MR PAT MCFADDEN MP AND MR IAN WATMORE

10 MAY 2007

  Q440  Mr Prentice: In the letter that you sent to us you mention customer feedback, improving service delivery and also information sharing. You talk in your letter about finding the right balance between maintaining the privacy of the individual and delivering more efficient, higher quality services with minimal bureaucracy. There is a real problem there because you have been telling us about the efficiencies of information sharing but there is a great danger that some information could just leak out. If information about an individual is brought together from a variety of sources it could completely compromise his or her privacy. How are you going to guard against that?

  Pat McFadden: I think this is very important. I think there are huge gains to be made in looking at what the public want and saying their time is not free and if we can do a better a job by part A of government talking to part B to get the service improved then that is a very valuable gain. I used the examples of the Pensions Service and the local authorities around pension credit and council tax benefit earlier. That is a good example of information sharing in order to benefit public service. You would also have the same thing probably in cases more familiar to us around child protection or if someone was leaving hospital and they were going back home but they needed service support at home you would want the health authority and social services departments to be talking to one another.

  Q441  Mr Prentice: I understand that. In your letter you talk about sharing information to fight crime and so on.

  Pat McFadden: That has been well documented, the failure to share information in some quite well known cases.

  Q442  Mr Prentice: So there are no limits to that. The police say that it would help us bring down crime if we had information from Work and Pensions and the Health Service, so you would be happy with that.

  Pat McFadden: The thing I am trying to say in the document—and I think I have been very open in saying it—is that there is great value in this for a number of areas, fighting crime could be one of them, service delivery could be another, child protection and so on. However we also do have to be alive—this is important and that is why I have highlighted it in the letter—to legitimate public concerns about privacy. My colleagues in the DCA[7] are producing a strategy on this for publication later this year and this is something that has to be considered as part of that. In what circumstances should one share information? What should be the individual's control of that? It is an important point that you raise and what I would say is that we should be very alive to the possibilities of this but should do it in a way which takes account of some of these concerns.

  Q443 Mr Prentice: You tell us that this strategy is going to be published in summer 2007; are you going out to consultation on this?

  Pat McFadden: I think I will have to discuss that with my colleagues.

  Q444  Mr Prentice: I think you ought to. Just one final point about this huge area of choice and so on. You will be totally familiar with this document here and I have one quick question about choice advisors.[8] You talk about the public out there, if they are a bit bewildered about the multiplicity of choices facing them then we are going to provide choice advisors in education and health care. Who are the choice advisors specifically in education and health care? Are they teachers and doctors or are they someone different?

  Pat McFadden: I think this is important because one of the issues that has been raised about choice is whether you are empowering the already empowered. That is one of the criticisms that has been made of it. I do not imagine you have ever made that criticism yourself but others have. We are probably all familiar with, for example, parents in our own constituency who really want to do the best by their child, get the best education and so on, but maybe they are not as forceful in making their views known and having all this information and so on. I think if the state in some capacity can help those people in a world where there is choice then that is a benefit to empowering people who perhaps at the moment are not empowered.

  Q445  Mr Prentice: I understand that but my question is very simple: who are the choice advisors? Are we going to be putting advertisements in The Guardian for choice advisors or are they just going to be teachers and doctors?

  Pat McFadden: I think they would be appropriate to the circumstances.

  Q446  Chairman: Having these people is going to cost us more, is it not?

  Pat McFadden: We are back to whether it is a cost now and whether it is an efficiency of the future.

  Q447  Chairman: You obviously have to pay choice advisors.

  Pat McFadden: You may be paying them.

  Q448  Chairman: You are not going to have free ones, are you, if you are going to have an advertisement in The Guardian.

  Pat McFadden: I do not know whether there will be an advertisement in The Guardian at all.

  Mr Prentice: Sorry, The Telegraph.

  Chairman: We are not sure about this, are we? We are not sure who they are and whether they are going to be paid or anything like that. Paul?

  Q449  Paul Flynn: In this very helpful letter you sent us you mentioned there is a project called Tell Us Once designed to improve multiple services around particular "citizen episodes". If of my constituents is in the throes of a citizen episode—having a baby or suffering a bereavement—who do they ring and what does the person at the other end tell them?

  Pat McFadden: At the moment the difficulty would be that they have to ring a lot of people unless they lived in Wolverhampton which, unfortunately for your constituents, they do not.

  Q450  Paul Flynn: What would they be told in Wolverhampton?

  Pat McFadden: As I said we have a pioneering service (on bereavement, not on childbirth) where, if you have a bereavement, there is a service available where you go to see the bereavement service at the council and they will deal with a lot of different government departments for you. One of the reasons that David Varney recommended that this Tell Us Once project be started was that he found that at the moment if our constituents, normally speaking, were to suffer a bereavement in their family they might themselves have to conduct a whole load of transactions with the DWP about the person's pension, a lot of transactions about their house, the local authority if they lived in a council house and so on. When there is a particular sensitive moment in a family's life, can the Government not do better than that for people? That is really the idea behind Tell Us Once. It is not easy because at the back of this there are databases in the local authority about who their tenants are, there are databases in the DWP about who their pensioners are and so on. The idea behind the project is: can you go to someone—in this case it would be the DWP—and say, "Look my father or mother has passed away, could you just take care of the Government end of this for me and make sure everyone knows who needs to know?" It is in a development stage at the moment but that is the idea behind it.

