CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 97-iiiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREpublic administration committee
Good government
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This is a
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The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Public Administration Committee
on
Members present
Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair
Mr David Burrowes
Paul Flynn
Kelvin
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger
Julie Morgan
Mr Gordon Prentice
Paul Rowen
Mr Charles Walker
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Examination of Witness
Witness: Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office, gave evidence.
Q119 Chairman: It is a great pleasure to welcome Liam Byrne, Minister for the Cabinet Office, to our Committee this morning. It is a particular pleasure because you are a minister who is genuinely interested in the kinds of things the Committee is interested, which has not always been the case with Cabinet Office ministers. We want to ask you some questions relevant to the conclusion of our inquiry which is rather grandly called "Good Government" and we also want to talk about leaks and whistleblowing which is another inquiry we have underway at the moment. I do not think you want to make a statement, do you?
Mr Byrne: Only really to applaud the Committee's timing; I do not think the premium on good government has ever been higher so I am very much looking forward to the Committee's conclusions.
Q120 Chairman: Your experience is varied and you have substantial private sector experience as well. We are trying to understand what the Government does well in this country and what it does not do well, and then to work out how it can do the not well bits better. What is your take on what we do well and what we do not do so well?
Mr Byrne: I think the Government has done well at delivering its big objectives.
Q121 Chairman: I am not talking about the Government.
Mr Byrne: Absolutely, but if you judge good government ultimately by the test of whether it achieves that which it sets out to achieve then actually I think the analysis is pretty good because the Government set out to substantially increase investment in public services which was a political mandate and I think public service investment has now been increased by about £170 billion since 1997. Most importantly for taxpayers there has been a substantial yield to that investment so education results have been transformed.
Q122 Chairman: I think I probably put the question badly; could I just try again? I know the Government has done all these splendid things - we all know that, with a few exceptions -but you have an interest in how organisations work, how they deliver what they are supposed to do. You have experienced a number of sectors and with you coming and thinking about how we do government in this country - the machinery of government - I am asking you what you think works well in terms of that machinery and what does not work so well.
Mr Byrne: I anticipated this debate and I thought about presenting my answer in this way, but I do think it is basically right. If you go back to when I studied political science at university the debate about the Thatcher years and the Major years - which is what we were studying - ultimately came down to the test as to whether government as a machine was capable of actually delivering on the objectives that were set for it. I do think it is important to underline the fact that actually when you are asking what government is good at, government is good today at achieving on its big objectives. That is quite a significant starting point and if you look at the investment that has been stepped up and the results that have been delivered on health, education and on crime, yes of course that is down to the dynamism of our political leadership in this country but it also does say something about the quality and integrity of the government machine, that it is able to step up the raising of money (that is a difficult set of policy conundrums to work through) but it has been successful in actually translating that increased collection of money into a series of outcomes that have resulted in a country that is richer and fairer. So I realise exactly what you are driving at in your question but I think the fundamental point to underline is that government has been good and is now good at delivering on its fundamental objectives. To add to that I would say that there have been clear signs that the government machine has proved good at the challenges of crisis management. If you look at our response to terrorist incidents or if you look at other civil contingency emergencies like foot and mouth or blue tongue but also if you look at the policy response and the response of the machine to the challenges of the downturn, what government has proved pretty adroit at - I mean the government machine as well as the value of our political leadership - is responding very, very rapidly with policy ingenuity and translated that into effective policy delivery. That, I think, would be the second major point that I would underline. So, delivering on big objectives over a sustained period of time; that is good. Somebody once said to me that there are different schools of public service reform, there is change that is driven by political leadership (we have had quite a lot of that), there are changes that are driven by new ways of doing things (that is often a bit slower) and then there are changes driven in response to crises or things going wrong. That is an important point to hold onto; crisis driven change is an important driver of public service reform and actually I think one of the things that government does do well is respond well in a crisis. I think the response during the downturn has been the latest proof of that.
Q123 Chairman: Let me turn it on its head then and ask you what we do not do well. I do not mean a particular government; I mean the way we do government in this country. What do we not do well in your view?
Mr Byrne: I think there are three things here. The central Civil Service is still not good enough at driving rapidly the business of delivery. I think it is good; I think it is radically better than it was in 1997 but it still has a bit of distance to go. Secondly, I think that policy makers are not entrepreneurial or innovative enough. Again that is much better than it was but it could be much better than it is today. Thirdly, I still think that the centre of government is not good enough at joining together integrated policy delivery. The reason I picked those three points is with an eye on the next decade because over the next decade it is unlikely that public spending will grow at the same pace that it has grown over the last decade. What that does is to create a pretty strategic inflection point because it means that the only way that you can satisfy the ever increasing pace of public expectations is by doing things differently. You cannot put more and more money into solving a problem; that means you can only square that circle of rising expectations and flatter public spending growth through innovation and driving delivery and better integration of solutions. The public will simply expect a very different kind of public service delivery over the next ten years. If you think about my kids' generation, my eight year old child types better than he can write; he spends more time on a computer than watching television - too much time on both! - but the normality of my children's generation is collaboration on-line, the ability to customise and tailor whatever they have in their lives into their individual outlook on life. If government is to deliver on that in public service reform then we have to become much more adroit at knitting together coalitions and partners around the individual or around the individual business or around the community. If you think about the great strategic challenge of the next ten years, which is how you do more better but without the same kinds of levels of public spending increases, then innovation, driving delivery and better and more effective working together I think become the hallmarks and the real criteria of success.
Q124 Chairman: As we have been doing this inquiry we have heard from witnesses a series of repeated and familiar criticisms both about the political side of government and the administrative side of government. On the political side we have heard arguments that governments legislate too much, they should legislate less and better; legislation is poorly considered and often poorly prepared; far too many initiatives are produced which makes it difficult to know what is really important; probably far too many ministers chasing around the system. On the other side there has been an analysis that the Civil Service does not do performance management very well, it does not bring people with front line experience in, it does not do risk very well, it does not do innovation very well. What I am asking you really is whether you recognise these critiques - both the political ones and the administrative ones and whether you broadly assent to some.
Mr Byrne: Some. I am not sure I would
agree with the too many initiatives, too much legislation and too many
bills. I understand why that critique is
there but I am not sure I agree with it.
If you step back and look at what the impact has been of the sum total
of those initiatives, you do see a country that is richer and fairer and you
see pretty radical improvements in pretty significant areas like health,
education and criminal justice. That was
the mandate we were elected to deliver on.
