Infrastructure and Projects Authority

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

As I said in my initial reply, the reviews are primarily aimed at the project leaders. They give them advice on how to identify risks and take mitigating action to ensure that those risks are circumvented to ensure that the project hits the relevant milestones. There might be occasions when Ministers have to intervene, for example, if some legislative change is needed or if fresh estimates and more money are required from the Treasury, but for the most part the reviews are aimed not at Ministers but at departmental leaders. As someone who has been a Minister, if I was in charge of a project that had a red tag attached to it by the IPA, I would take a very close interest in its progress and make sure that it was delivered.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I suggest to the Minister that if he were in charge of a project and he saw an amber/red, he would find within his department very few resources with the kind of expertise, training and coalface experience to be able to come to grips with these large, complex and high-risk projects. Will he take back to the Government the need to completely relook at resources and staffing against these projects? It is not the standard civil servant, nor the management consultants who are required; it is hard-bitten folk with real experience of the relevant industries, and the Government should start to put that rapidly in place.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Baroness raises a very important issue. If she looks at the annual report of the IPA, she will see the action it is taking in order to make sure that the Civil Service has exactly the skills and resources it needs. There is a fast-stream process and it is recruiting graduates and providing leadership programmes in order to ensure that the Civil Service does indeed have the capacity to manage these very large and costly projects.