  Q451  Paul Flynn: Is it working?

  Pat McFadden: It is not up and running yet.

  Q452  Paul Flynn: I thought most of your letter was aspirational which is encouraging.

  Pat McFadden: Tell Us Once came out of the Varney Report which was only published a few months ago. He was very clear that this was something we could develop now and pursue during the next CSR period so we would not expect it to be working at the moment. You asked me if the local one is working which is informing this a bit. My impression is that it is quite highly valued and certainly locally they have quite a lot of supportive letters from families who like the idea that someone, rather than giving them all the work, will actually do some of this for them.

  Q453  Paul Flynn: The transformational government strategy was published in November 2005.[9] Since then the action has been the setting up of the committee and the issuing of a vision statement to ensure that information will be shared, expand on opportunities for the most disadvantaged, fight crime, provide better public services for citizens and businesses and in other instances where it might be in the public interest. You do not mention more mother love or apple pie, but this is just a statement of the obvious so where is it going? Is there anything practical in this? We are now two years on since it was set up.

  Pat McFadden: I think we have done a wee bit more than set up a committee. One of the things we have done has been to begin the process of rationalising hundreds and hundreds of different government websites around the place, trying to get the content to go to two big areas which we think will be easier for the public to use and fits more with how people find information on the Internet now such as Directgov and Business Link. We have taken quite major action there and there is more to do in that direction. I think Ian wants to come in on this.

  Mr Watmore: I was one of the main authors of that document and we had a very clear vision in that document.

  Q454  Paul Flynn: What are you going to do then?

  Mr Watmore: What we then said was that there is a period to the next spending review and there is a whole bunch of things we are going to get on with. We have done those. We have an annual report which you can read but to give you three or four headlines of what we have already done: when we wrote that report there were two or three hundred thousand people a month using Directgov and there are now six and a half million. We have put in shared service systems right across all the big government departments in the period and that is now starting to yield real efficiencies in those departments.

  Q455  Paul Flynn: How are you going to expand the opportunities for the disadvantaged? Just take one practical example.

  Mr Watmore: I happen to live in the North West. I went to visit a very good scheme in East Manchester called Eastserve where in that community of very low access to the Internet they went in originally with a scheme to put the Internet over the telephone wires in those homes and then realised that 35 % of those homes did not even have fixed-line telephone wires into the homes because the people themselves selected to not have that sort of system. A mobile based Internet solution was put in place. Those people are now beginning to use those systems to help themselves.

  Q456  Paul Flynn: The Government have gone along and they are using IT services in a more intelligent way than they were before, to their credit, but very much along the lines of what is happening in private industry outside. The point I want to make is that by providing people with this myth of choice you are actually creating unhappiness and cynicism. If someone comes along and wants to be influenced by their choice of school and someone who is not articulate and has their choice advisor at their elbow to persuade them to make a strong case, you will then find that possibly 150 people are going for what is known by most people as the best school in the city, but there are still only 100 places in that school. What you are doing is giving people disappointment because there is going to be a change as a result of that choice.

  Pat McFadden: I profoundly disagree. Most parents get their first choice of school; the numbers who do not are in the minority. Secondly, to pursue the logic of your argument, to take that choice away from people would be to say to them that we, the politicians, ultimately are going to decide where you will send your child to school, regardless of the quality of that school. That would be profoundly disempowering for people and it would be profoundly disempowering for the people who need a good education.

  Q457  Paul Flynn: The point I am making is that you are offering people the illusion of choice where choice is not practical.

  Pat McFadden: It is certainly not an illusion. The excellent city academy that I visited where that document that Gordon referred to was launched has been instrumental in transforming education in that part of London.

  Q458  Paul Flynn: It is an illusion in the choice of hospitals, the choice of consultants and many other areas as well. Convince me, give me half a dozen practical examples where major government policy has been changed as a result of consultation.

  Pat McFadden: I cannot give you that but I will give you an example of health choice. I had a constituent of mine recently who I saw hobbling about on crutches. I asked what had happened to him and said he had had a total knee replacement. I asked if he had had it done locally and he looked at me as though I was behind the pace and said, "No, we've got a choice now; I had it done in Cannock" and he obviously made that choice freely, perhaps with some advice from his surgeon. I hasten to say there would have been nothing wrong with having that surgery done locally but it was down to him to make the choice. I do not accept that the choice is false either in education or in health.

  Q459  Paul Flynn: There is the choice of the waiting list which was there before, it is nothing new, and choice was offered by previous governments as well. The question I asked, which was a different one, was can you give me examples of major government policy that had been influenced by public consultation or the e-news and the e-consultation?

  Pat McFadden: We have 500 a year.

8   Cabinet Office, Building on progress: Public services, March 2007 Back

9   Cabinet Office, Transformational Government: Enabled by Technology, November 2005 Back