that word yourself, the Chairman and Kevin Brennan raised this in your discussion with Nigel Crisp. In the world of business, one expects to meet a majority of targets but not all of them, and if they were all met you would call into question the degree of stretch and ambition. But in the political world any time they are not met is presented as a failure. We also need to recognise that, even if all targets are not met in full, nevertheless, if you compare the position in the base year with where you are now, you can see a substantial improvement in outcomes. And the dilemma is that you need stretching targets to drive better performance and drive up the degree of ambition, but if targets are stretching they will not all be met, and that is the thing that needs to be recognised. I am hoping that one of the things that come out of this inquiry is a much better understanding of all these issues; and where the performance management process as a whole, of which targets are, as I say, a part. I think that is probably what I want to say by way of general introduction.

Thank you very much indeed for that. As I say, a number of things come under your bailiwick; targets is one area that we shall talk to you about, but we shall talk about general organisation of government issues, too, I am sure. Could I ask you just one thing, to start with, which is, you mentioned this question about validation and assurance, could I relate that, just very briefly, to this infamous dossier about Iraq, which came out a few weeks ago, which many people felt had done great damage to the Government's position on the front of validation and assurance, because we know what it turned out to be. Can you just tell us how on earth that could have happened?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) A dossier was produced originally by the intelligence community, and then a document that was produced, unfortunately, I think, bearing the same name, calling itself a dossier, as opposed to a briefing. The answer is that it was not produced by the same people. I think that led people to a view that it was, in a sense, volume two of the same process, and clearly it was not.

But who validates these documents? These are important things, in the context that we are talking about, and great damage is done if we do not get this right. What quality control system was, or was not, in place to ensure - - -

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) There was no second-guessing, it was not a case where this document was produced and then submitted to someone else. It was produced in the Strategy and Communications Unit of Number 10. They produced it, and they took responsibility for it.

It was a huge mistake, was it not?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I am not going to judge; but I can understand why people thought that it was, as I say, volume two, and thereby casting doubt on volume one. They came out of two different processes.

Let us move it on a little. I take it we are about to go to war. Can you tell us just what that does to the Machinery of Government; how does the Machinery of Government go onto a war footing?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) First of all, the military are organised, in the usual, very professional way. There is then a process, now, I suppose, quite familiar. I was involved in it in 1991, but it was rehearsed again for Kosovo and Afghanistan, in effect, for developing a daily routine, the analysis of what has been happening on the ground, the intelligence and reporting. That is digested by senior officials and the issues are then distilled and taken to a meeting which the Prime Minister chairs, earlyish in the morning, not at the crack of dawn because that is when the analysis of the intelligence process is going on, and the issues of the day are then acted upon. There can be then a whole series of implications for domestic departments too; while military conflict is being prepared for, thought is being given to the post-conflict situation, which starts off from an initial position, which could be a humanitarian one, through to how Iraq is governed and reconstructed. Work is going on, on that basis, involving a large number of departments. Also, at the same time, there is all the work which my colleague David Omand is doing on counter-terrorism; we are subject to a threat, this threat has been with us for some time and will continue to be with us, but we will need to be even more vigilant over this period.

And this machinery that you are describing is ready to go?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes.

Could I ask something on the communications side, because we read reports about how the Government communications system is gearing itself up for what is going to happen, perhaps you would tell us a little bit about that? And perhaps you would tell us whether the same guarantees that we are supposed to have about the integrity of the communications system apply in war too?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The quality of the message which comes out of Government in times of war has got to be even more credible, I would say, it cannot afford to mislead people, you have got to take the country with you. I think we have passed the sort of era, like the second world war, where you can give people a very, very partial account. The world media is there, these are wars which are fought out with the media actually there on site; you cannot afford not to have a fully credible message, which reveals as much as is consistent with the good operation, the good conduct, of the war itself.

And the reports that say that there are special arrangements being made, units being set up ready to be deployed, and so on, all this, can you tell us how valid that is?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) This is the revival of the CIC, which is a unit that was mobilised for the conflict in Afghanistan; that can be remobilised in this case. But it needs to be able to both receive and transmit messages not simply to the UK public but globally, basically.

And the intention is that it will be remobilised, and is ready to go?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes.

Thank you for that. Can I ask then on just one more area, before handing over to colleagues, which is that when you were appointed, the remit, very emphatically, was to drive forward the Civil Service reform agenda, and I think we would like to know how this is going? When I read ministerial speeches these days, one by Gordon Brown recently, one by Alan Milburn - - -

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) You have read it, Gordon Brown's speech, all 11,000 words?

Indeed; and I enjoyed it, and profited greatly from it. But they all have a lot of sentences in about how we are sorting out the Civil Service. How are we sorting out the Civil Service, how are you sorting out the Civil Service?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) First of all, I am starting by sorting out the Cabinet Office, which is, in a sense, the instrument, and I have brought the six units that were there, largely operating separately, into a single command. We meet regularly now, we plan work jointly, we share projects and we have tried to avoid that sense for departments that they are being bombarded by a whole series of conflicting initiatives; therefore there is a much greater sense of purpose. The second thing I have taken further is that each of the permanent secretaries, as part of their performance arrangements, leading ultimately to the Permanent Secretary Remuneration Committee, produces a performance plan. This is in two parts, their main delivery objectives and, secondly, what they are doing to develop the capacity of their organisations and their own personal capacity, I have agreed these with all permanent secretaries, that was done in September, October. We will come back to that, probably May, June, when they write up what actually they have achieved. So a performance management system for permanent secretaries is being given more substance, more form. But we are going on to develop that for departments as a whole. We are engaging now as a group in the Cabinet Office to develop an agreement, a departmental change programme, 'performance partnerships' is the name we have given to it. What are the five or six things that are a priority for that department, starting with, have they got the right people at the top, have they got the right structures, have they got the right capability to deliver projects, is there a relationship with the various delivery agents they work with, whether it is the police, local government, quangos, or whatever. Are those things in good working order. I have done quite a lot of work on revamping the number of senior teams, Home Office, Lord Chancellor's Department, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, DEFRA. Also, we have done quite a lot of work on what we need to do to improve our success rate on major projects. Probably about three-quarters of the major projects actually are IT projects, but some of them are construction projects. We have agreed a set of principles that people should follow, and we have undertaken quite a lot of work to bring in or develop people with the skills to take those major projects forward. We were given a presentation on the history by Peter Gershon. Based on US experience, about a quarter of IT projects succeed, in the sense of being on budget and on time; about half are late, or overrun, or do not deliver their full functionality; and another quarter fail so badly they get dropped. Now, if we say we have got 40 major projects, are we prepared really to contemplate writing off ten of them and succeeding fully with only another ten? The answer is, no, we are not. So we are making a major effort to raise that success rate. The other thing I would indicate is, we have continued with the programme of recruiting talented people from outside. The open competitions are running at a rate of about 200 a year, and about 120 of those, i.e. about 60 per cent of those 200, have gone to outsiders, and about 40 have been won by existing civil servants. There is more I could say, but that is a flavour.

Yes, I am just trying to get a sense; you see, we see Cabinet Secretaries come and go, here, and they all tell us how they are reforming the Civil Service, and the phrase 'reform of the Civil Service', it is a bit like 'the Middle-East peace process', it seems to go on just endlessly into the distance?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not talk in terms of reform of the Civil Service, actually. I talk in terms of reforming public services, because many of the services that, the Government is committed to improving, ultimately are delivered by a front line which is not even in the Civil Service. And so you have to look at the total process, right from the genesis of the policy in Whitehall through to how it is delivered by the police, in schools, GP practices; therefore it is transforming the public services, rather than reform of the Civil Service, as an institution, which is properly the focus of my work.