I am not sure, either, about too many ministers. I was doing a bit of thinking about this over
the last couple of days and I guess I am slightly cursed by my own personal
experience because at one point I had three ministerial jobs when I was a
Treasury minister, a Home Office minister and a regional minister and at
moments during that period I wished there were more ministers rather than less. When I was doing some maths on this last
night, if you look at DWP now, for example, DWP's staff count is about 118,000
and so the number of people in that department per minister is 20,000. If you take health, as I was fond of saying
when I was Health Minister, health is something like the world's 33rd
biggest economy. It is bigger as an
economy than
Q125 Chairman: We shall come back to this but I want to ask you about what you are saying about Whitehall. On this general point, do you think that governments just over promise and therefore necessarily under-deliver? I was thinking about this this morning listening to a discussion about the pledge to cut teenage pregnancies by half. I thought to myself, "How are people like Liam Byrne going to go round ensuring that teenagers don't get pregnant?" Is it not the kind of promise that just brings discredit upon the whole political process? The promise can never be delivered in that form; the levers are not there so do we not invite difficulties?
Mr Byrne: I think I would disagree with that. Obviously politicians have got to set expectations in the right place. I found it quite interesting as quite a new politician and a politician who was elected in a by-election four and bit years ago. I know what I say locally and I know how careful and precise I am locally so at the last election I was very clear about wanting to increase the number of neighbourhood police on the beat and I wanted three big health centres built and I wanted to get new investment in housing for local people. I was very, very precise about what I committed to do because I did want to be able to go back and say, "Actually against all of these things I've delivered". If you look at our own party and look at the pledge cards that we published at different elections, they were also pretty precise pledges. I do not think there is anything wrong with making commitments that you fully expect to deliver. I think that is what we get paid to go to work quite handsomely to do. I think you have to set goals and objectives.
Q126 Chairman: It is making pledges that are elusive to deliver and then being measured against them.
Mr Byrne: This is a really important political point because there is a risk right now in the times that we are in of politicians offering timidity and that is not what the public is in the market for.
Q127 Chairman: Do you not think if politicians said that governing is pretty tough actually but we are going to do our best, that might have more credibility with the public than making rather grandiose statements about what we are going to do and not achieving them - I do not mean this government, but any government - and then people just get fed up with politicians.
Mr Byrne: If you look at the big objectives that we have set overwhelmingly we have hit them on health and education.
Chairman: You are taking us back to the record now; I know that already. David Burrowes?
Q128 Mr Burrowes: I understand you like your cappuccinos and soup, and also you like your grid and your media grid and your media story. Is that part of your responsibility?
Mr Byrne: My basic job is making sure that the Government is joined up and coordinated across policy and communications.
Q129 Mr Burrowes: So communications is part of your responsibility.
Mr Byrne: Making sure that government is coordinated is part of my responsibility. I am not in charge of the Government's communications operation if that is where you are heading.
Q130 Mr Burrowes: Are you concerned about the story each week?
Mr Byrne: Not especially because it is the business of ministers and my ministerial colleagues to make sure that they are communicating effectively in what they do.
Q131 Mr Burrowes: In terms of your cross-departmental role is communications part of your brief?
Mr Byrne: It is quite hard to coordinate government's policy delivery without being concerned about the argument that we are trying to present and advance, but I am afraid that is not an exclusive responsibility of mine, that is a responsibility of the Cabinet.
Q132 Mr Burrowes: Perception is up there as much as performance in terms of driving across departments the delivery message as much as the delivery performance.
Mr Byrne: Sorry, I did not quite understand that.
Q133 Mr Burrowes: Are you concerned about what the perception is out there in terms of the message that is getting out there from departments?
Mr Byrne: Only as concerned as any other minister.
Q134 Mr Burrowes: The way you have taken on the role you have not seen the communications side as a key cross-departmental role that you should have.
Mr Byrne: I do not think you can make a contribution to coordinating the work of government and ignore communications.
Q135 Mr Burrowes: In terms of the media, in terms of what was going into the media, what is your role in terms of the issue of leaks?
Mr Byrne: I do not think I can claim any role in that. Do you mean the behaviour of civil servants?
Q136 Mr Burrowes: In terms of seeing out there in the media a number of leaks emanating. Do you have any responsibility or concern from your office as to how this is happening?
Mr Byrne: No more than any other minister.
Q137 Mr Burrowes: So from your office there is no involvement that you would directly have in terms of any inquiries in relation to this.
Mr Byrne: No, not me personally but obviously the Cabinet Office is also home to the Cabinet Secretary who is pretty concerned about the Civil Service codes and so on being upheld and is ultimately responsible for that code being upheld.
Q138 Mr Burrowes: Do you have any take on the issue of authorised and unauthorised leaks and what the state of play is in terms of the number of leaks that are out there, authorised and unauthorised?
Mr Byrne: Sorry, again I do not quite understand what you are asking.
Q139 Mr Burrowes: Do you have any responsibility or involvement to change the state of play in terms of the numbers of authorised leaks happening?
Mr Byrne: No more than any other minister.
Q140 Mr Burrowes: In terms of unauthorised leaks?
Mr Byrne: Again, no more than any other minister.
Q141 Chairman: We are looking at the whole leaks issue and we have had evidence from the FDA who say that the source of leaking is overwhelmingly political and that is corrosive of the system. I think what David wants to know is, if that is the case, are you the person to do something about it? If not you, who is?
Mr Byrne: The person who?
Q142 Chairman: If that is the problem, is it part of your job to sort it out?
Mr Byrne: No, I think that is a collective responsibility on government. It is something that is enshrined for civil servants in the Civil Service code and for ministers in the Ministerial Code. I think the Prime Minister has been very clear and has said this on a number of occasions, that the primacy of Parliament needs to be upheld. I am interested in this question and I have been through the number of statements, for example, that ministers and prime ministers have made to the House. What you see, if you can be bothered to add it up as I have, is that there have been something like 114 oral statements since the end of June 1997. Gordon Brown on average has made a statement to the House every 11 days; Tony Blair made a statement to the House on average every 19 days; Margaret Thatcher made an oral statement to the House every 24 days. So you can see that frequency of prime ministers coming to the House and presenting arguments and statements about public policy has really dramatically changed over the last 20 years.
Q143 Chairman: Do you have an equivalent list of political leaks for those respective periods, have you?
Mr Byrne: I have not added that up.
Q144 Mr Burrowes: Do you not think that is an issue for the Cabinet Office in terms of the numbers of political leaks?
Mr Byrne: No. You are making a serious point and I do not think that any one department should have this parcelled off to it or any one minister should have this parcelled off to them in their responsibility. That has to be a collective responsibility on members of the Government.
Q145 Mr Burrowes: So where does the leadership and guidance come from?
Mr Byrne: From the Prime Minister.
Q146 Mr Burrowes: Is it coming?
Mr Byrne: Absolutely.
Q147 Mr Burrowes: Are we seeing guidance on it?
Mr Byrne: I think it is a political task so I do not think it is something that you necessarily need a whole load of red tape around.
