MR PAT MCFADDEN MP AND MR IAN WATMORE

10 MAY 2007

  Q480  Kelvin Hopkins: It would help if people had someone to ask to explain it.

  Pat McFadden: We will take that away and see what we can do. I think actually you make a fair point about the language we use. I think it can be difficult to understand for some people and that is a good moral for us all. It is something I do try to stress and I do not disagree with you that sometimes the language we use can obscure things. That does not mean to say that the end in sight is the wrong one or that the policy is not a good one, but I think it is always incumbent upon us to try to explain things properly.

  Q481  Kelvin Hopkins: I could go on at length about that, but some of the points made in this government strategy document are utterly trivial, it seems to me. Is it not trivial to suggest that a teacher should phone parents before parents' evening when what they are desperately concerned about is the fact that they cannot get into the school of their choice because there is now a hierarchy and the middle class are targeting all the best schools?

  Pat McFadden: I think the middle class have probably always targeted good schools. The question is whether we have capacity in the school system for greater chances for people as a whole, but that is a slightly different point. On the teachers thing, one of the issues which we touched on in our earlier discussion is that some parents are more engaged than others. That is a fact and we all know that in our constituencies. You may regard it as a trivial point but I think that if we can do what we can to encourage parents to take a real interest in their children's education—maybe we were lucky, we grew up in families where this was the case, but not every kid in the country is as lucky as that and sometimes you have a parent who is not as engaged as we would all want them to be—and if there are certain things that the school and the teachers can do to encourage that, I do not actually think it is a trivial point. It is a good point.

  Q482  Kelvin Hopkins: It may be a good point for a small book or advice for head teachers from the department, but in major government policy statements it sounds rather trivial to me. When my constituents come to see me at my surgery—I am sure they do at yours as well—what they are concerned about is the desperate shortage of housing. Several thousands of families cannot get council houses because we are not building them any more. Owner occupation is now beyond them because it is too expensive and they are living in overcrowded conditions with their own families, or in very poor quality private rented accommodation with the local authority making up the difference in the rent. These are the big issues, and we are talking about trivial issues in a major government policy statement. Are we trying to pretend that these big issues do not exist?

  Pat McFadden: You are probably asking me to go slightly beyond my responsibilities in the Cabinet Office. I do not think anyone would deny that access to housing and affordable housing both in the rented sector and in terms of people getting on the property level in terms of house buying is a big issue for the country. I certainly would not want to deny that.

  Q483  Kelvin Hopkins: Going back to a point you were talking about earlier, that is benefits and having a one-stop shop, that is a major problem for my constituents. The complexity, means testing and forms to fill in are very confusing. Many of them come from backgrounds where English is not their first language. We have the Citizens' Advice Bureau buckling under the weight of debt counselling for people who cannot handle all this and yet we have divided up benefits into three separate areas. We have the local authority, DWP and now the Revenue as well. Would it not be better to rationalise the whole system and perhaps reduce the means testing and look at really making things better for people?

  Pat McFadden: The discussion of whether you have universal benefits or whether you target them is pretty timeless in politics. We have a mixture in our system and probably always will. If you have a targeted benefit you have to assess in some ways who is entitled to that and so that is where you lead into some of the things you may be complaining about. On the other hand, to take something like tax credits—for all the criticism they have come under—they have targeted substantial help. As I say, it is a timeless discussion in politics.

  Q484  Kelvin Hopkins: I am really trying to make the point that we are focussing on such matters as being able to do things on-line when we have been told this week that we have the worst cancer survival rates in Western Europe.

  Pat McFadden: We do have a Secretary of State for Health as well. You can ask me about the armed forces as well if you wish but I may not be able to answer.

  Q485  Kelvin Hopkins: The Cabinet Office has a central role covering the whole range of policy in every area. My final point is about complaints. Where I live we used to have a community health council, a shop in the town centre where people could go and complain about problems in the Health Service. That was closed down and replaced by a PPI[18] Forum, making it a little more difficult for people to complain. We now have a situation where PPIs are becoming too active and making it uncomfortable for the Health Authority and they want to find a way to wind them down and reduce the complaining power of the citizens again. Are we not going in the wrong direction? Should we not be opening more Community Health Councils and not closing them down?

  Pat McFadden: On the specifics of that I have to suggest that the best people to ask are Health Ministers.

  Chairman: Kelvin is raising the general issue about how people can influence services, but I think we will take the point; I understand that you cannot go into the specifics very far.

  Q486  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Since you mention the armed forces, I will ask a question about the armed forces because it is important. One of my constituents was killed in the Nimrod crash in Kandahar and we wanted information. We were told it could not be supplied because it has to go through government. There is no mechanism for service people to complain. They have set up their own website called PPRuNe[19] and I just posed the question could I have some information about the Nimrod crash in Kandahar because my constituent was killed. I had hundreds and hundreds of e-mails on this because there is no mechanism for people to complain or to have any redress. Surely, from what you are saying, the service personnel from this country should have some recourse to complain in your ideal world of Utopia. Why is that not happening?

  Pat McFadden: I am not sure I have an ideal world of Utopia. I am here today to try to explain how the system works not to argue that it is perfect in every sense. Again I really feel you should probably pursue that with Defence Ministers. I am not trying to be unhelpful.

  Q487  Chairman: What Ian is raising is an example of an area where there is no way for people to complain.