Yes, I accept that, although, of course, it was the Civil Service that was very much the focus of the reform agenda that you were given and why you bring in people to help you do that?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes. If you asked me in what way have I taken on, for instance, my inheritance and developed it - - -

That is what I am asking?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Okay. The first is a recognition of a different focus, which is the wider public services, so we have got to spend a lot more time on these relationship questions and not simply on questions that are internal to the Civil Service-pay, how we recruit, are all the important things, but we have got to move beyond that. And the second is the embedding of the delivery culture, and getting people really to buy into it and not start off with, I suppose you have a kind of process where, initially, people say, "What has all this got to do with me? I know it's going to happen, but I'm pretty apathetic about it," through to "I know it's got to happen, I want it to happen; help me, give me the skills that I need," which is where I think a lot of us are at now, through to "I believe in all this, and I'm confident I can make it happen." We have moved a long way, I think, in getting the PSAs as the focus of departmental activity. If you ask how are different departments' business plans constructed, how are the responsibility plans of individual business units, right the way down to people, they feed back to the PSAs. That is the dominant focus, and that is quite a big change.

Thank you for that. I am sure colleagues will pursue that with you. Just very, very finally, to that, again, when you were setting up your Reform Strategy Team, part of their terms of reference was to work up a Civil Service Bill. Now, again, when your predecessor used to come to see us, he would tell us about the imminent arrival of this Bill, and he would give us timetables whereby things were going to happen, and this went on month in, month out, year in, year out, and I just wonder how this proclamation in the terms of reference has been converted into progress?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) We have resolved one issue, which is a point raised in your report on "These Unfortunate Events", the whole question of discipline, who is responsible for that. The Phillis Report on GICS is looking at a second issue, which is the proper role of special advisers in media work. We are waiting for Wicks, and also we are waiting for you, you are drafting a Bill. The question is, why is it not on the legislative programme; the answer comes down to six priorities. I think there is, even for the Cabinet Office, something which is higher up, in terms of our priorities, which is a Bill on civil emergencies, which is about putting right something that is seriously out of date, rather than a Bill which is giving the final touches to a system that, by and large, we understand. We have codes, we have a Ministerial Code, a Civil Service Code, a Special Adviser Code, and we police those. Ministers have to judge what priority do they give to drawing all that together, as opposed to all the other things that come in the legislative programme. At the moment, these other things have come higher up.

But the commitment to the Bill is still there, and it is continuing?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) There is still a commitment there, yes.

Chairman: Thank you very much. I guess we shall talk more of those kinds of things.

Kevin Brennan

Just picking up something that the Chairman asked about, in terms of the preparations for war, would that include a paper being put to Cabinet on the Crown Prerogative and its meaning, and so on?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) No, I do not think so. The Crown Prerogative is the same as it has always been. There is a recognition that whatever are the Government's legal powers also it has to have legitimacy, and so all that it does has got to be (a) legal and (b) has got to command political support. Hence the various undertakings that have been given about debates.

And has the Government had advice that what it is planning is legal?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) It is recognised that no civil servant can be asked to do anything unlawful, and ministers recognise that absolutely; the military are in the same position. And work is going on now to set out what that basis of law is, and that is something that is going on at this moment.

As we stand, currently, if, for example, over the weekend our military forces went into action in Iraq and there had not been any further resolution in the United Nations, are you confident, as a civil servant, and as the senior civil servant in the country, that you would be acting legally?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I am confident that neither I nor anyone working for me will be put in the position of acting unlawfully. And that is an undertaking which, when they next debate it, Parliament is going to want that assurance about as well. It is going to need to know that what it is voting for is legal; the military need that, and, based on the same view, the Civil Service needs it. It is recognised that that is an absolute requirement, that there is a legal basis for any action that is taken.

And, as we sit here now, are you confident - as we sit here now - that that is the case?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes, I am confident. What I am not competent to do is explain the full legal basis for the interaction of one resolution with another resolution, it would need an expert to do that, but I am absolutely confident that this undertaking which civil servants can expect will be fulfilled.

Chairman

Sorry, Kevin; and the advice from the Government's legal officers - - -

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) That will form the basis of it, yes.

Yes; it forms the basis of what you are saying to us now?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I am confident, yes, that this will be based on good advice from my Government's law officers.

Kevin Brennan

Can I ask, just on what you said about targets, on the dilemma which you said rightly that I had raised previously, about how targets will be used in business and in government, just one question on that, and that is, would you have any suggestions about how you would resolve that dilemma?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I think we will resolve the dilemma by recognising that each individual target holder strives to produce their target. But when you are looking at the totality of the report you do not brand as a failure something that, in fact, may be achieving 80, 90 per cent of targets. You look at, also, where has this process, of which targets are a part, brought us, in terms of, for example what is the standard at Key Stage 2, what are the standards of GCSE, have those categories of crime gone down. You look at the outcomes at the point that you are making this judgment, compared with the way they were before, and you do not rely exclusively on the comparison between where you are and where you hoped to be, in terms of the target. You have got to bring the total picture into play.

I will not pursue that myself, because I know that colleagues want to ask you a bit more about targets. You probably know we had the new Ombudsman in front of us last week, and we had quite an interesting session, and one of the things we asked her about was this whole area of ministerial gifts. And there have been some further press reports indicating that, following some of our discussions last week, a decision has been taken to publish ministerial gifts over £140 in value, backdated to April 2001. Is that the position?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Broadly, that is the position, but I think I will disappoint you by saying that it was not following your discussion, this was a decision that was taken earlier.

Right. When was the decision made?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) However, if you want to take the credit for it, that is alright.

No, no.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Shortly; and the document is being prepared as we speak. Shortly, we will produce precisely that.

When did you decide to do that?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) In the last few weeks.

Can you explain to me why April 2001 was chosen as the appropriate date to backdate it to, rather than, for example, back to May 1997, or 1998, or 1999?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The question is how much time and effort you want to put into reconstructing the record. Now you may say the record should have been kept, and I think basically this is taking it back to the beginning of this Parliament rather than the one before.

I notice you have got some in-flight refuelling there; do you want to avail yourself of that, while we are at it?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) It says, June 2001, election, underlined; in other words, it is saying we will start from this Parliament. Basically, it is an agreement about how we go forward really, and then getting good practice.

But do you think that is a sufficiently strong basis on which to choose a date, if I were to come along and make a request, for example, or ask for a judicial review of your decision on its reasonableness and logic of why you chose that particular date, do you think the two reasons you have given, one, that there was an election at that time, and, secondly, that that is probably all you can spare the time to do?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) That is always a possibility. In addition, there are two things to come out; one is, we are to produce this list, and then there is the Ombudsman's report. If the Ombudsman says, "I think this is unsatisfactory," then obviously you are in one situation. If she has taken the view that this is a reasonable response, and, what is more, entrenches some good practice going forward, then we are in a different world.

Do you have any idea what sorts of gifts of a value of over £140 ministers tend to get from foreign governments, or businessmen, and so on, have you seen a list of any of these?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Most of these come to either the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary. I think you will find there are remarkably few coming to anyone else. It can be anything, it can be art, jewellery or books, all sorts of things, I do not think there is any one way of capturing what they could be.

