MR PAT MCFADDEN MP AND MR IAN WATMORE

10 MAY 2007

  Q414 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to our witnesses this morning. We are delighted to have Pat McFadden who is the Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office and Ian Watmore who is Head of the Delivery Unit also in the Cabinet Office. Thank you very much for coming along to help us with our inquiry which goes under the heading of Putting People First. Pat, you are in charge of all this inside the Cabinet Office. Thank you for your memorandum.[1] Do you want to say anything to us by way of introduction or shall we go straight into questions?

  Pat McFadden: No, I do not think so. You have the memorandum so I think we should probably go straight into questions.

  Q415 Chairman: The programme that you preside over is called Transformational Government, never knowingly undersold. So that we can get a more concrete sense of some of this tell us what a transformed government would look like.

  Pat McFadden: I take the point that whoever came up with that title for this has set the bar. I do take the point about that but on the other hand it does reflect an ambition to do more than just incrementally improve what government is already doing. Let me give you a couple of examples. If you take what the Pensions Service have been doing, they have taken a process which, in the past, was quite paper based and time consuming and which, if you were entitled to other benefits in addition to your pension, it was left to you to go and sort that out with someone else. What they have tried to do is to do much more of that over the phone, to make it take less time and crucially to ask the person some questions about whether they may be entitled to some other benefits such as, for example, a council tax benefit which may be administered not by the Pensions Service but by the local authority, to start making the joins between these things. It is an ambitious title but what it reflects is an ambition not just to deliver a service in a more efficient way but actually make some of the links between what someone might meet at one part of government and to link them up with what someone might meet at another part of government. I will give you another example more locally based. I recently went to Nottingham and they have a service there called First Contact. It is often led by the Fire Service. If they go into someone's home and they see that they might need a smoke alarm or something like that, they actually begin a process of assessment of other things that that person might need—maybe adaptation to their house, it could be a whole range of things—and what happens then is that the First Contact service makes all the links themselves between the different parts of the local scene, as it were, to make sure that that person gets what they need. If you asked me to define it, it is certainly delivering services more efficiently but it is doing something more than that; it is making the joins so that we look at this from the end of the telescope where the member of the public is rather than the traditional departmental boundaries that we are used to operating with.

  Q416  Chairman: Is this more than the one stop shop that we have talked about for years, with a bit of IT added on top?

  Pat McFadden: I think it can be because I think the potential probably grows as we go on. If I could give a boost to a particularly local example to me, one of the things that was in David Varney's report was to talk about particular life moments such as a bereavement.[2] They are exploring a project following that in the DWP called Tell Us Once about stopping the situation where you have to go to lots of different parts of government at a particular sensitive time for a family to tell them about a bereavement. We have actually pioneered this in my own local authority of Wolverhampton through money from the Invest to Save Budget. It has been up and running for five or six years. I think it is considered to be successful and, building on that experience of what has been done locally, they are now feeding into the DWP Tell Us Once project. This is hard. You are right to say that the Government has talked about breaking down silos and so on in the past, but I think there is probably greater potential in the future to get this right by working back from where the member of the public is and taking care of some of those problems behind the scenes that we used to really confer on them to take care of by sending them to different places.

  Q417 Chairman: You mentioned efficiency and this is an area that I think interests us greatly. Contrary to the view that is often put that if we use IT properly and link up things this is going to save the state a lot of money, surely the fact is that the more personalised we make public services, the more choice we give to people, this is going to cost us money not save us money. Efficiency does not in this respect mean that we are going to save money if we are meaning what we say about personalising choice and all the rest of it.

  Pat McFadden: I am not sure if I agree. There are couple of points in there. There is the point about personalisation and choice and whether that is efficient. One of the things I do in the Cabinet Office is work on social exclusion and we have quite a successful record as a government on lifting people out of poverty, getting people into work and generally tackling social exclusion on the broad front. To give an example, the incomes of the poorest 20 % in the country have risen more than any other groups but within that poorest 20 % there are a group right at the very bottom of the income scale—perhaps 2 to 3 % of the population—who have not been touched by that general progress of the country as a whole and indeed general progress for the poorest group as a whole. For that group if you do not have a more personalised approach and a more targeted approach such as, for example, is set out in the Freud Review, then down the line you will be dealing with what could be multiple problems around a particular family at great cost.[3] Personalisation can actually deal with something which is quite specific.

  Q418 Chairman: I accept that but it is more complicated than that, is it not? If you think of the argument that is around today about not having mixed wards in hospitals because we think choice and dignity means that you have to have separation, nobody can claim that is efficient. It is far more efficient to put everybody together.

  Pat McFadden: There is this argument about if you have choice you need excess capacity and so on and that is somehow wasteful. I think what we have seen is that quite a small bit of excess capacity can actually produce quite a lot of change that may not otherwise have been there. If you wanted to run everything as a monopoly, if you wanted only to have one massive hospital for the country, you could argue on one level that that may be efficient but it would not be very user friendly and it would not produce a dynamic of change in the system.

  Q419  Chairman: There is a trade off. Men and women together in the wards, that is efficient but it is not how you treat people. Therefore in order to respect people's rights and to give them choice you do something which is inefficient. That seems to me to be perfectly right.

  Pat McFadden: I am making a slightly different point. The point I am making is that if you create some choice in a system you have to have a bit of capacity here and a bit of capacity there for people to choose between the two. But by virtue of having that choice, down the line, you might find that both become more efficient because they are looking at what the other one is doing and they know that the people who are coming to them do not necessarily have to come to them. I do not think it is quite as simple as you are saying.

2   HM Treasury, Service transformation: A better service for citizens and businesses, a better deal for the taxpayer, December 2006. Back

3   Department for Work and Pensions, Reducing dependency, increasing opportunity: options for the future of welfare to work, March 2007 Back