The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, we had a splendid opening to this debate and that has been carried through, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hennessy on that. A number of years ago when I was serving what I suppose was, in a university context, an apprenticeship for this kind of thing, I was the junior member of a senate and had to sit on an appointment panel for a very senior administrative post—university registrar, I think. We were wise and we brought in someone from the Civil Service to help—which is the reverse of the process that we have been complaining about today—as it was an administrative post. He started his questions by looking the first candidate in the eye and saying, “You are evil, but you are necessary”.

I have pondered that ever since and, on the whole, have come down on the “necessary” side, especially in the present company. That was a lesson, and I have to say that any civil servant who was feeling a little bruised in the run-up to this debate might take a turn sitting in front of a senate of academics. I say to them, what you are experiencing now is nothing in comparison.

Lest I run out of time, there are two comments that I will make straightaway. One is that wherever I travel in the world where there is still evidence of the influence of the British Civil Service system, it is a benign influence. Where it is wholly absent, you can tell. By whatever measure you use, this is a benign influence. Secondly—and I should say that I do not think that it is all the fault of the politicians, because we do run the risk of moving in that direction and saying that they are to blame and this perfect Rolls-Royce model is trundling on—I want to focus my remarks for my remaining minute or so on something that has not been discussed in this debate: namely, the place of quangos. They sit roughly between the Civil Service operating as it does and the special advisers brought in to do the jobs that they seem to do.

This came to light in my experience when I was chairing a commission looking at the national tests debacle for schools in 2008, when thousands of schoolchildren did not receive their results on time. The essence of it, eventually, was that there was a quango running this. The internal processes of that quango had failed and the procurement process, though it ticked all the boxes, was not adequate. I have spoken about this before in the House. Also, the lines of communication between the Civil Service, the Department for Education and the quango were messy.

The plan was to deal with the problem of devolving power to a quango by putting observers on the quango and all its subcommittees. It did not work. The observers did not have defined instructions or roles. They did not know, for example, whether they were reporting everything that happened to the Permanent Secretary or not. The members of the quango thought, “Well, we have observers from the DfE sitting here; surely what we are doing is all right”. There was, of course, a real problem and a collapse: a process that spent potentially £150 million of government money collapsed. I ask that, if there is a move towards having a much wider debate, the role of quangos—their powers and their responsibility and accountability to the department—should be sorted out very clearly, especially for those bright young people who go in as observers and do not quite know what they are doing.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I start by stressing again that we all share the goal of getting as complete and accurate a register as possible and, indeed, of maintaining it over the years. I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, whom I was about to call my noble friend because I have learnt a lot from him during the consideration of this Bill, as I have on previous occasions.

Over the next 10 years we will move more towards online and digital registration by default and we will find that communication between the citizen and the state becomes much easier. That is one of the large, indeed revolutionary, changes that we expect to go through. I would also remind noble Lords of what I said in Committee, which is that in certain parts of the country new housing in particular is making it increasingly difficult to carry out a full canvass. I visited the electoral registration office for Wandsworth. The figures there show that currently some 50,000 housing units are sited in gated communities or apartment blocks with entry phones, while the proposed development of the Battersea Power Station site will add a further 16,000 such units.

We all recognise that the annual canvass is useful and important. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Martin, that there are areas in Bradford where some houses are back to back and others are not; some houses where people use only the front entrance and others where they use only the back, so many of us are well aware of the difficulty of finding out who lives where. Nevertheless, the extent to which we find it easy to catch people when they are in and get them to answer their doors, and thus to rely primarily on the annual canvass, is itself changing. This provision has been put into the Bill to remove the necessity of coming back to the House with primary legislation for a change when we are confident that other methods—in particular, online methods—provide more efficient and cost-effective ways of ensuring that we have a complete and accurate register.

I also stress that, under the Bill as drafted, there is a statutory role for the Electoral Commission in any changes. This does not create a power that is simply in the hands of the Government. In addition to the changes requiring the approval of Parliament, the Electoral Commission must be consulted and give its approval. The commission itself considers that Clause 7 and the other clauses relating to piloting and implementing changes to the annual canvass are appropriate. It stated that,

“it is sensible to include these provisions in this Bill to allow the findings from pilots and the early years of IER to inform the future role of the canvass. The Government has already made changes to this part of the legislation to reflect comments made by the Commission during pre-legislative scrutiny”.

The commission’s report is also required for any specific changes that the Government make under the powers in Clause 7. Under Clause 8, the Minister bringing forward the order must ask the Electoral Commission to,

“prepare a report assessing … the extent to which the objective in subsection (2)”—

the registration objective—

“is met … and … the merits of alternative ways of achieving the objective”.

The Electoral Commission would be required to publish its report within three months, and the Minister would then be required to present that report to Parliament alongside the draft order—which is subject to affirmative resolution of both Houses—that would make the changes.

Our aim with this provision, and the associated provisions I have outlined, is to create a system that is flexible and able to respond to advances in technology but also one that is transparent and has the right amount of scrutiny and safeguards built into it. Having given those assurances, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel sufficiently confident to withdraw her amendment.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I want to be absolutely clear. Does the Electoral Commission have to give its approval or its advice? I ask in the context of what is happening in Scotland.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The Electoral Commission has to provide a report assessing the extent to which the registration objectives have been met. That report has to be presented to Parliament, and the Minister has to respond. Both Houses of Parliament then vote on whether they accept the Minister’s approval. It is a fairly strong set of safeguards.