As I understand it, if they are over that value, if the minister does not want to pay personally to keep them then you have to do something with them; so what happens to them all?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Most of them, if they are very valuable items, are retained by the department.

There was this case, was there not, of John Major, when he was given a horse by the Turkmenistan Government. It was last seen at the dog-handlers agency of the Ministry of Defence at Melton Mowbray, I understand; do you know if it is still there?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I have no idea. This illustrates the dilemma, that you are given gifts, and these are gestures of friendship, and you have to treat them respectfully, you cannot - - -

Kevin Brennan: Send it to the knackers-yard, no.

Chairman

Or ill-treat it?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) In answer to that, I do not know whether that story is true, I am just taking it as given.

Kevin Brennan

One of the reasons we were told previously that there was a problem perhaps, or an embarrassment, about revealing these gifts was it could be embarrassing politically to the Government, if they come from certain businessmen, and so on, or possibly even politically embarrassing to foreign governments, if perhaps their gift was not as good as had been given by the Turkmenistan Government?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) We are going to list them; so I think we have concluded that this is something that we are able to do.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

May I ask you about the e-Envoy; is he on target to achieve his targets by 2005?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes, I think he is. There are two parts to his target; one is getting something like 700 services online by 2005. Douglas Alexander, an answer in PQ, said that, on the basis of the last survey, we are up to 54 per cent. That was in the autumn. We are moving on, so we are probably round about the 60 per cent mark, but we will have to wait for that figure until we get to the next survey. So we are moving on pretty steadily. The second is the change that was made to this target in SR2002. I must emphasise that there are two things; one is availability of these things, and the other is usage, and we have identified about ten major areas where we want to concentrate and drive up the level of usage.

Because, last year, Mr Pinder was on an away day and he said that his feeling was that they would not have, and I will not say exactly what he said but, a chance of hitting the targets in 2005. He did go on to make the point that, in fact, of course, he was thinking of leaving in 2004, so perhaps it was not such a problem. Do you know if that is the course?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) We are working on the basis of getting up to more or less full coverage by 2005. Now squeezing out the last 10 per cent is always the difficult bit in these things, but that remains the commitment.

Is Mr Pinder under contract?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes, he is.

Is he going in 2004; do you know when he is due, under his contract, because it is quite a tricky question?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) His present contract runs till April 2004.

So he will be well gone if it is not quite right; you will be here, of course?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I will be here, yes, and I am his boss.

It will be nice to see you again. If the Government does not get these targets, this was something that you said actually, that you did not want to have great turf wars, I seem to remember, when you came here you said "The last thing I want to do is spend the next three years refereeing turf wars, that would be absolute misery." I agree with you there. Do you think that the e-Envoy, because of what is happening, is in the middle of a turf war?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) No. We have a better understanding now, I think, of the role over the next two or three years, in respect of some of the things. The responsibility for standards and infrastructure, there is a continuing UK online campaign, in a sense, to get the country UK-enthused, and increasingly being directed to the people that commercial outlets are not reaching. There is work on a project known as 'Delivering the Promise', otherwise known as 'dot p', standardising websites. The next is the EGDP programme, which is the work in the ten major areas, which I can come to in a minute. They are working on a project which they call the 'Online Government Store'. Now this is the idea that if you are a student, elderly person, a traveller or motorist, you can come into electronic space and then there is something that says, "All the services we offer for you, irrespective of the department that they are offered by, can be found in that space." Similarly, they have responsibilities for the e-Government gateway, which is the process of getting validation of your identity, which can be used in repeat applications, so you are not constantly re-identifying yourself to Customs, the Passport Office, Revenue. They do work on e-Democracy. Finally there is also some work on security and resilience. So they have got a very major programme.

Can I bring you back to turf wars, because there are changes in the Delivery Unit, they have gone off to the Treasury, except for one person.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Initially, except for one person.

I think they would rather have stayed in the Cabinet Office.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) No, he has a room over there.

He has got two rooms?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes.

Ah, he is a dual-roomed person; how very nice for him. So, coming back to this; yes, that is interesting, I did not know that, actually, because I thought he was going to stay at the Cabinet Office but actually he is going between the two?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes. His principal office will be - - -

Number 10?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) No; in 1 Horseguards.

Right. Coming back to the turf wars, because it does seem to me there are massive changes within the Cabinet structure, is this you, are you moving things around, are you saying, "We want to shift them out to the Treasury," or, the e-Envoy, are his staff saying the same?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) They are still at Stockley House.

Are they going up or down, what are the numbers doing, in there?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The numbers actually are coming down, but, of the various delivery units, e-Envoy is still the largest, it still spends a large amount of money. So the idea of its being massively contracted, there were some reports of that in The Independent, are wrong; it is the largest of the units, spending about £14 million next year.

I know that other colleagues want to talk about the funding; but, if that is the case, are there changes within the Cabinet Office on this, so that you are trying to stop the turf wars, there were turf wars, are you total supremo?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I said it would be a nightmare; well, it has not been a nightmare, because it has been possible to get a good understanding of what each of these units is there to do. There were one or two projects which I thought were duplicating one another, but we have sorted those out. So, by and large, each of the delivery units has a clear understanding of what it is doing, and, in some cases, for example, the Prime Minister's efforts to reduce the bureaucracy which one part of the public sector inflicts on another, we are running as a joint project between the Office of Public Service Reform and the Regulatory Impact Unit. So, far from it being turf wars, actually we have got people working together. Now this move of the Delivery Unit to the Treasury is very significant, because when the Delivery Unit was set up, and I was in the Treasury at the time, the Treasury was very apprehensive about it, that it would create a parallel set of targets, for example. Would it create pressures for more spending? Now what has happened is that when the targets were reset and re-expressed in SR2002 the Delivery Unit was part of that process, so there is no difference about the targets and the objectives we are all working to. They have now agreed a kind of share-out between them, those PSA's where the Delivery Unit is in the lead and those where a Treasury expenditure team is in the lead. The idea that the Chancellor has stolen this off Number 10 is completely wide of the mark. What we have done is, because the purpose that they are engaged in coincides, we have come to the conclusion it does not matter actually where they operate, because they are not in competition. You locate them where it is most efficient to locate them.

That was not my point; it is interesting you went down that line, because that was not actually what I was thinking about. Certainly, you have opened a suspicious vein in me again now, that they were not stolen. The reason I was trying to go down this line is that you have sent us another organogram, which seems to be slightly more streamlined than the last one we had. You set that up and you are happy that you can deliver the PSA target system within that, such as the e-Envoy, using that model?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes. The previous one, I think, was representing that period between the election of 2001 and the reshuffle of July 2002, when the Deputy Prime Minister's Office was also inside the Cabinet Office. He has gone now and taken several of the units that he was responsible for, like the Regional Co-ordination Unit, the Social Exclusion Unit, and brought them together in a proper department. Now it is possible to define fairly clearly what are the purposes of the Cabinet Office, and, by and large, we do not have any units in it that do not serve one or other of those purposes, which is why now it is possible to draw a reasonably accurate, clear organogram. Also, we have two ministers, we have got a reasonable understanding of those subjects which report through to Gus Macdonald, and you are seeing him next week, those which go to Douglas Alexander, and those which go directly through to the Prime Minister.

Chairman

When we had Michael Heseltine here, a long time ago, he said, "Cabinet Office, it's a bran tub," he said, "always was, always will be." You have sorted out the bran tub, and now you have given some clarity?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I have made it a lot clearer. I would not say I have sorted it out absolutely, but it is a lot clearer than it has been for a long time.