Q148 Mr Burrowes: How is that leadership shown in terms of communicating across departments?
Mr Byrne: Through the Prime Minister talking to members of his Cabinet and making it very clear.
Q149 Julie Morgan: I want to come back to what you said when you said you thought that the number of ministers was about right.
Mr Byrne: Yes.
Q150 Julie Morgan: Going back to some of the comments that some witnesses have made to us in particular Digby Jones told us that being a minister was a "dehumanising and depersonalising experience". You think that the number of ministers is right, but what about what the experience of the ministers and what they actually do?
Mr Byrne: The reason that you come into politics is because you want to make a difference to your country. Digby made a huge contribution to this country before he came into politics and I think he made a huge contribution while he was a member of the Government. Digby and I share a lot of instincts because we both had careers in politics and we are also from the same city. My experience of being a minister has been that it is an extremely demanding job but it is an extremely fulfilling job because you do get to make a contribution to the direction that this country is heading in.
Q151 Julie Morgan: So you think junior ministers are able to make contribution.
Mr Byrne: Yes, absolutely. Let me talk
from personal experience because that is probably easiest. If you look at the work that I was able to do
together with two home secretaries at the Home Office overhauling the
immigration system, we delivered together the biggest shake up in the immigration
system since 1945. We created the UK
Border Agency; we brought together three different parts of government into a
£2 billion agency with 25,000 staff in 134 countries; radically overhauled
border security and introduced a points system like the one in
Q152 Julie Morgan: I understand it is a team of ministers doing that.
Mr Byrne: Yes, but my personal experience was taking personal leadership of those agendas and driving them through the departments with the support of secretaries of state and in partnership with secretaries of state.
Q153 Julie Morgan: Why do you think that Digby felt like that?
Mr Byrne: I do not know.
Q154 Julie Morgan: You cannot imagine what he meant?
Mr Byrne: When he talked about being dehumanised and depersonalised?
Q155 Julie Morgan: Yes.
Mr Byrne: No. I have not talked to Digby about it.
Q156 Julie Morgan: That is nothing you can relate to at all.
Mr Byrne: No. I should talk to Digby about it and give him a bit of counselling.
Q157 Chairman: He gave this searing indictment of the Civil Service too. You say you are sort of bedfellows, is that your view?
Mr Byrne: Was Digby really expressing a different sentiment to me?
Q158 Mr Walker: I hope he was.
Mr Byrne: I think Digby was frustrated by some of the challenges that I have highlighted around delivery and innovation.
Q159 Chairman: Does frustrated by challenges mean that you agree with him?
Mr Byrne: I think I might differ from Digby in my analysis of how profound those challenges are and the possibility of remedy. In terms of agenda items I suspect - again I have not talked to Digby about it - that Digby would also underline that delivery and innovation and the ability to join up are amongst the key challenges for government reform over the next decade. Again I have not spoken to Digby about it and I cannot speak for him about it. I obviously should; his mum was one of my constituents.
Q160 Mr Prentice: Digby was not a member of the Labour Party; should all ministers in a labour government be members of the Labour Party?
Mr Byrne: I would not insist on it because I think at moments of profound challenge to the country, as we are experiencing now, there is an enormous amount to be said for drawing on the best talents available.
Q161 Mr Prentice: The best talents; of course he was a GOAT. He wants to see more independent ministers brought into the Government because presumably that is where the expertise lies. Do you want to see more GOATs in the Government?
Mr Byrne: I do not think that you can take an a fortiori position on this. What prime ministers have to do is look at the challenges in hand and build a team that they think are best equipped to deal with it. That, I think, is what Gordon has done. There will be talents out there that you want to scout for and headhunt and bring into the Government because there are particular challenges that you have that require some specialist skills. For example, Mervyn Davies or Baroness Vadera or Paul Myners all have brilliant, phenomenal skills and at a time when government is having to re-build the banking system those skills are quite helpful.
Q162 Mr Prentice: So the talent pool in the House of Commons is relatively shallow. Is that what you are saying?
Mr Byrne: No, I would not agree with that.
Q163 Mr Prentice: In order to get the expertise we have to go outside.
Mr Byrne: No, I would not agree with that analysis for a moment. I guess I speak as someone who decided to quit a career in business and go into front line politics. That is a decision I have never regretted. I have been a member of our party since the age of 15 so I guess it is always something I had in the back of my mind. I just think that sometimes governments confront situations that require very, very rapid assembly of sometimes quite specialist skills and obviously our own pool in the House of Commons is only refreshed in a big way at general elections and sometimes crises and great challenges loom without adhering to an electoral timetable. So you do need a bit of flexibility I think.
Q164 Mr Prentice: I think a lot of people were quite shocked that the chief executives of HBOS and the RBS did not have a banking qualification. Do you think it is a disadvantage that so many politicians do not bring specific expertise into the jobs that they are appointed to do by the Prime Minister, for example having a health secretary who is a doctor?
Mr Byrne: I think there are two points to this. Firstly, I think members of the Commons bring
an incredible range of expertise from outside from their previous careers and
previous experiences. Secondly, we are
just much closer to the people that government is supposed to serve than civil
servants ever can be. I went into politics
because I was frustrated about the direction of
Q165 Mr Prentice: You sit in at cabinet meetings but you are not a member of the cabinet. Is that right?
Mr Byrne: Yes, that is right.
Q166 Mr Prentice: How many full cabinet ministers are there?
Mr Byrne: It is set out in legislation; I would have to check it. I think it is about 20 or 21.
Q167 Mr Prentice: You were a management consultant. I am not asking you to tell tales out of school, but as a management consultant - that is your expertise - observing discussions at cabinet (who contributes, how often they contribute, the nature of the contributions, how the Prime Minister pulls it all together) is it an effective body at deciding the central objectives and direction of the government?
Mr Byrne: I have been very lucky in my career in that I spent a short period of time as a management consultant, I spent some time as a banker but I spent the bulk of my career starting to build a business from scratch. When you start a dotcom with two of you and grow it to be a successful business you do know the value in the modern economy and in modern society of building and providing leadership through collective leadership. I think the Cabinet does a superb job of that. That is just my observation based on 14 years in business.
Q168 Mr Prentice: Fair enough.
Mr Byrne: You maybe would not expect me to say anything else.
Q169 Mr Walker: Minister, you are both clever and thin so you are nothing like Digby Jones, so you do not need worry about drawing any comparisons there.
Mr Byrne: And bald; Digby has a full head of hair.
Q170 Mr Walker: We did have Digby Jones before us which I found a very distressing evidence session for a variety of reasons. He said there were way too many civil servants and he was very dismissive of civil servants and said that the job could be done with 50% less. Bearing in mind that he was only a minister for 14 months it is difficult to see what contribution he could possibly have made to public life in 14 months. How on earth is he in a position after 14 months - a fairly ineffective 14 months that he admitted to - to decide that the job of running this country could be done with 50% less civil servants? Do you agree with him?
