MR PETER WILKINSON AND MR DAVID BELL

22 MAY 2007

  Q540  Mr Prentice: It is the Healthcare Commission then, you cannot comment on central government.

  Mr Bell: Can I try and make a serious point about that? The question of do you get value for money out of your consultations is an important one for us to ask; how do you know that you are getting value for money out of your consultation? You can have metrics to say that X per cent of people responded in Y time or whatever, but I am not actually sure that takes you very much further; I would have thought it is more likely to be the extent to which you engage people that you might not have otherwise engaged through your consultation mechanisms, and also, as I said in response to an earlier question, the extent to which you are able to change and demonstrate that you have changed your original policy intention—

  Q541  Mr Prentice: I understand that. You told us earlier, or I read somewhere, that you carried out 46 consultations last year and you mentioned a few moments ago that there were some consultations that got fewer than 100 responses. How many of those 46 elicited fewer than 100 responses and did you think what a waste of time?

  Mr Bell: I do not know, I can find out for you how many of those were below 100.[1] Did it elicit was that a complete waste of time? Probably not, but it did elicit the response I wonder if we should have done that consultation differently.

  Q542 Mr Prentice: I see. What is the mechanism for deciding what to consult on?

  Mr Bell: There are Cabinet Office guidelines that we have to adopt, but I do not think they necessarily drive what we do. We normally, in a sense, consult on Green Papers and White Papers because there is a certain expectation that you will do that, and often on the back of particular regulations that fall out of legislation, so you will take those out and consult on the detail of those. That is not exclusive and it is possible to consult on other things where you want an early perception of what is likely to be happening, so issues to do, as I mentioned earlier, with demand-led funding, the structure of our student finance, should we take that in a different direction. It is an internal decision.

  Q543  Mr Prentice: But there would be no-go areas, would there not, and one no-go area would be the future of the existing grammar schools because the present Government is not going to get rid of the grammar schools; we have heard David Cameron saying that an incoming Conservative government would not create new grammar schools, but they are not going to touch the ones that are there already. It would be an interesting exercise though to find out what parents felt in those counties like Kent that have a grammar school set-up, would it not?

  Mr Bell: It is probably a political choice about those issues that you wish to consult on and those that you do not, that is the case with all consultation at national government level. It might be interesting to find out on a whole range of things, but ultimately we are consulting on what ministers wish to get the reaction on.

  Q544  Mr Prentice: Are there limits to consultation? Perhaps there are issues that are just red hot, issues that are too hot to handle, and we heard our colleague Margaret Hodge saying that people who have lived here for generations—she is the MP for Barking as you know—should have a prior claim to housing than some family of asylum seekers who have just moved into the area. You would not want to consult people on something like that, would you?

  Mr Bell: That is outside my remit, Mr Prentice.

  Q545  Mr Prentice: You can stray.

  Mr Bell: What I would say to you is that it is not the case that there are some things that are unsayable, because we have public surveys, tracking surveys, so if you ask people what are the issues that are most strongly on your mind we do not say "By the way, do not mention A, B, C and D." The question then becomes what do you do as a result of what the public might be saying to you about a particular issue. On some occasions you will say we are going to do this, this and this and on other occasions ministers will say no, we think that what we are doing is right but we note the public concern.

  Q546  Mr Prentice: You mention the public as if the public is kind of a unity; how do you consult in an increasingly diverse society? Britain has changed out of all recognition in the past generation; how do you do that?

  Mr Bell: Quite sophisticated, to use that jargon word of the trade, segmentation, so when we are consulting on our tracking survey we are consulting parents, we are consulting pupils, we are talking to educational professionals, we are talking to those who are associated professionals, so you are using the mechanism of the consultation exercise to try to cut across different types of audience, and then within that the methodology allows you to take account of age, class, background, region and so on. The one observation I would make is consultation does not give you a set of answers, it gives you a set of responses and I think what is interesting is the extent to which you then see consistency over time, and I think governments, civil servants, ministers will be very concerned to look at issues that continue to concern the public if they appear in tracking survey after tracking survey after tracking survey.

  Q547  Mr Prentice: Why do we not just hire MORI to get together a representative sample—I do not know how they do it but they say they do it—of the British population and just ask them to come up with answers.

  Mr Bell: The question was put earlier about the balance being the political decision and legitimacy and what the public thinks, and we do engage MORI to help us get some of that data. But MORI in its surveys is looking for answers to responses, but it is not answers that necessarily will drive what ministers think that they should do. Surely the purpose of those surveys is to inform ministers of what the public thinks and to try to assess the public mood ahead of making particular policy choices.

  Q548  Mr Prentice: Is it not the case that the policy is settled. We had Pat McFadden before us last week and the policy is settled, but you go out and consult on the nuts and bolts really, that is what it is all about.[2] On the big issues—academies, specialist schools—those are decisions that are taken at the centre and in all these multiplicity of consultations, it is all the nuts and bolts stuff, is it not?

  Mr Bell: I do not think I would necessarily be shy about saying that ministers have taken the big policy decisions, so they should make those decisions.

  Q549  Mr Prentice: It is not difficult stuff, it is listening to people out there, this is a policy initiative and we are only responding to what people out there are telling us. That is just bunkum.