Brian White

Your target we talked about, which is the e-Government target, seems to me to be a classic example of where you needed to set a target to galvanise change, but actually then to take that change through to delivery the target gets in the way. And how do you deal with that issue, because, if you are going to achieve the target, the temptation is to put everything just as a web page, but actually to achieve delivery you have got to re-engineer the management processes that pull behind it; so how do you deal with that actually?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) By adjusting, or refining, developing the target, that was what we did in 2002.

The charge will be, you have missed the target?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) What we did was leave the existing target, which is based on availability, in place and then add this second part to it, I cannot remember the exact words, about increasing usage in the major services. So both of those are now running; and as we get to more or less universal coverage the emphasis will switch to the usage that takes place in the major service areas; and it seems to me quite a sensible way. We would be accused of a lack of transparency, or dodging our accountability, if we dropped one completely and just switched over to the other; what we are doing is running them in dual harness. And then I can see a time when the emphasis will switch, as you get to achieve universal coverage. Then you put all your effort into driving up usage.

That is a much more difficult thing to get across, of course, but I am interested in some statistics that came out at the end of last year, which were saying that fewer than 3 per cent of the population regularly use government websites to access public services, and in their sample not a single person over 65 or from social groups D and E said they used the Internet regularly to access government services. So what are you doing about tackling who uses it, as opposed to the availability of it?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not know about the particular figures, but we accept the view that the usage of government services is lagging behind the use of the Internet in commercial life. That was the theme of the Prime Minister's e-Summit, so basically we are accepting that as a problem. There are two ways of dealing with it, and one is, you have to make the services that are available easily available and accessible, and that is this process of trying to group them in a series of clusters, so if you are elderly there is a website that brings together the information you need, whether they are coming from DWP about benefits, or health, or help with transport, or whatever. But also effort is needed to identify the groups where access is low, and that is where you target your campaigning effort. So the next UK online campaign will be not simply a global thing, appealing to everyone. Large numbers of people in the last four or five years have gone onto the Internet and are moving steadily over to broadband, you need to work steadily with inner-city areas, the elderly, whatever, and that is recognised increasingly in the way that campaign is being structured.

You mentioned earlier the key role of the PSAs and it has had a limited effect in achieving the kind of cultural change that you are looking for.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Did you say a limited change?

In my view, it has had a limited effect, it has had a significant benefit but it has not yet achieved that fundamental cultural change. Is not the problem that while we still allocate money to a departmental silo we will not get that change?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Amongst some of this, it includes people in the Civil Service and its agencies, police commanders, headteachers, I think there is increasing buy-in to the idea that there are certain objectives and they work towards them. So, setting out this idea of a kind of J-curve of the move from disbelief or apathy through to full commitment, I think we have moved quite a long way through that process.

But do you accept there is still a long way to go actually to getting the money related either to a particular project or to a particular outcome, that money is still related to an input?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Increasingly, targets are specified in terms of outcomes, there are far fewer targets in terms of, "We will set up this body," or "We will increase the number of teachers," or "We will spend this amount of money," through to "We want to improve coronary heart disease, cancer outcomes, hospital waiting times," and so on.

I have got a couple of questions on the Ombudsman, which related to Ann Abraham from last week. One is that the Government promised the reform of the ombudsman system as a whole, through Collcutt, and very politely turned down my request to assist you, through a Private Member's Bill. Where is the Cabinet Office in terms of coming forward with the reform of the ombudsman system?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not know, actually; really I am waiting for the report. This is a subject that is on my 'to do' list, rather than that I am actually right on the case at this moment.

One of the other things that has come to the fore recently is that, now that the taboo has been broken that ministers do not actually reject an ombudsman's finding, that they always accept it, it seems to be that more and more ministers now seem to challenge the ombudsman's findings; is that worrying you?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I am not sure that there has been a taboo. I seem to remember a case in the Department of Transport about compensation. I do not think this is the first time that a recommendation has been rejected. I would be surprised.

If you are actually going to achieve this transformation of public services that you have set out, one of the things that will hold it back is the competence of individual civil servants or particular sections, and we have had reports from the Ombudsman, something like the Immigration and Nationality Department, where they sent 5,000 cases in one day to the appeal authority and did not even have an index of what those cases were. What are you doing actually about the competence of civil servants and Civil Service departments?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) There is work done to improve the training of civil servants; there is a lot of training at the point where people first come into the Service, but we are increasing the amount of effort that we put in all the way through people's careers, and we are relating more of that to certain delivery capabilities. But, secondly, and this is illustrated by the IND case, this may have actually very little to do with the competence of individual civil servants, as opposed to the system in which they work. And one of the things that has happened is that the IND has worked in conjunction with the Delivery Unit to improve issues of process. I will give you another example, which is the Street Crime Initiative. Lots of people working, very competent people, but not working well as a system. And one of the results of the Prime Minister's intervention in that area was to get work done on what is the role of all the players down that chain, from the police on the streets arresting; the Crown Prosecution Service bringing offenders to court; the courts themselves; probation; the correction services, and whatever. And you can make a huge amount of progress simply by improving the system in which people operate, as well as raising their individual skills. Certainly we have got to do both.

Chairman: Thanks for that. I think Gordon Prentice would like to continue this line of questioning.

Mr Prentice

I wonder if I can ask you, Sir Andrew, to tell us about the morale of the Civil Service; is it good, is it bad, or what? It is not a trick question.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) If you ask of the morale of the Civil Service, my experience is, you get very different arguments. If you say, "Do you like your job?" you get a very, very high score. "Do you like the colleagues you work with; do you like the unit you work in?" you can get some very, very high scores. And the further you move away from that to the point of saying, "Do you like the Head of the Civil Service?" or whatever, unless that unit relates directly to you, the poorer the score you will get. People like to succeed and feel that they are making a difference and making progress, and there are large numbers of areas where that is the case; but also feeling that they are being resourced now with increasing amounts of money, and so that alibi, you know, "We'd like to help you but we just haven't got the money to do it" is being removed. So I think people feel that this is a system that is developing. They can see large numbers of areas where the outcomes that they are working on are improving. On the other hand, there are a lot of people still working under a lot of pressure. Working with the public gets more difficult all the time, people are more demanding, rightfully so, over time, probably better educated, ready to argue the toss, exert their rights. So that side of working with the public gets more difficult. But, overall, I think people feel that this is a system that is moving forward.

What about the people at the very top, the permanent secretaries, because I have in front of me here a recent piece in The Times that talks about "bonfire of the mandarins" and that you, not you, but permanent secretaries and the top people, are all going to be subjected to rigorous psychometric testing?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I think this is a derivative piece from a piece that appeared two days earlier in the FT, which was the originator of this story.

Is it true though?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Not quite, no. When DEFRA was set up, it was a department set up in some sense out of crisis, and it recognised that the new structure gave the department a new start. They recognised that the performance of their middle managers, as a group needed to be improved. So they have instituted a system which applies to roughly all Grade 5s who go through a process of identifying their competences, 360-degree reporting. This is then when the story starts to go wrong. What is the purpose of this? The purpose is to identify one of three outcomes. What is the training development that this officer needs; secondly, in some cases, there are people who are very good but are in the wrong job. They are specialists and they like being specialists and they are good at being specialists, so you reorganise them in a different way. Or, thirdly, there are some people to whom we say, "Regretfully, we don't think you contribute to the department," and you get into a discussion about severance. Now that is the minority. The first category is the most important, which is developing the people that you have got. The story was written up as though it was entirely about category number three. It was rewritten in The Times a few days later.