Mr Byrne: No.
Q171 Mr Walker: Why do you think he came to that conclusion? Do you think it was just a bit of grandstanding? We all like grandstanding; I do it all the time.
Mr Byrne: I do not know.
Q172 Mr Walker: Do you think it was a helpful intervention? It got a lot of coverage in the national newspapers. Do you think it was a loyal intervention?
Mr Byrne: In what way loyal?
Q173 Mr Walker: I do not think it was a loyal intervention.
Mr Byrne: Loyal to whom?
Q174 Mr Walker: I do not think he was loyal to Gordon Brown. I do not think he has been loyal to Gordon Brown. I do not think he would show any loyalty to the people who probably had to tolerate him for the 14 months that he was a minister. There seems to be no comprehension from Lord Jones that perhaps the problem resided with him and that when he went to civil servants they said, "My god, who is this man that we've had foisted upon us; let's just try to manage him out of the door". Is there any possibility that Digby Jones was a mistake, that the Prime Minister, in trying to build the government of the talents, actually put someone in there who perhaps was not that talented?
Mr Byrne: I think you are being enormously unfair.
Mr Walker: I am enjoying myself.
Chairman: Perhaps I ought to remind the Committee that we are not doing an inquiry into Digby Jones.
Q175 Mr Walker: He did make some incredibly sweeping statements about the Civil Service.
Mr Byrne: He did, but I am not here to comment on Digby Jones. I have known Digby for some years. He was the director general of the CBI when I was a member of the CBI and I thought he was an enormously effective leader of the CBI. I think he undersold himself. He was an enormously effective minister. He loves this country and he wants this country to be better in the future. He, too, wanted to get his hands dirty in that great effort. Three cheers to him.
Q176 Mr Walker: Why three cheers? What did he do for this country that we need to give him three cheers for, besides get a peerage and he is going to be a burden now on the taxpayer for the next 40 years if he claims his allowances?
Mr Byrne: He has a distinguished track record of leadership in the business community. He was an enormously effective advocate for the business community while he was at the CBI and while he was in government. The work that he did as a trade minister - again I am not here to answer an inquiry into Digby Jones - from what I heard from our embassies around the world when I was the immigration minister travelling to different countries and from the business community, they thought he did a good job.
Q177 Mr Walker: Let us talk about the Civil Service because that is what I am really interested in. I still think the Civil Service of this country does a pretty excellent job; I think we are lucky to have it. What can be done in your view to make the Civil Service even better than it currently is? What constructive measures could we take? I know that is a huge question and you have just minutes to answer it, but if you were Prime Minister what would you like to do?
Mr Byrne: Let me go back to the analysis that I gave the Chairman a few
moments ago. I think the big challenges
for the next decade are around delivery and innovation and around the way in
which you join up government. There are
number of things you can do under each of those headings. Let me say a word about the detail under
each, then there is something you have to do to government reform and
government performance management as a whole in order to create an environment
in which all three of those issues are resolved more effectively in the years
to come. One of the great things that
Gus has done in the Civil Service is to introduce the capability reviews. Capability reviews are good, they put
performance management on the map, they are well established now across
Q178 Mr Walker: You have to do all that while retaining a culture of public service, while managing people's career expectations and retaining morale so that people do not feel that they come into the Civil Service to perform a career and then they see people being brought in from the private sector and going over their heads. The third point, which I think you touched on, is that the public simply will not wear private sector salaries being imported into the public sector. You can see there is already a push back against that at the moment. There is an upper limit of about £250,000, beyond which people start getting very, very nervous. Would you see those as challenges?
Mr Byrne: I am a bit biased on this because I have members of my family who are civil servants. My perspective on this is almost entirely shaped by the work that I do on staff engagement. When I went to the UK Border Agency I spent about six months of my time on the road, I probably met a couple of thousand front line staff over quite a short period of time. I have taken that approach to the Cabinet Office. What is great and what is inspiring is to be able to sit back and we do have some absolutely fantastic people who are young and who have come into the Civil Service because they too love this country and want to make a difference to it. They have a myriad of choices in front of them as to how they can go and make the world a better place. They have what I did not necessarily have when I left university, but these are individuals who have gone into the Civil Service because they do want to make a difference and they do think that they can make that difference to the Civil Service. In my experience what they want is much more latitude to be able to make an impact so they are much more interested in delivery jobs in the future. The agenda that Gus set out a year or two ago about skills for government and the need to apply specialist skills, in my experience, is really enthusiastically welcomed by junior members of the Civil Service because they too want to go and get their hands dirty to make a difference, and they too passionately believe that policy making in this country would be different and better and stronger for having delivery experience right at the heart of it. There is an inspiring generation of civil servants that are coming up through the ranks at the moment and we have to harness that energy, passion, enthusiasm and brainpower.
Q179 Chairman: Can I just ask one final Digby Jones question? He wanted to take a sort of slash and burn approach to the Civil Service; he wanted to cut it in half. You are a Civil Service cutter; you want a much smaller centre. In your speeches you say you are very pleased that we now have, as you say, the smallest Civil Service since the Second World War.
Mr Byrne: Nearly.
Q180 Chairman: You did not say "nearly" in your speech. Cutting the Civil Service by 86,700 and then future cuts in further years. Does your view of this strategic smaller centre mean a radically reduced size of the Civil Service?
Mr Byrne: Six months ago I would have said yes and what I would say today is
probably. The only reason for the note
of hesitation now is because there is such a huge policy and delivery agenda
that has now swung into place to fight the downturn that I do not think we are
yet crystal clear about what the consequences will be for the Civil Service
workforce. An obvious example is that if
we want to dramatically step up the support that Jobcentre Plus provides on the
front line then we are probably in the business of hiring civil servants to
those roles. I think what is quite
interesting - you hinted at this in your question - is that we probably have to
look at the balance of civil servants in front line delivery jobs like the
Jobcentre and the balance of jobs at the centre. There are departments like the Treasury, for
example, that actually need to strengthen and probably increase their policy
resource at the moment because they are having to undertake some pretty
complicated stuff and then get it delivered.
I do not think we have that picture clarified yet but over the next
three or four months we have to. There
is, however, an extraordinarily important philosophical question behind the
question that you pose which is that we cannot go into this next period of 18
months and say, "Look, we're going to pick up new burdens by building new
bureaucracies"; we have to recognise that in the 21st century it is
quite possible to have strong government without having big government. Translating that rhetoric into reality is
going to take a bit more patient work over the next couple of months and we
have to look at the balance between the front line and the centre. Instinctively I believe it is possible to do
more and to pick up new burdens without building new bureaucracies at the
centre. We have to construct a future in
which it is possible for government to be stronger and do more, particularly at
times like now, without simply building a bigger bureaucracy in
Q181 Chairman: The Digby Jones point about cutting the Civil Service in half was nonsense, was it not?
