Whitehall: Prioritising Performance
Debate between Baroness Twycross and Lord Wallace of Saltaire(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
All of us have probably come across points at which people are treated as almost indispensable. Part of the value of people stepping back and having a report of this kind is that we can focus on what those critical single points of failure are. I will feed back the noble Baroness’s comments to the relevant Minister.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Minister mentioned that retention of the exceptionally talented is a problem. I have been distressed in the last five years to discover that some of the most talented civil servants I worked with in the coalition have given up and left the Civil Service, partly because of the rapid turnover of Ministers, partly because of the way in which some Ministers treated their officials, and also because a number of Ministers always seemed to prefer advice from consultants to that from civil servants. In that context, can the Minister explain why the Government have just given—perhaps she inherited the idea from her predecessor—a £200 million contract to KPMG to train civil servants? To my knowledge, KPMG is not particularly expert in training governmental officials, and it would be much cheaper and more effective to ask the university sector to train civil servants instead. I declare an interest as I used, as a university academic, to train civil servants.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
This is not an issue that I have got specific details on. I will go back and ask about it, but I assume that this would have been subject to a pretty rigorous procurement process.
Emergency Alert Service
Debate between Baroness Twycross and Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
Our thoughts go to everyone touched by the Grenfell Tower inquiry phase 2 report yesterday into the 72 victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. I am sure all noble Lords across the House share the determination expressed by the Prime Minister yesterday that nothing like this must ever happen again. My noble friend will be aware that alerts can currently be targeted down to electoral ward level and that, therefore, in a future incident akin to the horrific events at Grenfell Tower, the emergency alerting tool could now be an important aspect of the emergency response. I reassure him and Members across the House that all local resilience forums can both request an emergency alert and receive extensive training on this capability, which has been made available through the ResilienceDirect website. The Cabinet Office has also worked with the College of Policing’s multi-agency gold incident command programme to integrate awareness of emergency alerts.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, when the UK Government’s resilience framework was launched two years ago, one of its three core principles, as announced, was:
“Resilience is a ‘whole of society’ endeavour, so we must be more transparent and empower everybody to make a contribution”.
Since then, there has been remarkably little publicity, let alone any attempts to engage “the whole of society” in this endeavour. Given the likelihood of flood emergencies, heat emergencies, more pandemics and terrorist emergencies, we ought to be engaged. Will the new Government attempt to engage all of us, not just local government resilience frameworks and others, in making sure that the country is informed about and ready for these sorts of emergencies?
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
As noble Lords are aware, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster will chair a dedicated Cabinet committee to oversee the Government’s review of national resilience and preparedness. As part of this, there will definitely be a focus on this whole-society and whole-system resilience and how we can improve it. It is part of the suite of measures that the previous Government were looking at. I think it could go a lot further but it was essentially the correct idea.