We are talking about top civil servants doing these exercises, such as prioritising what is in their in-tray. If I were the Permanent Secretary in DEFRA, I would find that a bit demeaning, I suppose?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not know; it depends how it was done.

"Would you please prioritise what is in the in-tray;" would that make a difference?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I would not describe the assignment in that way. First of all, you are working from the way it was written up, not necessarily how actually it was being developed in the department. But this process, particularly at this level, roughly Grade 5, is the point in the Civil Service where people begin to exercise significant management responsibility for the first time. Lots of departments have recognised it. Certainly it was true of the Treasury that we do not do enough to equip people for that transition, for that step up in responsibilities. And the DEFRA exercise is probably the most extensive of these kinds of exercises, but you will find similar programmes in DTI, the Treasury is working on one similar. It is not unique to DEFRA.

Was it your decision to bring Faraday Partnership into DEFRA, or was it Margaret Beckett's, did she have any role in this?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) It was certainly a decision of the DEFRA Management Board.

Well she sits on that, obviously?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes, well not necessarily sits, at meetings, month by month, but I assume that that was agreed with her, and indeed this article was claimed to be.

Why was it necessary to go out to the Faraday Partnership and not to use the in-house expertise that you must have in the Civil Service to do this kind of work?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I am not sure, necessarily, that we have the expertise in the quantity that we need it. It is a very large programme.

So we have got the DTI, DEFRA, you will actually go sequentially through all the departments doing this exercise; is that the idea?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) By and large, they will tailor it to their own requirements, rather than having this imposed. I think that gives more commitment and buy-in to it, but a lot of departments will run similar programmes.

I am interested in performance-related pay and how you motivate top people, and in your latest document, which we all have in front of us here, it talks about new pay systems to sharpen team and individual performance. Is it causing any problems in the Civil Service that some people are being brought in from outside, and you acknowledge this is happening, who are on monster salaries, and working alongside people who are on the traditional Civil Service scales; is that an issue?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) It is an issue, but one of the features of the new SCS system is that we are establishing pay ranges that are quite large, and under the old system we had these large ranges but, by and large, people complained that they never made any progress up, you could work for ten years and you made ground only about a quarter of the way up the scale. The new system is seeking to make it possible to make progress up to a certain specified target point and make a reality of that. So we have the consolidated increases up the scale that are significantly bigger than the increase in the scale itself. So, the pay of individual senior civil servants has gone up on average by, say, 4_ per cent, compared with the increase in the scale by, say, 2_ per cent. In other words, we have closed a bit of the gap between ourselves and the market. Nevertheless, we are still bringing in people, there are several people in the Service who are paid more than me.

That was my next question.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not find that a problem. If it became a very, very kind of widespread problem, we would have to deal with it. We are I think, in a phase where there are certain market skills, particularly really good IT managers, project managers and finance directors, which are scarce skills. Also they are not available in the numbers we want inside the Civil Service. I think there is a recognition that it is sensible to go out and acquire those skills and pay what you need to pay to get them.

I recall, a few weeks ago, that the Lord Chancellor got a whopping great pay rise because his pay was linked to the Lord Chief Justice, I think, and the Lord Chief Justice's pay was linked to yours, am I right?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I think the problem was that the Lord Chief Justice's pay was not linked to mine. For good reasons, it is thought inappropriate that judges are in a world of performance pay; who then is to judge the judges? They are on spot scales. In a world where the people that they are roughly comparing themselves with have performance pay but they have a spot points, over time their pay will fall behind our pay. Then every so often there is a jump, and this year, for example, the judiciary are getting the second stage of a kind of catch-up increase. Now this process can go on indefinitely, having these periodical catch-up increases. However, the SSRB decided it needed to bring some kind of order or system to this. It is looking, as part of its next year's review, at how you achieve some degree of equity between civil servants who are on performance pay and judges who are not, so they do not have this feeling of being left behind and then taking a lurch every three or four years.

I understand that. Can I just move track completely now and ask a couple of questions about targets. You said in your opening statement that you wanted to give the front line more responsibility for setting targets, and I am interested in how this works in a devolved Britain. Because you are responsible for outcomes across the United Kingdom, and yet we have a system in Wales now, with the devolved administration there, which is pretty sharply diverging from practice in England, where we are still locked onto targetry; the Welsh are ditching that, are they not, in large measure?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not know whether they are ditching it. Certainly in the devolved services they can develop different ways of working, and in Wales and Scotland indeed that is the case. And the Delivery Unit operates primarily on the English departments, and then, by a kind of transfer of best practice, that gets translated into Scotland and Wales, rather than any sort of formal jurisdiction.

Annette Brooke

Would you still describe the Senior Civil Service as a gentleman's club?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I have never described it as a gentlemen's club. I think I know where you got this from. There was an article, which someone has got off the website, which had some piece about me, and then someone else described it as a gentleman's club. It is not a phrase I have used. However, I accept fully that we have a duty to make progress towards our diversity targets and we are making progress, but we are not there. A gentleman's club is not quite the right characterisation; by comparison with commercial life, our gender balance, for example, is better but it is not satisfactory, it does not meet yet the objectives we have set ourselves.

What steps are you taking actually to achieve the objectives?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The first is over recruitment. In the last few years, the graduate recruitment now has as many women as men, but that takes you some way back in the pipeline. Then there is the issue of women who lose a few years by taking time out. How do you ensure that, their careers in the Service, they catch up, that they do not lose time? I would not have thought we have been as good at that as we should have been. We can try to be more effective in ways in which we offer part-time working, the kind of models of part-time working, all sorts of ways of doing it.

Do you do that?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) We do. Also we can harness technology, in the sense that now we have secure modems which, effectively, allow people to work on the same material at home as in the office. This is not just useful for men who want to work all day and all night but actually is a great boon to people that want to work, say, four days but spend only three days in the office.

Can I just ask you, is there a uniform policy across all departments, in terms of trying to change the balance, and do you have departments which have a particularly low ratio of female to male?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The target for the SCS is one for the SCS as a whole, and most departments simply have taken that and made it their own departmental target. So there is variation. The MoD, maybe for historical reasons. Maybe it will be always have a lower proportion of women than elsewhere, because someone has got to be lower than the average, but even they are accepting that this is something that needs to change.

Also, if we look at people with disabilities, there seem to be a few issues in terms of how many people are being employed; have you got further plans in that direction?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes. Of the three targets, it is possibly the most difficult. We have made some progress, but we are trying to get the SCS from 1.5 to 3 per cent, and we are only 1.7 per cent, so we have still got some way to go. But we have our various programmes, and there is a thing called the 'bursary scheme' which is to help people with disabilities, try to find out what is the nature of the disability, what is the particular special help that they need.

Would you say that you are leading or lagging in relation to private industry, as far as people with disabilities are concerned?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I think, if you take the average, we are probably better. But I am sure that you will find the best private sector employers probably are ahead of us, and that is what we should be aspiring to, rather than the average.