Mr Byrne: I do not think you can cut the Civil Service in half, no.
Q182 Chairman: You are talking about not increasing but originally you were talking about substantially reducing. What I was not clear about was whether you were simply saying that the centre - Whitehall, which really is tiny in terms of the totality of Civil Service numbers - can be culled because it is going to be more strategic or whether you were talking about the whole run of civil servants being reduced.
Mr Byrne: Instinctively I think that
Q183 Kelvin Hopkins: I have to say that I have read your speech that you made at St Albans recently twice, all the way through and I find it very difficult to understand, but then I am a very simple chap. People are looking at government as having failed massively because they are about to lose - or have lost already - their jobs, some are losing their homes and there has been a catastrophic mistake in economic policy, specifically in Britain but across the world as well. Yet at the same time you are making optimistic noises about government. Did anybody see this coming? Did anybody inside the Treasury - and you were there - say, "Minister, there's a real problem"?
Mr Byrne: No, I do not think the effectiveness of international regulatory
systems allowed us to understand what domestic banks were doing in foreign
markets. If you look at the huge
structural role of foreign banks in the
Q184 Kelvin Hopkins: Surely Britain was leading the way in deregulation. We are the ultimate free marketeers and some of the European governments were much more restrained about all this.
Mr Byrne: The noises in the debate, if anything, were encouraging the Government to be even more laissez-faire in the way we approached regulation. We have to be absolutely clear because if we do not get the analysis right we will not get the prescription right. The global downturn of today is the worst since 1945; its origin was in markets abroad. What government has done now is put in place three very careful steps, first to save the banks (because if they have gone down they have taken our bank accounts, mortgages and business loans with them), the second is to put real help on the table now for business -----
Q185 Kelvin Hopkins: I know what we are going to do, what I want to know is how we got there. Building an economy where demand is driven essentially by a housing bubble and a mountain of credit is going to crash. I was writing this some years ago, and one or two other people of a similar view were saying this, but this was completely ignored. Was no-one in Whitehall, in the Treasury, saying this? If it was not, that surely was a failure of government and it was certainly not good government.
Mr Byrne: I think the chief secretary has been very clear that this crisis was impossible to see coming because international regulatory regimes simply did not give us the transparency into what these financial institutions were doing abroad. When you saw the assets they were holding dramatically collapse in value that did produce a series of consequences in financial markets that resulted in the credit crunch. That analysis is set out very clearly by the Prime Minister in the Road to the G20 document that we published last week. That is 120 pages of analysis of the current downturn.
Q186 Kelvin Hopkins: Would it not have been a good idea to have had a range of views about how we manage the economy inside the Treasury and have had a debate? It seems to me, as an outsider, that nobody was saying this inside the Treasury or inside government.
Mr Byrne: I think Gordon Brown was saying it as Chancellor. From 1999 onwards Gordon was underlining the risks of the lack of ability to see into what financial institutions were doing around the world. We had an early warning of this with the Asian crisis some years ago and again we spoke out then for the need for better international financial regulation.
Q187 Kelvin Hopkins: It is only 18 months ago and it was on television at the weekend where the Prime Minister was making a speech at the Guildhall saying he thought the bankers were doing a great job, and we were not going to regulate them and it was all going ahead as he wished.
Mr Byrne: That is a slight mischaracterisation.
Q188 Kelvin Hopkins: I am a simple chap and I see this as a simple -----
Mr Byrne: There is a difference between a simple analysis and a mischaracterisation.
Chairman: Kelvin, can I just say that we are not the Treasury Committee, alas.
Q189 Kelvin Hopkins: I will move on then. One of your themes has been that community action at the local level is the way forward. Birmingham is a centre of motor manufacturing which is suffering terribly at the moment from macro-economic problems which are national and international. Community action at the local level is not going to solve their problems, is it?
Mr Byrne: The response to the downturn has to be international, national and local. The three steps we have taken have to operate at international, national and local level. That is why, to set that out with clarity, the Government is publishing regional real help now plans which explain exactly what kind of things are happening at what kind of level. At the international level we have to achieve an international consensus about no reversion to protectionism, about fiscal stimulus around the world and international financial regulation reform. That is something that is best achieved at an international level and that is our agenda for the G20 conference in April. At a national level, monetary policy and fiscal policy have to come together in a combined boost. At local level there has to be substantial capital investment in schools, in roads, in infrastructure so that actually we come through this downturn stronger and faster and that communities remain together. There are different things that must operate at different levels.
Q190 Kelvin Hopkins: You mentioned the Asian crisis, but the one country that did impose a degree of protectionism, it imposed exchange controls and devalued and successfully came out of it very quickly, was Malaysia. They defied advice of the IMF and indulged in what would now be called protectionism. They did extremely well out of that.
Mr Byrne: What is the GDP per capita of
Kelvin
Chairman: Kelvin's point is the need for a diversity of voices within government so we are not caught unprepared for things that happen. Paul Flynn, did you want to come in?
Q191 Paul Flynn: I read your speech with enjoyment. It is stimulating but I had difficulty identifying the language. I can see it as a language that is derived from English but it is not really the English that we know and love. It appears to be written for a year zero of a labour government as well rather than the position we are in. "Freeing every police force from the bureaucracy of all targets bar one; the confidence of the public they serve". That is one of the claims of this brave new world. We put those targets on the police we have decided now the only target to measure is "the confidence of the public they serve". How do we measure "the confidence of the public they serve" when the opinion of the public is conditioned by what they read in the papers rather than the truth of what the achievements of the police are?
Mr Byrne: I do not agree with that.
Q192 Paul Flynn: I will give you an example. In my area crime has gone down by 20%, violent crime has gone down by 20%, burglary has gone down by 35%, car crime has gone down by 20%, yet the perception of the person on the street - the tabloid reader - is that crime has increased. How are you going to measure that and decide that is the only criteria you need?
Mr Byrne: By separating the national and local picture of satisfaction. I am not an expert in the way that this objective and this target are going to be put together, but I know in my own area where crime is also down very dramatically thanks to neighbourhood policing, when the West Midlands Police study local satisfaction - how the police were doing locally - there is a dramatically better picture than if you ask a question: "How do you think crime is going in the UK?" I think what we have to judge police forces on is public satisfaction with policing in their area. Although I love West Midlands Police I could not hold them to account for how people thought crime was heading in the whole country, but I could judge them for how they were delivering on the streets of Saltley.