  Pat McFadden: Can I make a point which may be of some relevance to what he has said which is that there are communities of interest and I think quite a lot in the services area, where people in the armed forces will come together on websites and talk about things and exchange views and so on. I think what the Government could do more of is have more of a dialogue with that and I think that could be valuable. One of the things which came out of the policy review process that has been referred to earlier is that we asked some people to do a project on the power of information, that is the power of public information which is already there, not information about individuals as such but looking at communities who are on-line who are self-created, talking to one another. Is the Government doing enough with those kinds of people? The armed forces is probably another good example actually and I think there might be more potential for more of a dialogue there with self-created communities of interest who organise themselves.

  Chairman: I think you have taken on Tom Steinberg to do work on this and we have spoken to him too, so that may be a link.[20]

  Q488 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Yes, that was interesting; it turns out he reads all the e-mails. Can I move on to another area? One of the areas that fascinates me in the Cabinet Office is the way that you do computer projects, IT projects. No government has had a great success in IT projects, including this one. The expenditure on IT projects is frightening. The famous True North one, which you may or may not have come across, spent something like £70 million trying to have a paperless government within the departments. It was a horrendous failure which ended up with the government being sued by a computer company. There must be a better way of dealing with this.

  Mr Watmore: The project True North: the contract was with the company that run systems like Directgov that we have been talking about. They completely failed; we terminated the contract. End of story.

  Q489  Mr Liddell-Grainger: It was in the Cabinet Office accounts as a very costly failure.

  Mr Watmore: It was not a costly failure on our behalf. We terminated the contract and moved onto another one. When we go back to the original transformational government strategy it had three big themes. Theme one we have touched on, which is about putting people first, putting the customer at the centre. The second big thing was joining up across boundaries which we have talked about. The third big thing is about professionalism and delivery of projects through programmes of this type. As a result of that we have launched an IT professional programme. We now have something like 8000 people belonging to that. They are receiving extensive training in order to develop their skills. We are hiring people from the best parts of the private sector. We have joint meetings to learn from each other and as recently as this week the City of Leeds has just announced that they are taking that whole programme into local government. Around 350 IT professionals in the City of Leeds have joined up with this programme. I do believe we are doing what we set out to do, to professionalise the capability of government both to do work when it does it within its own boundaries and also to manage suppliers when it is across boundaries. As you know, I came from the other side of the fence so people accuse me of poaching or game keeping, whichever way round it is, and I believe in the two and a half years that I have been here that government has improved massively in its ability to manage projects. The Public Accounts Committee and the NAO published their own report on successful IT projects—which got all of 0.1 column inches in the press—last November which I thought was evidence of some of that work in progress.

  Pat McFadden: Ian may want to take us through more IT greatest hits, as it were, but a general point on this is that it is absolutely right to point out these problems and to hold government to account and so on. That is right. However it is also true that there is quite a lot of success and the success is never really noticed. We pay out millions of benefits every week now using IT that works pretty well. Other organisations like the Passport Service have really raised their game through the use of IT. I think there is a tendency towards an overall view of this that somehow government and IT cannot work and I think it would be wrong to take that view because it would mean not doing things which could improve services and make life better for people. We have a duty in government as ministers, officials, all the structure that we have talked about, to try to do the best job, but it would be wrong to become defeatist about this and say it can never work.

  Q490  Mr Walker: Sorry, Minister, to take you back to consultations, but I am a new member of Parliament and it is the first consultation I have been involved in at Chase Farm Hospital. I was just wondering what safeguards are put in place to ensure that people appointed to oversee these consultations—such as Professor Alberti for example—are not only just politically impartial but also perhaps as importantly open and independent minded, willing to listen to arguments? Do you actually vet these people to make sure that they are almost immune to criticism, that they are completely independent from the political establishment when they are put in to oversee these consultations?

  Pat McFadden: I do not want to comment on the individual. I think that any minister appointing someone to oversee something would hope that that person would be seen by people as somebody with some authority and knowledge. That can probably never be an exact science because there will be those who take a particular view. This is something we have not touched on but is perhaps common to consultations and complaints. Once they have not got the outcome that they wanted they will see the process as being at fault and I think while complaints are a very important method of telling organisations where they are going wrong, sometimes that is the case. The complaint is not in the end about how the system works, it is about the outcome that someone has. You have to bear that in mind with this as well.

  Q491  Mr Prentice: You mention the Varney Review in your letter and we have not had an opportunity to go through all that, but Varney talks about greater flexibility and service delivery and so on. Our colleague Eric Illsley in the Chamber yesterday talked about the implications of local pay and that the people in the Court Service at Barnsley were going to get paid a lot less than in Sheffield which is just over the hill. As part of the flexibility agenda, is this going to be a characteristic of future government plans? Is there going to be local pay not just in the Ministry of Justice and the Court Service but right across the piece?

  Pat McFadden: We have had devolved pay in government departments for a number of years now.

  Q492  Mr Prentice: So it is not new.

  Pat McFadden: Varying pay rates between departments and so on is not something that has just been introduced.

  Q493  Mr Prentice: But that is something you would want to encourage as part of the flexibility agenda.

  Pat McFadden: We have had devolved pay for a long time. This is an issue which we discussed with Civil Service trade unions; they have concerns about it and there is an on-going dialogue about it. It has been in place for about a decade or more.

  Chairman: Before we move onto devolved pay rates for MPs which would be an interesting proposition, I just want to thank you both very, very much. It is inevitable, being a Cabinet Office minister, that we go round the houses because that is what the Cabinet Office does, so it is entirely par for the course and you must forgive us for that. It has been very enjoyable and informative and thank you very much to both of you for coming along.

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