It is good to see leadership. Obviously, you have programmes for ethnic minorities; are you making progress there?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) We are making progress there. Partly it is a question of recruitment, but, if you take the Civil Service as a whole, it recruits people from the ethnic minorities more or less in proportion to the population as a whole, but this is very heavily skewed towards the junior grades, so a lot of the people that we want to bring on actually are with us already. And I think we recognise that we need special programmes to identify people with the talent, to give them special help. There is a Cabinet Office programme which people from ethnic minorities join. They give them some additional training, they give them coaching and a mentor. Increasingly, a number of departments have set up their own schemes in parallel to this, to supplement them. The other feature is this whole question of outreach, going out to schools and universities beyond the traditional recruiting grounds. We have a summer placement programme, where people come in from ethnic minorities and they work during the summer vacation. Now we are beginning to see progress. We have had two people who came on this programme, saw the Civil Service, saw it in a completely different way from the way they had before, then applied, and have got in. And I think this is something that really I would like to deliver up a good deal more.

Can I refer perhaps just particularly to the women's situation. There have been some rather high-profile cases in the private sector, and in the City in particular, even the Stock Exchange, I think, of women having difficulties with their male colleagues, or their male colleagues having difficulties with them, and perhaps culminating in official complaints. Do you have any issues of official complaints at a fairly high level in the Senior Civil Service about how women feel they are treated?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Not at the permanent secretary level. I think we get on pretty well, actually. My women colleagues give as good as they get, and they are very good colleagues. We have not had such a case; it is possible we could. There was a famous case in Australia, you know. If it can happen there, it can happen here, but so far it has not. But I am not going to say we can never get into a position where on a gender basis there were some serious professional difficulties; but it has not happened recently.

I think you did say, earlier on, that one of your early tasks actually was working on the culture, so is that an aspect that you have been working on?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes. Going back to Treasury experience, we had a programme of compulsory training on diversity awareness. Gordon Prentice may think we should do this all in-house, but, anyway, we hired some consultants, and they came in and illustrated, through re-enacting a number of workplace situations, how people can make assumptions about people, often unwittingly give offence. I think people have benefited quite a lot from that.

Chairman

Thank you for that. Why are the figures for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on diversity so appalling and so out of line with the rest of government; is that a cultural problem?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) There is a cultural problem. There is a career problem, because of moving people around all over the world and it is quite difficult to move two partners, whether it is men or women, but it has been done. People have found ways of moving both partners, but in a world in which both partners increasingly are working, it is more difficult. There is also a question of culture. Remember the event when they recalled all the Ambassadors. The Prime Minister came and addressed them. There was a question from the floor from one of the women there, expressing the view that more needed to be done, and Michael Jay will fully admit that more needs to be done.

When we had some leading, in fact, the leading, public sector head-hunters here, the other day, they said, in passing, that they had noticed that routinely now, in a range of public organisations, when they ran a recruitment process and a man and a woman came through at the end, broadly comparable, they were appointing women. Do you think that practice is one which the Civil Service should adopt, or does it raise difficulties for you?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) They were saying that, we, in the Civil Service?

No. They were saying they had noticed, in a number of public bodies that they were recruiting for, that it had become the routine practice now, when you had a man and a woman come through a recruitment process and they were broadly of the same standard, routinely now the bodies were appointing the woman. And we tested that argument out with Dame Rennie Fritchie, a week or two ago, on the merit test, and she promised to go away and think about it, and I wondered what you thought about it?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Well I think I will wait for the evidence, actually. I do not immediately recognise it as happening. It may be their perception, it may be it is right. Certainly there is no instruction. On the other hand, there is an objective to increase the representation of women on public bodies to 40 per cent by 2004/2005. So it is the case that you have to look hard and make sure that, if you are recruiting, say, three board members to replace people who are retiring, the field that you get has an adequate representation of women in it, otherwise you are not going to be able to make any progress towards this objective.

So it would be perfectly proper to give preference to a woman at the end of a recruitment process, in order to increase the representation of women?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The discussion I had with Rennie Fritchie in the case I was involved in was, if this is a body where representativeness is part of the business that it is in, you can specify that you have got to recruit people who are representative. Now gender is one of the dimensions of this, but not the only one; it could be that you were looking also for people who are representative geographically. But I think her argument was, "If you're going to do that, it has to be part of the specification," so that you are recruiting against a known standard and known objective, for a known purpose.

Sorry to pursue this, just to finish it off. Is representativeness part of the business that the Civil Service is in?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) That is why we have the targets. We believe in diversity. There is a kind of business case for diversity, that we have got to get talent from where we can get it; but also there is a kind of legitimacy case, that we serve the public, are paid for by the public, so we cannot appear to be an organisation that they recognise, they just think, is completely different.

Mr Hopkins

It is a rare opportunity to ask questions of someone at the highest level of government, at the heart of government, so I would like to ask an important general question. When I read documents and speeches with words like 'reform, partnership and modernisation, strategic focus, scrutiny', whatever, I do not understand this, it sounds like Orwellian new-speak to me, and I want to know what really it is all about. Is this really simply a disguise for a hard ideology, to which our Government is committed, at every level, and which would not really be very popular with the population if it were explained in simple terms?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) No. I think, fundamentally, it is about improving public services and building public services around the people for whom they are being provided, and not in the interests of the people who provide them. Now that is a very noble purpose, there is nothing hard-nosed managerial about that. Some of the methods you use in order to get to that objective, business plans and targets and monitoring, and so on, are highly managerial, but the objective is far from it. It is about quality of service, it is about equity, there are some lofty ideals in there.

I may say that I do not really accept that. What seems to come out of this, the whole direction of government over a couple of decades, is breaking up the public services into units, marketising, privatising, and moving towards a world where democratic government and democratic control, if you like, of society, in any sense, is being severely diminished. Is that fair?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) No, not really. We have been through a phase in the eighties and the nineties where the debate was, what are the boundaries of the public sector, what are those services that should be public services and what can be passed over to the private sector, so that those organisations deliver these services direct to the public, possibly the regulator overseeing it, eg electricity, gas, water, transport. A whole host of them, including some pure market things like British Airways. That debate largely has run its course. It is not necessarily absolutely finished but largely it has run its course. The stage we are at, at the moment, is we have defined now those things which are public services, health, education and law and order, care of the elderly, and so on. But if something is a public service, in other words, funded by government, where the rights of access, the entitlements, are defined by government, nevertheless, you have a choice as to whether the government provides those services by using its own employees and its own organisations, or whether it buys them in, under a contractual relationship with someone else. Now you could say that is what the universities have been like for centuries; they provide a public service, they are not owned by government, they are not government employees, but we make money available to them and in return they provide services to students. That is how, for 50 years, the GP service has been run; general practitioners are not employees of the state, they are private contractors, but they enter into contracts and we provide them with money. Now you have a discussion now as to whether that principle can be extended into new areas. The Chancellor's speech, at least the first two-thirds of his 11,000 words, is trying to get down to what are the principles on which to decide whether you want to deliver a service using your own staff and your own organisations, or whether you will do it by entering into a contract with someone else. It is quite a difficult read, but it is trying to get to this profound issue.

It is called privatisation, I think, essentially.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) No, it is not privatisation. Are you saying that the GP service is privatised; the GP service is not privatised, it is contractual, it works by a combination of a contractual relationship plus professional ethics, so that self-employed people provide a service on behalf of the state and are paid for it. Now the question is can the same logic apply to hospitals? That is what the debate is about; now it is not for me to say which is the right answer, politics are going to sort that out.

I accept what you say, that the public sector, in a very few years' time, could almost not exist, and government will have a job merely - - -

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) That is not true, that is just not true.

