Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the Committee for giving me the opportunity to read further and in more depth about this fascinating subject. I have met the team on many occasions; I know its director and admire a good deal of his work, much of which I have read.

I start by declaring an interest. I am a social scientist and I have spent my career between universities and think tanks arguing with others of my own discipline about how they needed to pay attention to their relationship with government. I remember as a young academic going to a meeting in Chatham House—it must have been 30 years ago—in which the chief inspector of the Diplomatic Service was asked to address the question of the relationship between the study of international relations and government. He began his speech with the wonderful statement, “I am not quite sure what the discipline of international relations—if indeed there be such a thing as a discipline of international relations—might contribute to the practical business of diplomacy”. Happily, in terms of government attitudes to social science, we have moved on some way from there and most, but not all, academic social scientists have become a little more open to having a constructive two-way relationship with government.

We see here an attempt to build on academic insights and government efforts to widen the use of evidence in policy-making by the establishment of the Behavioural Insights Team. As several noble Lords have said, this is not new—there is a reference in the report to the NICE report of 2007—but is something that Governments have been doing in practice in the past. What Thaler and Sunstein did, as did many social scientists, was to make more explicit what people were doing implicitly, make us think about it more systematically and, therefore, use it more systematically.

I am glad that the academic community is working with government and I note that the British Academy held a seminar with the Behavioural Insights Team last month on how we might take this further. We are now into the whole question of the relationship between science, broadly defined, and government and how evidence gathered by government-sponsored research in policy-making can be used.

There are a number of obstacles to this. I have taken part in debates on several occasions in the past year about how far you can allow the Government to use the data they collect across different departments for other purposes. On organ donation, for example, there have been some very delicate discussions on how far you can use evidence collected by the DVLA for Department of Health purposes. Happily, the Government have now secured a protocol for sharing the relevant data between the different agencies of government. We look forward to publishing our findings in this area, which we routinely do in each of our major work areas, as soon as we are able decisively to establish the impact of each of a number of changes that have been made to questions about organ donation on the DVLA site.

We also recognise that social science is softer than a number of other sciences. The problems of experimentation and evidence collection are often a good deal more complicated, and on obesity, the timescale over which one will establish that interventions have worked has to be measured in decades rather than in months. So there is a range of problems in assessing the utility of the evidence even when one has collected it.

There are a number of other obstacles. We have the most highly educated electorate we have ever had but it is often very resistant to evidence, as we see in the debate on climate change and in the resistance of the car-owing public to everything told to them about the greater benefits of walking and about why paying more for your petrol is good for you. It is not something that the public are particularly keen on. Road pricing is, of course, a highly desirable development. I well recollect that the previous Government left it to Ken Livingstone—and then pretty well hung him out to dry—to try road pricing in London, and only when it succeeded did they at least take it on. Local government elsewhere has been hesitant about imposing road pricing in cities because it is not popular.

Much of what we want to do in regulation is not popular, so part of what the new unit is doing is to expand on what the Nuffield Council on Bioethics calls the “ladder of intervention”. If there is an ideology for this Government—and I am not at all sure that I recognise a single ideological position for any Government, whether this Government, the previous Government or their predecessors—it is that you should look at the ladder of interventions, see how far voluntary measures can take you and only then move up to the harder end of the spectrum, regulation—the hardest end being prohibition—and financial disincentives when your voluntary interventions do not work. So limited government, working with social and economic actors as far as possible and recognising that all of those share responsibility, is the position from which we come.

As the noble Lord, Lord May, said, the idea of government seeking to influence behaviour is inherently controversial. Two generations ago, there were other moral leaders in society who helped to set the social norms. Part of what has happened in our society is that as the traditional moral leaders outside government have lost influence, so advertising, the media and the corporate sector have come to set social norms rather more strongly. That raises the difficult question of how far government should be attempting to prescribe and enforce behaviour. That is the area we are in. It is a fundamental issue about the role of government and how far it should be an active interventionist and an enforcer. I recognise that in the health area most of all—smoking, obesity and so on—there is a very strong lobby for enforcement among the professionals and a very strong resistance among the public to that.

