SIR GUS O'DONNELL KCB

15 NOVEMBER 2007

  Q20  Mr Prentice: You would be the person responsible for replying to me under the Freedom of Information Act, would you?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: I will obviously reply to you under the Freedom of Information Act but precisely how much I will be able to meet what I think you are trying to get at in all of this—you may well be disappointed with the answer.

  Q21  Mr Prentice: I do not want to know how much Lord Ashcroft is paying in tax, I am not in the slightest bit interested, I just want to know if he is UK resident for tax purposes. That is now a matter of public policy because the House of Lords Appointments Commission has said this publicly, and it has named names—it named Lord Laidlaw. What is the difference between Lord Laidlaw and Michael Ashcroft, that is all I want to know, if he is a UK resident for tax purposes? That is not asking too much, is it?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: I am afraid it is. I could not comment on your individual tax position nor any other person's.

  Q22  Mr Prentice: Fair enough. Just one final question. Given the length of time we have had to wait to get replies to some of our earlier reports, when can I expect a response from you on my formal Freedom of Information Act request that I have just made?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: We will work within the normal guidelines for FOI requests.

  Q23  Mr Prentice: Is that 28 days or something?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Yes, I think so. I will try and ensure we do it as quickly as possible.

  Mr Prentice: Thank you.

  Chairman: Thank you for that. I think we may pursue it with the House of Lords Appointments Commission as well to see if it is their responsibility if it is not yours.

  Q24  Mr Walker: Going back to the press coverage that the "cash for peerages" investigation secured, you have said that you were concerned about the level of coverage and where these stories were coming from. I believe the Committee was concerned as well because they felt it might jeopardise the investigation. At any stage did the usual channels of Number 10 make contact with the Metropolitan Police and say, "Listen, if these leaks are coming from you we are concerned, can you stop it", or "Are these leaks coming from you and what the hell's going on?" because I think you might have been entitled to ask that question? We believe on this Committee—some of us do, I do not want to speak for all of my colleagues—that the Metropolitan Police were in regular contact with lobby journalists and members of the press and that did jeopardise their investigation. I just wonder whether you ever raised your concerns publicly with the Metropolitan Police about what was going on.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Not publicly.

  Q25  Mr Walker: Privately, sorry.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Privately I certainly asked them what they felt about the situation and what they thought, and they reassured me these leaks had nothing to do with them.

  Q26  Mr Walker: They reassured you. Did DAC Yates ever personally reassure you that these leaks had nothing to do with them?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Yes.

  Q27  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I talk about leadership in the Civil Service. One of the things you have looked at very closely is PSA 2.[4] Do you think leadership in the Civil Service is getting better? We have seen one or two slight problems and cock-ups. You say it is getting better, and if it is getting better in what way? Can you put some tangible meat on the bones.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Certainly. Leadership is one of the three areas that we look at in the Capability Reviews: leadership, strategy and delivery. We have placed a lot of emphasis, and I have certainly done it personally, on improving the standards of leadership. You are right in that a number of members of the Senior Civil Service basically saw themselves as people who were being led, not actually doing the leading. What we are trying to do now is from the start get them into the concept that they are leaders right from the moment they enter the Senior Civil Service, in old speak that is Grade 5 and up. We are doing that through a new programme that we call Base Camp. We have just launched the first one of these. As you enter the Senior Civil Service you are going to have a three day programme teaching you all about leadership. It is one of our most successful programmes in terms of the evaluations we have got. We are trying to work on bringing them right from that level. It is also a question of bringing in leaders where you feel you have got skills gaps and enhancing those who are already there. We are covering lots of different areas in that. For example, one of the issues we have got on diversity grounds is that whilst the Civil Service as a whole on ethnicity, black and minority ethnic populations, is slightly overweight relative to the working population, where we are underweight in that category is at senior levels. We have got a couple of programmes called Leaders Unlimited and META[5] which are aimed at trying to bring on leaders from black and minority ethnic groups. Similarly, we have got some other issues around gender where we are trying to work on those. The gender one is the one I am most confident about. The statistic that I am quite pleased about is if we carry on at the rate we are going the Senior Civil Service will be majority female in 2020.

  Q28 Mr Liddell-Grainger: One of the things that has fascinated me over the last week is all this carry-on at the Home Office, this fit-for-purpose marvellous department you have that now seems to be giving security clearance to just about anybody who wants it. There is hardly leadership there if the system itself is still breaking down. From the top down you have got to say that is not right, we cannot just give security clearance to the wrong people. I do not want you to comment on what the Home Secretary said but is there a failure in leadership?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: As the Capability Review made clear, there were lots of issues, serious concerns in our jargon, about the Home Office when we did that review. I am quite clear that they are changing things. There have been a very large number of changes to the leadership in the Home Office. I have got the numbers somewhere. Twenty-eight out of the 50 directors are new, there have been 17 exits. They have been addressing the issues. I have been working with David Normington, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, in terms of the follow-up to the Capability Review on all of the things they are doing to improve the department. You have to understand, the Home Office is a department that will always be in the news. It is at the forefront of all the challenging sets of issues. We are working very hard to sort and improve a whole range of areas, not least in the borders area where I issued a report yesterday about how we will improve that area.