Merely have a job of just handing out contracts. It was suggested that local authorities, in a few years' time, might simply have a job of handing out contracts, and that is all, meet once a year to hand out contracts, and that is all they would do. This is not what we understand, I think, historically, as public services. We have got an example, railway privatisation, where actually it is starting to reverse, because the contractual relationship has been so disastrous, we have seen already the Reading district area of rail maintenance being taken in-house by Network Rail, and more of that is going to happen. And, indeed, an article from the Financial Times says "public sector runs contracts better" in terms of IT, it is the public sector doing rather better in running contracts than the private sector.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) But do you mean running the contract or operating the contract?

I will finish on that question. When I came to this place first, six years ago, I said a few things, and people used to say to me, from time to time, "You're very off message," I was not quite sure what they meant by that, but sometimes I questioned directions the government was taking. In the core of central government, at the highest level, where you are, is there scope for flies in the ointment, people who question whether the direction is right and whether, in fact, this drift towards what I think I see as Americanisation of our society, particularly in the Health Service, there are people there questioning and challenging, to say, "Well, let's have a real intellectual debate"? Or are they told, "No, no; we're not going to go off message, we want people who are signed up to the new liberal agenda, to the Americanisation of the Health Service," etc?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) This debate about the Health Service is vibrant, I detect no sense of it being suppressed at all. So clearly there is room for different views.

One question. I understand from the newspapers, yesterday, or today, that it is going to be suggested that even foundation hospitals, if they come into existence, and I hope they do not, might be called 'companies'. Could we not see, in a few years' time, an Americanised hospital system, an American Health Service which costs twice as much as our Health Service as a percentage of GDP, and looks after the rich; is that what we are moving towards?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) That is certainly not the Prime Minister's plan, because his starting-point is that, the Health Service, more or less, is fully tax-funded; charges are a tiny proportion of the total. Access is determined by policy, and therefore the question is, who is the provider of it. Entitlement to the Service is determined as a matter of policy, and therefore it is not an American kind of minimalist system whereby if you are well-off you make provision privately and the state runs a safety network. As I understand it, that is not the Government's policy, it is not the Prime Minister's policy. And the debate is, having determined that health care is available and is available free, who then actually provides it, subject to those conditions. This is a vibrant political debate, and obviously you are in one part of this spectrum and there are other people that are in a different part of it.

One simple question. I understand there are rumours of something, I think you call it co-financing, or whatever, essentially bringing in direct charges for health services, in time. Are we not just one step away really from going towards a privatised Health Service?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not think the foundation hospital debate has anything to do with co-financing. It is taking as given that Health Service funding, and access to it, is as it has been; and it is confined to the issue about whether these are NHS-owned hospitals. I think the first foundation hospitals will be, I think it has been agreed that they will be part still of the NHS family. However, because they are the three-star hospitals which have earned a degree of autonomy, they will be subject to a lower degree of regulation, given more freedoms; but they are still public sector hospitals. That was the agreement reached a few weeks ago.

Chairman

This is fascinating stuff, and I have got colleagues who want to come in, and I am going to let them, because I want to hear what you say. But can I just ask you, as someone who worked for Mrs Thatcher as her private secretary for a while, you were giving Kelvin an account of how you saw the narrative over a long period, do you think we are talking about ideological continuity or ideological departures?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The interesting thing is that we tend to see this privatisation debate as something exclusive to the UK. It went on through large numbers of countries, Australia, New Zealand, North America. It left certain parts of Europe by, but it was by no means an exclusive UK development. We may have been in there first, but the privatisation process and its related thing, private finance initiative, has been developed very substantially by other countries. We have this kind of insular view of it, as though it were only a narrow debate about Thatcherism.

Chairman: I think you may have answered another question; but I will ask Gordon.

Mr Prentice

It was Kevin's line of questioning that prompted this. Those functions which properly belong to the state, there is a review going on at the moment, and you will be familiar with all the details, to contract out perhaps the management and storage of files held by the Department for Work and Pensions. Millions and millions of citizens and their sensitive, personal details, held currently by civil servants, and yet, if this goes through, they may be contracted out to commercial organisations. My question is this, would you be satisfied that the security of these files could be guaranteed just by a few clauses in a commercial contract with a commercial organisation?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I do not think this breaks any new ground. Lots of departments have their files off site, managed by commercial companies. Inland Revenue has its major contract with EDS, currently up for recompetition, involving the confidentiality of records.

This is all new to me. I did not realise that a lot of confidential stuff about me, presumably, is held by commercial organisations that are contracted with central government. A lot of people will find that worrying.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Let me give you another example. I think it is the case that assessments for disability benefit are contracted out, so they are conducted by private sector organisations. So this is quite intimate, confidential information about you, your health, your disabilities.

Brian White

And look at the problems they have got, the people who assess the medical health records?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) As I said, we are not crossing this divide for the first time. Clearly, if you do enter into a contract with a private sector organisation, you do have to insist on the highest degree of confidentiality. You may say, "Well, GPs, they're in the private sector, they hold very confidential information."

Mr Prentice

Yes, but they swear the Hippocratic Oath, do they not?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes, they do.

You do not get a chief executive or private sector organisation swearing an oath?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) A company that takes this on and then is found to have abused this confidence (a) will have breached the contract, but (b) the reputational damage to it will be severe. So there are pressures and safeguards in this.

Chairman: I think this is the beginning of another inquiry, but we shall want to talk to you more about this. This is a very interesting section, thank you very much indeed.

Mr Heyes

I think, Chairman, there is a follow-on to this point. Sir Andrew reassured, I think, in what he said, that regulation is the counterbalance, the security that you get to deal with Kelvin's fears about the risks attached to privatisation. But another arm of your organisation is the Regulatory Impact Unit, and their key task is to remove what is described very often as the burden of regulation. I think there is a contradiction here, is there not?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) It is not called the Deregulation Unit any more; it was at one stage.

I am taking this from your Autumn Performance Report, that is six months out of date?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Yes, it is called the Regulatory Impact Unit, and its related body is called the Better Regulation Task Force. There is a recognition that regulation is an essential feature of life; regulation is a very effective way of securing policy objectives. And the issue is not whether you have it or whether you do not, it is how well you do it, whether you can find alternatives to regulation, whether it is proportionate, whether it is administered in a way that achieves its purpose, with the minimum degree of cost. That really is what the RIU is looking at. Rather than taking the stance that regulation per se is a bad thing, regulation is highly sought after, a lot of people argue for regulation.

I wonder if there is something in the work of the Regulatory Impact Unit that might be helpful to us in our inquiry into the whole issue of targets. Have you done a regulatory impact assessment on the effects of the costs and burdens of public service performance targets themselves; does that information exist?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Not in that form. We are very conscious of the fact that one of the biggest complaints from public sector managers, the front-line staff, is the regulation that they are under. Now some of that may be reflecting the fact that they are being put under more pressure to perform, but undoubtedly some of it is genuine. The Prime Minister recognises these concerns and attaches a great deal of importance to them. One part of the Regulatory Impact Unit is the so-called Public Sector Team. They have developed a methodology, they have produced a series of reports, called MAD reports (Making A Difference). The methodology is to go to someone in the front line, it could be a headteacher, a GP, police area commander, a consultant, or whatever, and say, "Please tell us what is the impact, not only from the department but from the inspectorate of your sector, or the local government, what is the combined impact, and what can we do to do about that?" The first thing is about data and returns. Are people being asked in one month to send a return to one organisation, then the next month more or less the same data but not quite, so it has to be recast, to someone else, and can we consolidate these data returns? The other is that, whenever you set a target, immediately it spawns guidance, and can that guidance be cut back, kept out, or is it essential, and turned into readable material? A typical Public Sector Team report will come up with, maybe, for a sector, 30 or 40 actions that departments will undertake. They have done at least half a dozen of these now, and they are, I think, quite an effective way of addressing the problem.

