Personal Service Companies (Select Committee Report)

Lord Stewartby Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stewartby (Con)]

My Lords, I do not know whether it was my timing that went wrong, but it enables me to take a slightly more detached view about proceedings over the past couple of hours. I have crossed out most of my speech anyway, so that is no problem.

What is left is a whole area of vagueness. There is very little in the way of action taken. You get the feeling that somehow people thought that, if they let things happen, that would be all right. However, a little while ago I checked through the nature of this issue and it raised a question in my mind as to what the people who are running the bodies think they are trying to do. A lady professor from Oxford remarked, “If you don’t know what you’re trying to do, you are not necessarily going to be very successful”. It is that sort of attitude that I felt had spread through a lot of our deliberations.

We all know that the arrangements for the way things work mean that it is quite difficult sometimes to get straightforward answers to straightforward questions, but we took that to some sort of an extreme. Whenever these issues came up, I asked myself what the authorities were trying to achieve. Did they want to have more of these companies or fewer, or did they not mind either way? This is a culture that spreads through a lot of the areas that we have been discussing this evening. I think that the whole show lacks not only direction but any sort of impetus. I do not think that it is possible just from observing what happened in the cases that we looked at to know whether the authorities actually have any objectives of their own. Do they stop and think whether they are doing what a reasonable person might do? I did not get very far ahead with my little investigations on that front, but I do not think that you will get a well organised and efficient body if its objectives are so vague. How would we know whether we had done a good job if we did not know what we were meant to be doing? It sounds rather asinine because it is such a simple issue.

If you take it in the round, covering all the areas that we have been looking at, you would find quite a lot of comments about what people did but not why they did it, or whether they were pleased with having done it, or however you would like to express it. I would ask that my late contribution to this discussion should not merely be filed away in a corner, because big changes are needed in the structure of management in a lot of the areas that we have been talking about. This is the wrong end of the debate to set off with a lot of new ideas—they are certainly not personal to me—but I hope that perhaps I have spent a bit of time trying to judge what would happen in an ideal world. It would not be quite like the world that we have in this area and there is a huge opportunity for improvement. It is necessary because a lot of what we were looking at is almost incomprehensible unless you are a specialist or expert in the field. I leave with the committee the thought that we could be a little less inert when we tackle these areas and I hope that that will come without too much delay.