House of Lords (Cessation of Membership) Bill [HL]

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Friday 29th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, at this time of Olympic trials, times and records, I shall try to emulate my noble friend Lord Steel and produce one of the shorter Second Reading speeches that will be recorded in Hansard. The speech is as follows. Many years ago, reading Aristotle, I learned that politics was the art of the possible. This view was enhanced by reading R A Butler, who chose that as the title of his memoirs. This Bill falls comfortably within the compass of the possible. We should advance it without delay because it does something that all of us want to see in place. I simply add that I hope that the Government will look very carefully at the question of whether other proposals in the pipeline fall equally comfortably within the realm of the possible.

Government Procurement Policy

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, for a vigorous and, dare I say it, characteristically incisive introduction to this important debate. At the beginning, I want to declare an interest. I work with a Malaysian conglomerate, YTL, which is currently working with a vigorous, small young British company in IT, Frog, which is based in Halifax and is doing marvellous things in the provision of IT in the area of education. The other way round, interestingly, we are seeking to procure for that company as part of a broader deal an arrangement to provide IT services for all Malaysian schools. That would be a major thing for such a bright young company, and we wait to see the outcome. There is talent in this country, and that is a good example of how it can be harnessed to international sale of services as well as to the purchase of services locally.

In this debate, I want to offer noble Lords a case study of public sector procurement in which I had to carry out an investigation, and put it in the context of current government policy, which will inevitably lead to much greater need for procurement expertise in the public sector. Those two policies to which I referred, which are mirrored elsewhere, are in health, where many of the services that we now get directly through public sector activities will be procured from other sources. Equally, in education, academies and free schools will have increasing powers of purchase and procurement. I rather approve of this policy, but on the other hand it means that there will be a need to ensure that in the process of procurement in the system we are competent and fit for purpose.

The case study, which bears on both of those—and Ministers should beware and read this—relates to something that happened in July 2008 when an American company that provided a major examination portfolio for English schools’ SATs failed to meet the terms of its contract. Increasing panic spread through the various agencies involved. The fact that at least four different agencies were involved is one of the messages to come from this. The commissioning agency was the Quality Curriculum Authority; within that was a non-statutory subsidiary, the NEA, which ran that side of the business. There was also the statutory subsidiary in Ofqual, which was meant to be an independent regulator but was none the less within the major quango—and then there was the Department for Education, then titled the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Those four all had an interest in this procurement and its correct outcome. You can imagine the panic when it became clear that the delivery of the test results was going to be significantly late. Those are the results for those aged 11 for which parents, pupils, teachers and school league tables wait, and which pupils progressing to secondary school require as a clear picture, so they can take them and be assigned a proper educational syllabus in secondary school.

The panic was great, but what was the initial reaction? Of course, it was to procure someone to carry out an inquiry—procure with a small “p”. That was me. There were some comic elements to that small “p” procurement, but I will not spell them out today. The job, as I saw it initially, was to look at what had gone wrong with the process in the examining system and to rate answers to these questions. Was it efficient? Were the results that eventually came through safe? Finally, what do we have to do to make up for the shortfalls of the process in question?

However, it quickly became apparent that I had to push further back into the process of procurement. This major American company, which had been brought in to carry out that important element of the British examining and assessment system, failed. What was wrong with the procurement? Fundamentally, there was one very considerable thing wrong: by and large, with no disrespect, those responsible for the procurement were amateurs. They were on the quango board or were officials within the quango—officials with strong education experience and a degree of oversight from within the Department for Children, Schools and Families. With no disrespect, those amateurs were recruited because they had other admirable qualities, but in this area they did not have the necessary expertise.

The lessons from this were, first, that procurement in the public sector will increasingly be for services, not just for items such as missiles, schools, new hospitals and so on. Secondly, when amateurs go through a system of procurement they are either dreadfully incompetent and amateur, in which case they get tripped at the first hurdle, or they do what these groups did: they played it by the book, the whole book and, lastly, nothing but the book. All the ticks were in the boxes. I examined very thoroughly the process. It is laid out in my report that 11 stages of the process were all gone through formally and correctly. They got good due diligence on financial matters from one of the big four companies, which investigated the company in question—again, that ticked all the boxes.

Informally, however, what did they not do? As became apparent, and as the then shadow Secretary of State Michael Gove pointed out with some delight, they did not check the web or the press reports. They did not look at what was being said in the lively American press about this company. For example: “Mismanagement by ETS”—that was the company—

“led to over 4,000 teachers being wrongly failed. This led to a shortage of teachers”,

in the USA. It had to pay $11 million in compensation. There are plenty more quotes in the report if your Lordships really want them; that is just an example. Did no one within the QCA have sufficient international contact or nous to pick up the telephone and ask a colleague in the States, “What is this company like?”? The press reports were clear, yet these informal checks had not been made. It was played by the book, as they did on the European journal and the new system whereby competitive dialogue was introduced. All that was correctly done but it was a major failure in procurement.

Another major failure, I suggested, was that because there were four different elements involved, there was not adequate clarity of where the lines of responsibility ran. Yes, they lay with the board of the QCA but in its final minute, in which it approved this contract, it noted:

“The Chairman also suggested that the process be used as a case study to share best practice amongst other divisions”.

If only—that was what went wrong. There were not sufficient lines of communication and there was a degree of amateurism, although with strict propriety. Nothing untoward happened but it was not clear where the responsibilities lay. I rest my case.