Q193 Paul Flynn: To its great credit this Government has introduced the Statistics Bill which has established for the first time ever an independent body that provides the objective evidence on all statistics and the first thing that certain parts of the Government did was to try to spin the figures again. Quite rightly they have been criticised by Sir Michael Scholar of the Statistics Authority. Does this not fill you with despair, creating figures that can be judged to be objective?
Mr Byrne: I think it is to our great credit that we have introduced the Independent Statistics Authority and some quite significant changes have gone alongside with that, for example around access that you get to statistics. There was not a month or a quarter that went by when I did not regret that as an immigration minister looking forward to the immigration statistics that I was not able to see until the day before or the morning (I cannot remember which). The introduction of the new Statistics Authority is such a big change that there are going to be the odd teething problems. The example that you allude to is an example of that. I know Kevin Brennan has written to the Committee about it and maybe he is planning to write further. Building confidence in statistics will be hard work. That is not something that is a problem exclusively owned by government; that is something that is more generally true. It comes back to some quite profound themes in the way the public thinks about risk. If I could just pick up one thing that you mentioned at the beginning of your question about it being the Government that introduced all these targets and now you are saying they are being taken away, this is an absolutely key point in the public service reform debate over the next ten years because actually, when we came into office in 1997, in order to drive the performance of services from, in many places, poor to good/adequate some pretty strong, robust, top down performance management was needed for the whole system to move from good/adequate to excellent across the board. You cannot beat that from the centre, can you? The only way in which you can deliver that is by beginning to let go.
Q194 Paul Flynn: You have some very interesting things to say about the effect of YouTube, Wikepedia and others and the extraordinary results involving millions of people from a small workforce in the centre somewhere. How do you see that working in government? I am not clear from your speech what the implications are.
Mr Byrne: As a prolific blogger yourself you will have your own take on
this. I think there are two big
opportunities. The first is in the way
that policy is created and shaped. If
you look at Facebook it has something like 100 million users now and there is a
creation of new media that takes place which means it is on Facebook in a
completely new way. If you look at
enormously significant new products like Linux, that was actually created by a
process of mass collaboration of software programmers around the world. My question is: how do you begin to make and
shape evidence based policy in a way that really draws together the
experiences, views and ideas of people that are not just dispersed across the
Q195 Paul Flynn: Do you really see a chance for evidence based policies when we know that all governments are addicted to getting a drip feed of adulation from the tabloid press every day and policies will be aimed to bring in a harvest of votes eventually?
Mr Byrne: I am surprised that you say this.
Q196 Paul Flynn: The drugs policy, for a start, is to send out a signal to the country that heroin and cocaine are no more dangerous than ecstasy or magic mushrooms because they are all from the same category. These are decisions taken recently. That is irrational, it is untrue and it is a dangerous policy to send out, but it is popular with the Daily Mail.
Mr Byrne: I think you are wrong about the ecstasy policy.
Q197 Paul Flynn: Do you think ecstasy is as dangerous as heroin? Are magic mushrooms as dangerous heroin or cocaine?
Mr Byrne: I think ecstasy is a random, dangerous killer.
Q198 Paul Flynn: There are three classifications, should it be classification A like heroin and cocaine or classification C?
Mr Byrne: I am not an expert.
Chairman: Again, I think magic mushrooms are not our territory.
Q199 Paul Flynn: Can I ask whether the Welfare Bill is designed on experience or whether it is designed to grab a few favourable headlines. Are you happy with that Bill?
Mr Byrne: I am surprised at your line of inquiry because you, amongst many of our colleagues, are a more adroit user of new media than, for example, I am and the idea that you somehow tailor policy to specific media titles is a bit of an old fashioned way of looking at policy delivery and reform. If you look, for example, at the media market I think that the mainstream newspapers now sell something like 22 million copies fewer than they did in 1997. If you look at the audience of the main news channels, their audience has collapsed. That means if you are a government communicator that digital media and regional media and Metro and freesheets have a vastly greater significance than they had before. I just think that that hardwired link between policy and certain newspapers is a link that is not there any more. The media environment is so much more complicated today that that link has just dissolved.
Q200 Chairman: You are not suggesting that there has not been a link between the public policy of the Daily Mail over the last ten years or so, are you? Just read the memoirs.
Mr Byrne: I am talking about the future.
Q201 Paul Flynn: I am not going to ask you any more Digby Jones questions but I would like to ask you your opinion of Chris Mullin who went to Tony Blair and said, "I want to leave the Government because I want to have more influence which I will have on the back benches". He has written a very revealing book on his experiences in government. He calls his department the Department for Folding Deckchairs. He did find the whole thing a depersonalising and dehumanising experience and he gave it up. You gave us the figure of £16 billion as the spending of a health minister, have you got an equivalent figure for a minister in the Wales Office or the Scotland Office?
Mr Byrne: No, but I can certainly rustle one up for you.
Q202 Paul Flynn: The picture we have of junior ministers is that they are rather aimless souls who were sent to meetings that nobody else wanted to go to.
Mr Byrne: I profoundly disagree with that.
Q203 Paul Flynn: People have been scratching their heads trying to find them something to do to keep them occupied. That is a pretty bleak picture that we have had.
Mr Byrne: I think that is a ridiculous portrayal.
Q204 Paul Flynn: It is come through from eminent former ministers.
Mr Byrne: That is not my experience.
Q205 Chairman: Surely your argument about a smaller centre should apply to the political centre too.
Mr Byrne: No, absolutely not. If you
look at the way in which policy is going to be delivered in the future, I think
that it will be more important and there will be a bigger role for ministers to
actually ensure that delivery focussed innovation and joined-up working are
actually happening in practice. If I
could just take the example of regional ministers, Stephen Hughes, the Chief
Executive of Birmingham who I was having an argument with a couple weeks ago, said
something very interesting about public service spend in Birmingham. They reckon roughly that public spending in
Q206 Chairman: That is an interesting analysis. So we can have even more ministers because there is all this joining up to do. On this analysis there is clearly infinite work for the politicians.
Mr Byrne: I think the job of work of ministers will change over the next decade.
Q207 Chairman: This is an interesting proposition: more ministers and fewer civil servants.
Mr Byrne: The same number of ministers; I am not proposing you radically increase them.
Q208 Paul Flynn: This is a splendid document. There are elements of manic optimism: "Standards cannot be a gamble. They must be a guarantee". You talk very much along the lines of the 1997 New Labour vision of setting these bold targets. Experience has shown us that the targets are more often measures of failure rather than measures of success. What is the magic formula you are going to have to make sure that standards are not a gamble, they are a guarantee? They have not been in the past.
Mr Byrne: I think that is wrong as well; I do not think the evidence bears that out. If you look at the big targets, for example, in health we had a profound political difference with the Conservatives and with the Liberal Democrats in that actually we do not think we should write the medical profession a cheque for £100 billion and say, "Have a good time". We say, "We expect you to deliver on certain standards", including making sure that waiting is no longer than 18 weeks or making sure that people suffering from cancer get a diagnosis within a couple of weeks.