  Mr Bell: You are absolutely right, you have to be careful not to raise expectations so that people think they are being consulted about one thing when you are actually consulting about something else, so the implementation of a particular policy is more than just nuts and bolts, it can actually be very significant to how that is felt. For example, on the back of the consultation we did on school admissions we had 4000 responses, lots of different views expressed and I think as we saw last year, changes were made as we went along, so I do not think there is anything wrong with saying ministers make the big policy decisions and then we go out and consult on the day. But not all of our consultations are just about that, they are sometimes about trying to assess what the public is thinking ahead of making policy decisions.

  Q550  Mr Prentice: I understand that. Can I just turn finally to Mr Wilkinson? I have been reading this new publication of yours, the Audit Commission, Seeing the Light that you will be totally familiar with.

  Mr Wilkinson: I am familiar with it.

  Q551  Mr Prentice: It talks about innovation and it says what we have been talking about, that users, people out there, should have the opportunity to become involved in the design and development of innovations and then you go on to say, "However, more than half of local authorities report that they rarely have the opportunity to talk directly to users about their needs implying that they have not created such opportunities, either routinely or through the innovation process."[3] That is pretty damning, is it not, more than half of all local authorities, and the Audit Commission has been in existence for donkeys years, we have been exhorting them to get their act together and more than half of them do not consult users.

  Mr Wilkinson: We are on a journey is the way I would describe it.

  Q552  Mr Prentice: It is a very long journey.

  Mr Wilkinson: It is a journey with some optimism but I can see there is a long way to go. We published in 1999 a report called Listen Up and in there we analysed what we thought councils should be doing in terms of consulting and engaging the public, and in fact we have published a wall chart, which is one of our most popular publications, on how to do some of the more sophisticated consultation that we believe councils need to be doing. Since then we have been through the CPA process, monitoring how well councils are doing, and the journey that they are on is that they are becoming better at getting the views of the public, but they have a long way to go in terms of being as sophisticated in understanding the diverse needs of different segments of the public, in the way that Mr Bell has been describing, and also in terms of getting greater engagement and involvement with the public. However, the one thing I would say is that it is very hard to do well under the CPA process and to improve, unless you are improving that segment of your business, so the journey that they are on is to make an improvement. As that report describes, however, there is still some journey to go.

  Q553  Mr Prentice: Does the Audit Commission bear any responsibility for this slow rate of progress?

  Mr Wilkinson: We are encouraging, have been encouraging and continue to encourage local authorities to get better and I think we would report that they are getting better but they need to get better still.

  Q554  Mr Prentice: You talked about innovation units in local government and you cite one; is that the only innovation unit—it is Kent County Council—is that the only one in the country?

  Mr Wilkinson: We have not done a comprehensive survey of all authorities to see whether they have innovation units. We were looking for evidence of good practice and, in particular, the way in which innovations can be spread and how innovations can be quite modest in terms of the way they are invented—there is a case study in there of the Wolverhampton Bereavement Centre which is a classic of getting close to your users, listening to what they say to you, coming up with something which is innovative but to them appears to be pure common sense, and which then we are saying well there is a real problem in terms of spreading that innovation because there are all sorts of barriers to the way in which within a community like local government innovations can spread. The notion behind that report was to highlight some of those barriers and to look at the way in which local authorities can create the conditions, where both internally and from outside they can develop and grow and spread innovation.

  Q555  Chairman: Just on Gordon's grammar school point and probably quite irrelevantly, is there good research evidence on the effect of grammar schools?

  Mr Bell: We have research evidence on the impact of selective education, yes, but it is not just our research, there has been quite a body of research on that subject.

  Q556  Chairman: What does it show?

  Mr Bell: It shows that you do get a kind of polarisation, so therefore, as you would expect, those young people who do well in the grammar schools will not always be matched by those who do well in the surrounding schools in a grammar system.

  Q557  Chairman: Does it have a depressing effect on schools around them?

  Mr Bell: Some schools in selective areas do very well, there is no doubt about that, but the question that you have to ask is has the grammar system then peeled the children off, which it obviously has, and has that been the cause of the performance of other schools. The data does suggest that you have got a negative effect on the performance more generally in a particular area, so in some areas as it has been described you have got the very best of schools and you have got the very poorest of schools existing side by side.

  Q558  Chairman: We went through a period of having referendums, did we not? That was a kind of user choice, was it not?

  Mr Bell: I am not sure that at central government level we ever did that beyond the most famous—

  Mr Wilkinson: Is that with respect to grammar schools and the continuation of grammar schools?

  Mr Bell: Yes, sorry, I do apologise. That is still an option, but I think I am right in saying—and please forgive, I should know this—there was only ever one ballot to remove the grammar school system in North Yorkshire and that was voted down. I think that has been the only one, but I can check that.

  Q559  Chairman: Is that a sensible way of involving users in the choice of school systems?

  Mr Bell: The Government's policy is quite clear that the existing grammar schools will stay; that a mechanism exists if parents wish to initiate it, but as I said I think there has only been the one case where it was initiated and parents voted it down.

2   Q 414-493 Back

3   Audit Commission, Seeing the light: Innovation in local public services, May 2007, p 43 Back