Mr John Holbrow, Mr Michael Glass, Dr Claire Barlow and Mr Marcus Long

15 JANUARY 2008

  Q180  Earl of Selborne: So whose job is it to select the areas in which standardisation might be appropriate? You talk in your written evidence that you are engaged with WRAP and other key stakeholders to produce specifications. Are you proactive or reactive in identifying the product area in which you need standardisation?

  Mr Long: I will say both; we are both proactive and reactive. A lot of our work is about making sure that we engage with a wide range of stakeholder groups. For example, we have a group that manages consumer interests so we actually have some individual consumer representation; we also have consumer representative groups; we are listening to the consumer angle; we spend a lot of our time in this part of the world listening to what government wants to do; looking at government policy and saying, "Here you have standards that can actually stop the need for new legislation and new regulation." We have very good contacts with trade associations across a massive range of different sectors and we are listening to what is going on; we understand what is going on in the community, in the economy and things like that. So we are listening to what is happening; but also we are receptive to people coming along to us and saying, "We would like you to create a standard to help us solve a particular issue," hence why I answer it as both hopefully reactive and proactive in what we are doing.

  Q181  Lord Howie of Troon: You have told us how BS has an input into the ISO business and I have no doubt that is very effective, since I have known BSI for some time. However, at the end the ISO might be different from the BS in a number of ways. How do you—or maybe it is not your job—how are people advised which one to use where they are not set?

  Mr Long: If an ISO standard has been developed that covers the areas in which a BS had previously existed the BS would be withdrawn, so there is one standard for people to work to. If there are things that we need to do specifically in the UK we can build annexes into an international standard so that there are specifics, but the intention is always for an international standard.

  Q182  Lord Howie of Troon: Sort of opt outs, as it were?

  Mr Long: I would not go so far as to call them opt outs; they are more opt ins, I guess, in a way, in that they are actually a way of making sure that any peculiarities in the UK are dealt with, but it is something that we clearly try and minimise because international standardisation has massive economic benefits.

  Q183  Baroness Platt of Writtle: How can standards be applied within public procurement to reduce waste? And following up something that you said earlier, how you try to have community input—I have had a lifetime in local government so I am very interested in this—how do you listen to them and find a group of people who are going to want to do that?

  Mr Long: If I can take the one about public procurement? I think there are probably four ways that standards can aid more efficient public procurement. I think the first one is in the specification of products and services, that very simply the procurer can actually specify with the use of standards, what they are actually after. That then aids the businesses that are supplying them far better to understand what it is that is required out of that given service. That is a practise used extensively in America, that an awful lot of public procurement in America is dominated by the use of standards, far more so than here in the UK. I think the second one is that standards enable procurers to understand the quality levels to which suppliers will actually work. I gave the illustration of the small business earlier, saying nobody knows who I am but when I say I work to ISO 9001, ISO 14001 they have a real indication of who I actually am as an organisation, of how I work. The third element is how standards can support innovative new areas as well. We have done a lot of work with the Home Office in terms of biometrics and by creating standards in an area that can aid public procurement again by the innovation being encapsulated in documents so that it enables more businesses to look at the tenders and things like that. So I think there are some benefits there. Also, standards have been used by procurement organisations to manage their own businesses better. So, for example, the NHS's purchasing and supply agency actually worked to both ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 and they find that it helps them run their business more efficiently as well. So we would certainly welcome standards being used far more extensively in public procurement. Your second question about how we bring together communities, it really works very simply, that when we want to create a new standard or an organisation has come to us and proposed the creation of a new standard we will look extensively to find out where the communities of expertise are, and if we create a formal BS standard then what we will do is have periods of public consultation as well where we will publicise that a draft has been written of a standard, anyone can then have a look at that standard and feed comments back to us.

  Q184  Baroness Platt of Writtle: How would they get it?

  Mr Long: They can get that online from BSI; we can send them copies of those standards so that they have a look at the draft and see what is actually involved in the standard and comment through to it. But our intention is always to get the very key stakeholders right there at the outset of the creation; in fact even before a standard is created we want to make sure that we have the stakeholder groups so that they can tell us what they want in the standard, what they want it to produce, how they want people to benefit from the use of that standard. So we would work very hard at making sure we had the right communities. A number of the organisations here today are involved in the standards making process and we use them to help us get to wider and wider communities.

  Q185  Baroness Platt of Writtle: What actions are being taken to promote these standards and is progress being made rapidly enough?

  Mr Long: We can always do more to promote what standards can actually do. As was the DTI worked with BSI and UKAS and the CBI on a programme called the National Standardisation Strategic Framework, which is a programme to promote the benefits of standards, and that worked very successfully to push the benefits of standards into business, into government and into society groups as well. It was a three-year programme that came to an end; I would dearly love that programme to go on and on, and in the meantime we are still trying to use the case studies that we created, the material that we created to actually get to more and more organisations to show what they did. One part of that was a macroeconomic case study that actually looked at what the British standards' portfolio added to the UK economy and the answer came back from that study that the British standards' portfolio added something like two and a half billion pounds to UK GDP every year and had done so since 1948 by supporting innovation, by greater efficiency; and there is no doubt that that figure can grow more extensively the more organisations are aware of what standards can do for them.

  Q186  Chairman: Would anyone else like to contribute?

  Mr Holbrow: I agree with what has been said about standards, particularly on public procurement, but I think we have to be very careful that we do not create the barrier for small businesses with public procurement because they cannot necessarily easily meet the standards that are there. There is evidence that sometimes small businesses are eliminated from being able to tender for business because the standards are more geared to big business rather than small business. Going back on an earlier point, though, I certainly welcomed when BS 8555 was set up that that is looked upon by small businesses as being a good environmental standard, more so than the 14000 series which is, shall we say, more structured, whereas BS 8555 does not require quite the structure and is a lot better for small businesses.

  Q187  Earl of Selborne: Could I just follow up that sentiment from Mr Holbrow because we heard from Mr Long that in America there is a greater success in rolling out public procurement—it has a much greater impact than in the United Kingdom. Would your opposite numbers in the United States share your concern that small companies might be discriminated against—is this the case in America?

  Mr Holbrow: I am not aware of what goes on in America, I am afraid, but I know amongst a lot of our members when we had a meeting the other day on this that there is a concept—we do not have the proof yet—that very stringent standards are barriers to procurement for SMEs. I do not know what it is in the States, I am sorry.

Chairman: Thank you very much; that is very helpful. If we have any other points that we want to raise with you we will get in touch, or if you feel from your point of view that there is something you would like to amplify then please do not hesitate to drop us a note and we would be very happy to receive it.

Baroness Platt of Writtle: My Lord Chairman, I wonder whether PICME might give us one or two extra examples. They only gave one and you did mention that you had others, perhaps.

Chairman: If you would submit them in writing, as we have other witnesses coming in, that would be helpful. Thank you for your attendance this morning.