The ladder of interventions and a range of policy tools are what this is all about. We are not saying that we do not want regulations; we are saying that where possible we want to investigate what works. In the debate, I was asked, I think by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, whether there are any examples of behaviour being changed by non-regulatory interventions alone. There is the example of HMRC letters that were redesigned to say “most people pay their taxes”, which improved the extent to which people made their returns. We are having a debate in another context about electoral registration in which it is being urged on the Government that if you put at the top of each letter, “You must fill in this form. £250 fine”—I will not go into the fine—it will radically improve the number of people who fill in the form. This is a debate we are about to have in another sector but we all recognise that the way you design forms and convey messages has a positive or negative impact on behaviour.

Loft insulation is another instance in which you discover that, if you ask people why they have or have not gone along with the policy, there are interesting obstacles on the way. If you volunteer to empty their loft they are much more likely to say, “Fine, now you can insulate it”.

The Behavioural Insight Team is now looking at energy tariffs and mobile phone tariffs because it is clear that most people simply give up long before they have begun to investigate which tariff is best for them. It intends to work with industry and to talk about how simplification of tariffs might make choices easier.

I defend the attempts by the Government to limit how actively they intervene and the number of prohibitions we impose on society. That is a debate that we have all had to have, in the previous Government and in this one. We are talking about the range of intervention.

I was asked a large number of questions about obesity and the traffic light issue. As noble Lords will know, that is partly a question of what can be done compulsorily at EU level. If the EU has not passed a regulation that everyone must have traffic light interventions, we have to work voluntarily with the supermarkets. The Government are talking to supermarket companies and others, and some have responded differently from others. As a believer in limited government, we had to demand that companies behave responsibly. That is part of the dialogue that we must have. One way in which we change social norms nowadays is by having Commons committees which pull the heads of banks and companies up before them and ask them what are their social norms and acceptable behaviour. Not all of that has to be done by government prohibition.

I was also asked how the Behavioural Insights Team is itself monitored. It has an academic advisory council which monitors how it behaves. It was set up for a two-year period and is now coming up to its two-year review. It was entirely appropriate that it should be set up for a limited period—we do not necessarily want something that goes on forever—although I think that it is likely to be extended. On the question of the use of evidence, I hope that some Members of the Committee may have read the recent publication, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

The Minister has talked a lot about evidence and performance but there are people in Whitehall who say: “What has data got to do with policy?”. Data and information are very important. We receive very little information from government. They want to give us a good form but does not the Minister think that the programme of examples that I tried to give him of telling people much more about the information will help to make decisions? That is largely absent from the government response?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I take the noble Lord’s point that perhaps the government response should have taken more care with the question of data. There is another debate to be had—I encourage all Members of the Committee to participate in it more actively—about government data collection, government data sharing and access to government data which relates to the census and questions of privacy. We all need to engage in that debate because government is now collecting a great deal more data, as are private actors. Government behaves with much more caution about the use of that data than Tesco or Marks and Spencer. As with obesity, there are important questions as to how far we lower privacy issues in government in order to gain benefits in public health and elsewhere.

I mentioned the White Paper Test, Learn, Adapt, which has been recommended by Ben Goldacre and Tim Harford. That suggests to me that there are those in the media who recognise the importance of government data and at least think we are attempting to move in the right direction.

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, talked about corporate power and how to confront it. That is also part of a much larger issue. We are left with business and the media setting a large amount of what becomes the social norm. The power of advertising—and advertising is absolutely about covert nudging as opposed to overt messaging—is an issue that again we cannot answer here. It is fundamental to our debate about the balance between government, society and market, in which that we all need to engage. I look forward to the noble Lord’s next written contribution on that fundamental issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, talked about the international dimensions of behavioural influence and cultural change and whether we should be following US research. There is a fair amount of independent research in this area. The German Marshall Fund does some very good research, which I follow. There are some mildly puzzling outcomes. From the surveys that I have seen, the most pro-Western public in the entire Middle East is the urban population of Iran. Whether or not that suggests that the behavioural impact you should be having is to impose sanctions on the regime, it raises some very large questions about what policies and interventions you pursue and what you get back in return. I will feed that back in.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, raised a number of questions about transport, which I have touched on. Government studies have shown that cost, time and reliability are clearly very important factors. There is some evidence for providing better, simple information. The new signs at bus stops which tell you when the next bus will arrive increase the number of people who wait for the bus. That is another nudge if you like. Information helps.