Then how does that sit; you mentioned chief constable there, I think, as an example of someone who might be approached. There is a chief constable, I think, who is so fed-up with the targets that are being imposed externally that he has abandoned the system and introduced his own range of targets and is operating quite independently, that has been his response?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) That is what can happen, if the system of targets is seen as purely a kind of top-down imposition. I do not think it is the general position. People do complain, but I do not think there are many people who freelance.

Just staying with the work of the Regulatory Impact Unit, I see, again from the Autumn Performance Report, which I acknowledge is six months old now, that delivery is achieved through, the first bullet point is "High level bilateral meetings with Regulatory Reform Minister". Can you tell us some more about how that works?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) Each department has, someone at official level and someone at ministerial level who are designated as having some overall responsibility for the regulatory impact. It is called a gateway, and they should scrutinise any new returns, or new guidance that is being issued, and see whether it is necessary, and look also at what is being done already. Now, if you take the Secondary Schools White Paper, that came out three weeks ago, there is a pledge there to reduce significantly the amount of guidance that is flowing out of the department into the school system, and one of the ministers in DfES, possibly David Miliband, is assigned with the oversight of that work.

It has a feel of thought to it, it is back to Kevin's Orwellian references, a bit like thought police, this, is it?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) That is what we are trying to correct.

Can I make just one more comment, Chair, before I finish. I spent quite a lot of time looking through your Autumn Performance Report, and, to be honest, I found it quite difficult to read, it seemed to me to be full of bureaucratic obscurity, and I picked out just one sentence that I think makes the point nicely, I wonder why it is necessary to use language like this. It is on page 7, "the Prime Minister's target for electronic service delivery by government". We are told that "the programme is seeking to move forward in three distinct areas", and, right at the bottom of the page, the bullet points say, and if this is not new-speak I do not know what is: "Mitigation of crosscutting risks (including development of customer-centric propositions to mitigate against risk of low take-up for services delivered in isolation)." How customer-centric is that?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I think I am going to put up my hand on that one.

Could you translate it for us?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I am not sure I can. This was the report on the target as specified in SR2000, and then if you look later you get the progress against the SR2002 PSA, there is a similar one, and the question is whether this offending sentence is still in there.

There are plenty more, you can dip in almost at random. I am being partly light-hearted, and I do not want to press you any further on it.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I will take this back and say that you found it - yes, it is in there, at the top of page 24, yes, okay.

Chairman: You are going away to see this man, are you not, who is very customer-centric; that is very good, thank you very much indeed.

Brian White

We talk an awful lot, in public services, about choice, at the moment, we want to give customers choice. If customers are going to have choice about which public service then you have got to have spare capacity actually to be able to do it; so how inefficient are you looking to run the public services?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The question is whether having a degree of spare capacity is inefficient. I suspect there are parts of the public sector where this thing can run at 10,000 revs, max, and it is running at 10,000 revs max, and so any slight disturbance, if you take a hospital A&E department, causes massive disruption. Actually it is not the most efficient way to run it. So if you have people who are undergoing elective orthopaedic surgery, hips and knees, and all that, and they are mixed up with a stream of people who are coming in from accidents, and then they call all these people in and they do all the preparation, and then the surgeons have to say, "I'm sorry, we've got a big car crash; go home." That is massively inefficient. So I suspect having a bit more capacity is (a) probably more efficient, but the issue also is the question of customer service. If the thing is massively efficient but delivers a lousy service then it is not really a good service. If you take the courts, the courts may be massively efficient, in the sense that not one judge is ever spending one minute of his day not working, but if it keeps a lot of other people waiting it is not a good combined system. So I think you can trade off, in a sense, the pure efficiency against the quality of service.

Chairman

Thank you for that. Can I go on to a couple of things, to finish with. Could I ask you about Parliamentary Answers and whether you are the person responsible for the quality of the way in which Parliamentary Answers are run? I ask that because we have a little rule, which we have offered to colleagues, about taking up unsatisfactory answers, and, of course, people are sending us many examples of these, particularly where these circular answers go round to departments, and so on. Who is our quality controller inside the system that we can go to with these things?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) The Cabinet Office provides the overall guidance, which says that answers have to be full, complete, prompt, etc. The actual content, you have heard the Speaker say many times that ministers are responsible for the content of the answers, so if you do not like the answer - - -

Let me just give you an example, I do not want to detain you for much longer, but we have got a case at the moment where someone put down a question, asking for a bit of information, and a couple of departments simply gave it, and then everyone else gave an identical answer, a form of words, that had been supplied by somebody, somewhere. Who takes on the task of supplying the form of words?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) It may well be the Cabinet Office. We get lots of round-robin questions and people say "We want advice on how to answer this," and the alternative would not be very satisfactory either, that some people give hugely long answers, some very peremptory ones. The Cabinet Office Parliamentary Section acts as a co-ordinator for round-robins, and the question is whether you make your own judgment as to whether, on balance, that drives standards up or drives standards down, but that is where the co-ordination is carried out.

And, this is the point of the question, do you think we could have a little co-ordination with whoever this person is, so that, in fact, we can provide the service to the House that the House would like us to perform, in terms of just making sure there is a better system at work for getting answers out and ironing out some of these difficulties?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I am sure there is a great deal that can be done to improve, as a pure process, how prompt it is. We have not tapped power of e-delivery into this thing at all.

Perhaps I can ask our Clerk to make some contacts with you there. Just very quickly. We have been doing in inquiry, it seems to have been going on for ever, called The New Centre, and we do not report because the centre keeps changing all the time. What I want to know really is, now that you have had a go at it, is it in a form now that you think is its mature form, is this the best that we can do, in terms of organising the centre to make it do the delivery job for government?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I think, given the evidence you have taken, before Christmas and from Michael Barber - who else came with him last week?

From the Treasury, Macpherson.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I think the answer is, yes, whoever writes this up now, I do not think suddenly you are going to find that there is some major change. This structure is, I hope, basically with us for the rest of this Parliament.

You see, I came across, the other day, this piece by Geoff Mulgan, the Head of the Strategy Unit sits inside your network, where he had had these radical thoughts about how we could reorganise government entirely differently, to get away from the old departmental model, from the theme-based, and so on. Is that the kind of thing that we ought to be working towards, and do you think we need, perhaps, like at the end of the first world war we had the Haldane Inquiry, which gave us the modern departmental structure, do you think, a century on, we need a sort of Mulganesque inquiry that takes stock of the whole shooting-match?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I would approach this service by service, rather than trying to find a model that works everywhere, because the structure that you need in MoD has very little to do with the structure that you would want in the Department of Health. So I am sceptical as to whether there are some general principles or a completely new configuration that it would make run across the whole piece. There are lots of ideas about Machinery of Government changes in particular sectors. Indeed, if you take the Department of Health, absolutely major change, with effectively bringing the old NHS Executive into the Department, but I am not sure that the lessons you would draw from that really have much relevance, say, to the Home Office.

Yes, in the present structure.

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) But the centre I hope is pretty simple.

Yes, the present structure will see you out anyway?

(Sir Andrew Turnbull) I hope so.

Chairman: That is what we need to know, yes. I really want to thank you very, very much, because you have spoken to us in a very open and engaging way. I think we like the style that you bring to this, and it has been very stimulating, and we look forward to future conversations. Thank you very much indeed.

Search