  Q29  Mr Liddell-Grainger: The Home Office seems to be permanently in a hole and it keeps digging, which is a remarkable achievement, because ever since I have been a Member of Parliament it has been a catastrophe-led department by the look of it and now we have got yet another occasion which must have been avoidable. Somebody must have said, "Is this a good idea? Why are we doing it?" Here we are, we have got all these people, lets all make them security guards, what a brilliant wheeze. Even Admiral West, he has done a u-turn west. What is going wrong, Gus?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: The Department, like I say, covers a whole range of areas. You will not read in the media about the absence of jail escapes, you will not read about all of the thousands of things the Department is doing right. Because of the breadth of areas it is involved in, because of their sensitivity, if they do the slightest thing wrong it will be raised many, many times. That report about asylum seekers, the treatment thereof, was a report that had come out a week earlier and had been covered and they decided to have another go at it. That is the kind of goldfish bowl you are living in when you are running the Home Office.

  Q30  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I think one of the problems with that argument is at the moment we are on a heightened level of security. In fact, I have just been looking at the papers and there we have armed police on the front. We are in a terrorist situation. In the middle of all of that where we have got Admiral West saying, "No, no, we have got to defend everything and pull up the drawbridge", we discover that inside the camp all these decisions have been made over quite a long period of time, this has not just happened in the last week. It is a systematic failure of leadership, is it not, that this was not spotted, brought up and dealt with at the time?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: No. I disagree, to be honest, because if you think about the security situation they have been very successful. If you think of Operation Overt and the fact that was stopped and what we are doing on borders to bring together UKvisas, the Border and Immigration Agency and part of Customs into a unified UK border agency, there are a lot of things that are going right there about the big picture. Without a doubt, the threat levels, as Jonathan Evans pointed out in his recent speech, are very substantial and the degree of challenge is going up all the time, so we are having to cover a situation that is not staying the same, it is getting much, much more difficult and, therefore, they will be working on a number of fronts for a long time and they will not succeed in every area.

  Q31  Mr Liddell-Grainger: It is one of the areas that we would like them to succeed in, for obvious reasons. As the Head of the Civil Service, are you happy that the systems are now in place where, within reason, the cock-ups like that of last week, which was a cock-up, it had to be, hopefully are going to be minimised because if they get it wrong we suffer? I am talking about the public in general.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Absolutely. The problem we have got basically is we are increasing the resources which come through the Cabinet Office budget, that is exactly right, and you asked about this, in terms of the single intelligence vote to our agencies, and there are a very large number of threats that we know about but we are also quite clear in a kind of Rumsfeld way that there is a lot we do not know about and, therefore, I cannot guarantee to you that we will manage this completely. As you saw, the Prime Minister's statement yesterday talked about a whole set of issues of areas where we have vulnerabilities: where large crowds come together, train stations, et cetera. We are working on all of that but it is not against a background that is static, the challenge is growing and evolving every single day.

  Q32  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I ask, as the Chairman was, about the changeover of prime minister because you are right, it is an unprecedented situation. One of the things the Prime Minister came in with was he wanted to be more open, he wanted to go before Parliament, and we had a raft of statements like I have never seen, every day we had two to three statements and we were statement punch-drunk, but that has slightly gone. Has the Prime Minister's office reverted to type now? Have they gone back to where it was or is it still this dynamic organisation?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: That is slightly odd given the Prime Minister gave a statement yesterday.

  Q33  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Yes, but we have cut down since before the recess in July.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Thank goodness. I would have died if we had carried on at that pace!

  Q34  Mr Liddell-Grainger: That probably answers the question quite admirably.

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: As the Chairman raised, we did have an unprecedented period of time when we could do some work to prepare, for example on a whole range of constitutional reforms, so there were a number of things that had been worked on that in the early weeks of the new Prime Minister meant he wanted to give lots of parliamentary statements. We are moving to a more sustainable pace now, I hope.

  Q35  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I ask just one thing. Lord Drayson went for whatever circumstances and Admiral West yesterday did a very interesting u-boat turn and came out with a slightly different view when he came in to have a cup of coffee without biscuits. Do you, in the Civil Service, have a different way of dealing with the peers who are political appointees, not publicly elected appointees?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: In some ways, yes. They have different backgrounds so you have to think about what is the best way of briefing those peers for particular issues. If it is someone, for example, like Shriti Vadera, who is steeped in the ways of Government from her days as a special adviser, that is quite straightforward. If it is one of the others who has not previously been in UK Government then you want to work with them, talk to Cathy Ashton about making sure they know the ways of the Lords and understanding about how Government operates and the legislative process, so there is quite a lot of work to be done with some of them.

  Q36  Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you give them more resources? Say Drayson, who had no background in politics whatsoever, he came from industry, and I have no problem, he is a nice guy and I think he did a pretty good job actually, did you give him more resources to try and get him over the rather steep learning curve?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: We are always available to Ministers to do that. I think Lord Drayson had come much earlier and made the transition incredibly smoothly and brought particular skills that were hugely useful for the Defence Industrial Strategy.

  Mr Liddell-Grainger: I had no problem with that.

  Q37  Chairman: Does collective Cabinet responsibility apply in exactly the same way to the big tent people or do they have more latitude?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Collective Cabinet responsibility applies to all of the Cabinet.

  Q38  Chairman: To Government, to ministers?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: Yes, absolutely.

  Q39  Chairman: In just the same way, no special rules for the big tenters?

  Sir Gus O'Donnell: No.

  Chairman: We shall see about that.

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