Q209 Paul Flynn: You seem to think that the role of the health service to provide a doctor in the evening. We have had some very odd measures for the health service and the least important one are waiting times, for instance. The outcomes are not measured in a rational, scientific way. They are again the Daily Mail standards of what people's perceptions are.
Mr Byrne: I think that is an extraordinary thing to say.
Chairman: We do like your interest in this notion of public service guarantees because it is something that this Committee has recommended and we would like you to take that further.
Q210 Mr Walker: Can I just ask one quick question? Paul touched on the fact that you are a great fan of MySpace and modern technologies. Director of Digital Engagement is a position being advertised at the moment by the Cabinet Office with a salary of between £120,000 and £160,000. We are in the midst of a recession and you are looking for someone to do twittering. Is that right?
Mr Byrne: I think that is another ridiculous characterisation.
Q211 Mr Walker: But it is fun, is it not? We have not had enough grandstanding at this Committee. Seriously, Minister, perhaps this was not explained as well as it should have been when the advertisement was placed; a bit of insensitivity perhaps.
Mr Byrne: In a funny way I do not think there is a big political divide on this kind of thing. In response to Paul I said a bit about how the media environment is radically changing and this presents two opportunities. We have to ensure that taxpayers know about what we are doing with their money and communicate that across a much more complicated range of channels. For many people in this country digital media is the channel through which they find out about what is going on and what government is doing with their taxes. Secondly - although I cannot speak much about this because it is a new agenda and I have not thought it through by any stretch of the imagination - on both sides of the political divide there is a new interest in how public policy can be conducted more effectively by changing behaviour. This is something that the Right Honourable Member for Witney has talked about in the past. He has prayed in aid a book called Nudge which is pretty interesting stuff. If you look at the Economist last year when they were naming their economist of the year almost all of them were behavioural economists. There is a new frontier, if you like, in public service reform around this idea of how behaviour economics and social marketing are harnessed in order to change behaviours in order to invest in prevention. That is true in health, it is true in criminal justice and it is also true in education. Digital technology will be absolutely critical in delivering on that agenda. This is very much a new agenda in government. There is a shared political interest in it but I would rather not talk about it, I would rather just do something about it.
Q212 Mr Walker: Are we going to read on your twitter site what soup you had tonight?
Mr Byrne: No.
Q213 Paul Rowen: Is this the third or fourth ministerial post you have had since you were elected?
Mr Byrne: It depends on whether you count being a regional minister, a minister for the Treasury and an immigration minister. I was police minister for a glorious two weeks.
Q214 Paul Rowen: So this is your fifth.
Mr Byrne: Sixth I think.
Q215 Paul Rowen: Sixth in four years. Do you think that makes for good government?
Mr Byrne: Are you asking if I think I am a good minister?
Q216 Chairman: Paul is asking you a question that has come up a lot in our evidence which is that ministers alternate too frequently and that civil servants move too frequently too. He is asking you about ministers in your experience.
Mr Byrne: It is really hard to generalise because it completely depends on the challenges you have in front of you.
Q217 Paul Rowen: Let us take the Borders and Immigration Service. You were put in there to sort it out.
Mr Byrne: Yes.
Q218 Paul Rowen: I asked your successor last week what the target was for asylum seekers. We knew that, it was 60%, but it is still 38% in terms of delivery. You were put in there to sort it out and it does not seem to have happened.
Mr Byrne: If you are going to take immigration reform then actually you voted against putting in place £100 million extra for immigration policing. You were on the Committee when I asked the Committee's authority to do that and you voted against it. If you look at what we have done by bringing together UK Visas and HMRC into the UK Border Agency actually that has created a stronger border security system for this country. The number of people coming in claiming asylum is now at the lowest level for about 12 or 13 years. We can selectively quote statistics about immigration reform but actually you are from the party that has consistently voted against many of the reforms that we try to drive through. I think that is a pretty rich analysis.
Q219 Paul Rowen: That was not the point I was making. You are the minister and you were put in there to do a job, yet the target for dealing with asylum seekers, getting their claims done is 60% and it is at 38%. That is a pretty poor record in my view.
Mr Byrne: If you look at the improvements in the UK Border Agency over a period of two years overall its performance has improved radically and that was often reform that was driven in the teeth of political opposition.
Q220 Paul Rowen: Taking other targets, you have reduced the Civil Service by 86,700. Apart from saving money, how has that made the departments more efficient in delivering your agenda?
Mr Byrne: Sorry, I do not understand.
Q221 Paul Rowen: Let me explain. I met members from the Public and Commercial Services Union yesterday from government offices and what they were telling me was they have lost 28% of the staff but the jobs have not gone. They told me they are still dealing with claims for European Social Fund, for example, but they are having to bring in agency staff to do the work because they do not have enough staff to do it. Or they are having very senior managers - because you are having more senior people rather than junior people - doing very menial tasks. Is that an efficient government?
Mr Byrne: Let me put the answer in this way: we are going to deliver on the targets for savings that were established by Peter Gershon so those efficiencies are real. However, against that backdrop we have, for example, dramatically improved education results and dramatically improved health results.
Q222 Paul Rowen: The tasks are still there and unless you actually change the nature of government, if you are still requiring fewer civil servants to do the same job, you actually end up doing the job more badly, do you not?
Mr Byrne: Let me answer the question again. In 1997 45% of kids got five good GCSE results; it is now 65%. Waiting times are down to 18 weeks; life expectancy is up. Crime is down 39%; burglary is down 55%; knife crime is down 39%. We have delivered these changes.
Q223 Paul Rowen: With respect, do you not think that the teachers or the doctors or the police have actually delivered that, not the civil servants who have actually produced the beans that have to be counted?
Mr Byrne: They are operating within a reform agenda that is set by government. You cannot say, "Okay, you have reduced the number of civil servants and the results of public service delivery have gone up" and somehow criticise us.
Q224 Paul Rowen: You have employed more teachers, have you not?
Mr Byrne: Yes, absolutely.
Q225 Paul Rowen: They have delivered their job.
Mr Byrne: Just to remind you of your own question, your own question was about whether the central Civil Service is more efficient now. If the results are going up and the number of civil servants is going down then that is pretty good, is it not?
Q226 Chairman: I think Paul's initial question is one I would like you to answer. You have been around organisations, you know about this, in your judgment how long does a minister have to be in a post in order to be effective? That is a question you can answer for us.
Mr Byrne: It is an important question and it entirely depends on what the task in hand is and what experience and networks the minister has.
Q227 Chairman: I think you can do better than that. It is not two weeks, is it?
