MR PETER WILKINSON AND MR DAVID BELL

22 MAY 2007

  Q580  Mr Prentice: Should you?

  Mr Wilkinson: The study that we are in the process of doing looks at the responsibility of local authorities as commissioners of services for doing the sorts of things we have just described, to make sure that the resources are properly used and well-used. I hope that when you see that report you will see that we are taking seriously our responsibility to help local authorities fulfil their responsibility as well.

  Q581  Chairman: Just on this point, if we use third sector organisations to do things which the State is not doing well, sometimes failing at, dealing with some of the most difficult to reach groups and wanting to operate in quite different, new ways, the chances of failure, the risk, is higher, is it not? Is that not something that we are signing up to?

  Mr Wilkinson: Having a sophisticated process for managing risk is something that all public bodies are developing, and of course as you get into more complicated forms of relationships then inevitably there is the potential for things to go wrong. Equally, that means that the way in which you commission, control, manage those services you need to make sure is appropriate to whatever that level of risk is. I think though it is like anything associated with risk; people take risks and the more that they are aware of those, the more that they manage those and the more that they are sensible about those, proportionate in terms of the controls that they put in place, the greater the prospect that you will get the benefits that are associated with trying to do things differently and innovatively.

  Mr Bell: I just wonder, Chairman, if we have been here before because when there was a move to delegate funding to schools and colleges there was a lot of concern that essentially what you were doing was dissipating the control from the single local authority across possibly hundreds of schools. The evidence has suggested that provided you put in the right mechanisms, people at the local level will spend their money wisely and actually you get the benefits of them making the decisions closer to those that they are serving than those that are a bit further away.

  Q582  David Heyes: I do not want to dig too deeply into this because of the time constraint, but David Bell mentioned in passing tracking surveys. I can guess what tracking surveys are, but I do not want to do that, I want to get on our record what you mean when you say tracking surveys. What are they, how do you use them, where do you use them, how extensive are they and so on?

  Mr Bell: The key survey that we have just set up over the last year is one that will get opinions from those different groups that I described twice a year, and then we will feed that back in to ministers as well as officials, and hopefully we can use that to determine what sort of policy interventions we might make, how things are going, how things are working and so on. On top of that we actually have a number of ways of tracking opinion; for example we have a public communications unit that takes about 250,000 phone calls a year, we provide a weekly feedback in to ministers and officials of the themes that are there, so that actually gives us a very good, week by week update on the sorts of things that generally the public are concerned about and are phoning us about.

  Q583  David Heyes: Who does the tracking surveys, who carries them out?

  Mr Bell: It is a MORI survey that does the tracking survey.

  Q584  David Heyes: Is it expensive?

  Mr Bell: It costs us £250,000 over the year.

  Q585  David Heyes: Compared with the £5,000 per consultation average.

  Mr Bell: Yes, but the consultations that I described earlier are specific to a particular issue around a Green Paper and the tracking surveys address—

  Q586  David Heyes: It would be unfair to see this as a kind of clandestine consultation.

  Mr Bell: It is more an opinion survey rather than a consultation but it only illustrates the point that I maybe made earlier, you are drawing upon data from lots of different sources. The real question for us is how do you use that information and what the public is telling you to adapt, to amend, to change to improve your policies.

  Q587  David Heyes: Are the results in the public domain?

  Mr Bell: Those results are not in the public domain, I do not think. I will check that but some things are no secret and in the world of freedom of information ...[8]

  Q588 David Heyes: When the participants are taking part in this, are they aware that the purpose is to influence public policy?

  Mr Bell: Yes, they are, they are told that this is a survey being carried out for the Department for Education and Skills.

  Q589  David Heyes: Who chooses the topic, how do you choose where you are going to use this method?

  Mr Bell: What we do is we have some standard questions so you can actually track changes in opinion across some common themes, so you will have what is their attitude to school discipline or whatever, but we also have the capacity to insert particular questions that might be particularly topical at the time. It is very important that you do not change the questions completely every time you do it, or you will then not be in a position of tracking the public's mind.

  Q590  David Heyes: Is it fair to say that the Audit Commission have some reservations about the use of surveys, about the approach?

  Mr Wilkinson: We think surveys are one of the very many ways in which local authorities can be in touch with their consumers, so I am not quite clear where your question is coming from, I apologise.

  Q591  David Heyes: It is whether the surveys can capture the whole spectrum of opinion really.

  Mr Wilkinson: Surveys are one of many tools and, as I said earlier, we have been talking as though consultation is a one-off that happens. We look at a spectrum that runs from research about the facts all the way through to user engagement, deliberative polling, a whole raft of different mechanisms, and surveys would be a mechanism which has validity in some circumstances and will provide value for money in some circumstances. That is why, as long ago as 1999, we went through the stage of categorising the different types of mechanism you might use and in which circumstances they would be good value for money and give you useful information.

  Q592  David Heyes: A tracking survey is fulfilling the same purpose, therefore, as perhaps a focus group would, is that right?

  Mr Wilkinson: Yes.[9]

  Mr Bell: You could use focus groups, you could use tracking surveys, it is a matter of choice about which you think is more appropriate. This was partly in response to the departmental capability review that was carried out last year that we should have a systematic mechanism for tracking the views of our users, and our view was that the best way of doing that was by a tracking survey rather than through a focus group approach.

  Q593  Chairman: Some very quick questions to end, with quick answers. You said in the world of freedom of information just now. I heard a recently retired permanent secretary say the other day that she would never any longer, as a permanent secretary, have written down advice to ministers. Do you feel that kind of pressure?

  Mr Wilkinson: Not at all.

  Q594  Chairman: Nothing has changed.

  Mr Wilkinson: Nothing has changed.

  Mr Bell: In my view nothing has changed.

  Q595  Chairman: Could I just ask about these Choice Advisers very quickly; who are they to be?

  Mr Bell: It is for local authorities to decide who they are. They have to be independent of the local authority so they could be a variety of people from different backgrounds. They could be people who have been teachers previously, they could be people who have worked as learning mentors in school, but people who have an understanding of the local system.

  Q596  Chairman: As we are inventing these people it seems in different services now would it be sensible to have a generic kind of Choice Adviser or do we have to invent a new and different kind, each time we develop choice in a public service?

  Mr Bell: That is a good question. Again, maybe you are back to the specialist knowledge that you might require to be able to offer technical advice on whether it is choosing social care, or a health option or a school place, but I would have thought there are lessons that we can draw upon in the experience that we have gathered from different areas, but I just wonder whether an individual Choice Adviser providing information on all the kinds of choices that are available to citizens might be a stretch too far.

  Q597  Chairman: You could have experts in choice, could you not?

  Mr Bell: Often if you are going to have technical knowledge it is quite a big task to know it on school admissions as it is to know it on social care and who the providers might be.

  Mr Wilkinson: One of the interesting things that will develop, assuming the legislation that I referred to earlier is passed, is the enhanced role of the local strategic partnership and the leadership role of the local authority will start raising questions about public services within areas and the extent to which they are integrated around the needs of the people that live within those areas. That will raise a raft of different questions and the technical problems that David Bell refers to I am sure are absolutely correct, but equally it would be a real challenge for local strategic partnerships to engage with their citizens, and the way in which they do that will take us on to an even more sophisticated level than we have been advocating so far, and the journey will therefore get even more exciting.

  Q598  Chairman: Finally, when the Committee went to the United States not long ago and we looked at these charter schools, all of them told us, as though it was simply an axiom, how could you do anything else. If a school was over-subscribed you had to have a lottery because that was the only fair way of allocating places. Here it is regarded as kind of sensational to do it. Who is right?

  Mr Bell: These are matters for local authorities to determine, Chairman, and quite seriously that is the way it should be. Local authorities want different methods for allocating decisions where there are not enough school places against the demand.

  Chairman: I just thought I would try it on you. Thank you very much indeed for a very interesting session; having both of you together has been particularly interesting, so thank you very much indeed for all your time.

9   Note by witness: This is a response to the point that tracking surveys and focus groups are fulfilling the same purpose in that they are both mechanisms to collect the views of users. However, beyond this they fulfil different roles: surveys provide breadth of information whilst focus groups provide depth and understanding. Back