Mr Byrne: Let us take an example of the Business Secretary. The Business Secretary brings in an incredible wealth of experience to his job and has a big job in hand. It is a really difficult question to answer without taking into account the attributes, the experience, the expertise, the energy and the enthusiasm of the minister in question and the nature of the job in hand.
Q228 Chairman: Of course there are variables and I am pushing you because it is really helpful to us to have a sense of this. It has been put to us very strongly that one of the deficiencies of government is this problem of too rapid alternation. For a minister to be effective, broadly speaking, give or take all the variables, how long should they be in the post for do you think?
Mr Byrne: I can only speak from personal experience. In my own personal experience it takes at least three or four months to get fully up to speed, to get your agenda established, to get your relationships in place, to get the degree of alignment that you need with your civil servants, to tune into your accountabilities in the House. I know why you are asking the question and it is an important question, but that is my personal experience and I think even then it is probably hard to generalise from it.
Q229 Chairman: That is interesting. Half a year, say, to get up to speed and then the question would be how long would it take to really know the job and to improve in the job, to understand the systems you are dealing with and to make an impact, see things through, take responsibility for the outcomes of initiatives as well as launching them. Of course often what happens, as Paul is saying, is that these things are not continuous because the person who picks up the responsibility for things is not the person who has usually started them.
Mr Byrne: It does in part depend on the nature of the task that you have in hand. From my experience in social care, we were able to get individual budgets as a policy area up and running pretty quickly in part because I was building on the extraordinary good work of my predecessor.
Q230 Paul Rowen: How many are there? My understanding is that there are only 16,000, and that is three years after you ceased being health minister.
Mr Byrne: I would be happy to write to the Committee with the latest figures.
Q231 Paul Rowen: There are not many. There are parts of the country where there are a lot of personal budgets but there are not that many in total.
Mr Byrne: I would be delighted to write to you with the latest figures.
Q232 Paul Rowen: One other thing on capability reviews, the Cabinet Office came very low down the bottom when we looked at the capability reviews. I know you have this review of the reviews going on, but what have you done since you arrived at the Cabinet Office to actually improve the capability of the department?
Mr Byrne: There are two important changes that I asked Gus to make at the Cabinet Office. The first was to give much greater weight to the National Economic Council and to ensure that it was equipped with the best skills available to drive not only the development of policy but also to drive delivery of policy. I also wanted much better integration between the National Economic Council and the work that the Cabinet Office does every day to coordinate the domestic policy agenda through a group called the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat. That is change number one. Change number two is that I want the Cabinet Office to be much better equipped to drive public service reform with greater force and greater speed over the months ahead. That is why we are re-organising in order to bring a number of parts of the Cabinet Office together in one public service reform group which I am able to tell the Committee this morning will be lead by a new director general called Chris Wormald.
Q233 Paul Rowen: You also said that there could be savings made by bringing together the IT and human resources departments into one central section. Given the experience of government with IT projects - massively over time and over budget - is that not even more dangerous, putting all your eggs in one basket?
Mr Byrne: I have worked in government IT for most of my career and my experience tells me there is no iron law that points in that direction.
Q234 Paul Rowen: You think by bringing it all together it will be more efficient.
Mr Byrne: I think savings can be made.
Q235 Paul Rowen: Do you think the example of the health service computer system is a good example of where centralisation has improved efficiency and saved money.
Mr Byrne: I am not massively well qualified to comment on the health system.
Paul Rowen: It is over budget, underperforming and those hospitals that have introduced it have had to employ a lot of staff to actually cope with it.
Q236 Chairman: I think we have got as far as we are going to get on that, Paul. I just want to ask you a couple of very quick things. Your Whitehall reforms are interesting and we follow them with interest. What I would like to know is, beyond those - better joining-up, more front line, capability reviews and so on - are you a Whitehall reformer? There are radical ideas around for what we might do to Whitehall; there is talk about increasing political control, for example (we have had IPPR reports saying that); we have had arguments for defining more clearly the accountabilities of ministers and civil servants. Is that an agenda that interests you beyond the things that you propose so far?
Mr Byrne: It is an agenda that interests me a great deal. I cannot claim to have fully thought through
all aspects of the
Q237 Chairman: Do you wish that Whitehall reform had been grasped more firmly when the Government first came in?
Mr Byrne: I have thought about this a lot and I think that in politics you do have to prioritise. It would be unfair of me, as a relatively new minister, to criticise ministers who came in in 1997 and the first couple of terms because actually I think the priority was just driving the re-investment and renewal of public service that have been so badly degraded in the previous 18 years.
Q238 Chairman: Michael Barber, the delivery man, who has written the book Instruction to Deliver says that the failure to reform Whitehall is the great failure of the Government.
Mr Byrne: I disagree with that because I think the overwhelming priority of the Government was to drive the improvement of public service delivery.
Q239 Chairman: He thought that one was connected to the other.
Mr Byrne: The slight irony of Michael's position is that through government
reform and through
Q240 Chairman: Let me ask one practical thing to end with. This Committee has spent more time than it likes to remember on the issue of whether we should have a Civil Service Bill to put the Civil Service into statute. We have been through this endlessly. We have had endless government undertakings; we have had draft bills; we have produced our own bill on it. Finally, with the arrival of Gordon Brown, we had the commitment to do it and we had a constitution reform programme of which this was an integral part. We have had a joint committee considering it; we have considered it. It is ready to go. The only problem is that is still has not appeared. I think everyone wants to know whether we are going to get it in this Parliament.
Mr Byrne: Where we are is the position that Michael Wills gave the House on 9 December. In the Queen's Speech on 3 December the relevant sentence in the Queen's Speech was that we will continue to take full proposals on constitution renewal, including strengthening the role of Parliament and other measures. Michael Wills stated in the House on 9 December that proposals on the Bill will be presented in April and May and at this stage that remains the position beyond which, although I would love to go further, I cannot because we are still in the process of knitting together the position that the Government will take.
Q241 Chairman: There is to be a constitutional reform bill in this session.
Mr Byrne: Yes.
Q242 Chairman: There is to be Civil Service legislation as part of that.
Mr Byrne: Yes.
Q243 Chairman: The intention is to complete this in this Parliament.
Mr Byrne: The position remains as Mr Wills gave it to the House.
Q244 Chairman: You are the Cabinet Office Minister; you will know the state of play on this.
Mr Byrne: Yes, but there needs to be a collective decision of government which has not yet been finally taken and that is why unfortunately the position remains as Mr Wills gave to the House on 9 December.
Q245 Chairman: It is not easy being a minister, is it?
Mr Byrne: It has its privileges.
Q246 Chairman: Let me thank you for giving a lot of time to us this morning. We like the fact that you bring a fresh mind to some of these issues and we have enjoyed our session with you.
Mr Byrne: Thank you, so have I.