David Halpern, the head of the Behavioural Insights Team, is very interested in the built environment and how far it impacts upon behaviour. That is a really difficult, long-term issue, the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was talking about. Redesigning public spaces and how you design footpaths and cycle ways help with this, but part of the answer to improving the urban environment and encouraging people to walk rather than use cars is persuading them to live more closely together and not to wish to live 10 to 20 miles from where they work.

Another area in which the provision of information would help—and here government has a great deal further to go—is on the concreting of front gardens, which over the past 20 or 30 years has contributed very substantially to the problems of urban flooding. The provision of information about the utility of digging up your front garden again and providing green spaces through which the water can drain is clearly something that government can do without enforcing it.

I love the term “cognitive polyphasia”. We are all stuck with that. As someone who, when in opposition, campaigned for the pedestrianisation of further squares in London and, in particular, of Parliament Square, I am conscious that there are a number of people who think that it is very good to have pedestrianisation so long as they can still get their limousine to take them to St Margaret’s for weddings and do not have to spend two to three minutes longer in their taxi from Smith Square. Individuals often resist things that in the long run will be to their advantage.

This is a broad initiative of government—I stress of government because it is not a partisan move from this Government. We all want to find ways in which the range of government interventions—from information through to pressures and financial disincentives to tighter regulation and, in some cases, prohibition and penalties, as in seat belts and some areas of health—will help to change behaviour. That is not something that the Government can do alone. We have to work with publics whose attitudes are often highly contradictory and whose willingness to accept evidence when presented as mediated through the media is sometimes relatively limited.

What I hope that the Committee is persuaded of, into which the report provided a useful insight, is that this is one of the many tools available for government which helps government to be more self-conscious. The Behavioural Insights Team is in the Cabinet Office to provide a resource across government and its many departments to encourage them to use more of those interventions to affect behaviour. On that basis, I give way to both noble Lords.

[Lord Krebs]

Will the Minister respond specifically to my question about the 11 countries that have introduced taxes on foods that specifically contribute to obesity—high sugar, high fat foods? Might the Government follow the lead of other countries in tackling the obesity crisis by that measure?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Reay]

The Minister said that the measures we want to take for public health are not popular and that is one reason why we do not have to do that. A lot of regulatory measures that have been taken have been popular by the time they are taken. You may have to work to get that popularity, as others have suggested. You have to give the public information as to why things are being done.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

This is turning into more of a seminar than a debate. I felt when I was getting my briefing from the Behavioural Insights Team that I was attending a seminar rather than receiving a briefing. Let me attempt to answer the question on sugar, salt and so on. That is certainly an issue that the Government are considering. We have not yet come to any conclusion. Having a public debate on the options helps to considerably further the debate, so I encourage all those interested to pursue the issue and aid the Government in making our recommendations.

On the question of school meals, we are all aware, again, that we need a mixture of interventions. We need Jamie Oliver out there campaigning. We need schools that are experimenting, often against initial parental opposition. We can all remember the parents who came to bring chips for their children because the school was giving them this nasty healthy food. There, we are slowly moving things around

One final point and then I will have to sit down because I am well over 20 minutes. When I first joined the House of Lords, if I went into the Lords restaurant at breakfast time I saw many of our security staff eating enormous English breakfasts. I was in there the other day and I saw our security staff eating light breakfasts. In small ways, attitudes are changing and some of the message is beginning to get through. The full English breakfast is still provided in the River Restaurant but fewer of our security staff are taking it. That is an interesting example of where social norms are evolving in one way or another, but all of us in our position as social scientists or scientists, as well as politicians, need to address the question of how we shape the public debate and public attitudes in a range of different areas. Government has a role in that but not everything which government does should be done through taxation or prohibition. Where government can encourage and inform, it should do so first before it moves up the ladder of intervention.

[Baroness Neuberger]

I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. There have been some memorable phrases. I am particularly interested in behaviour change for bankers and interventions will clearly be programmed as a result of today’s debate. I was slightly disappointed with the Minister’s response, particularly given that he is a social scientist. He did not answer the question put to him about when, if ever, a chief social scientific adviser will be appointed within government. I hope that he will deal with and answer that point.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I apologise. I should have answered it but so many points were made in the debate that it was extremely difficult to cover all of them. This question is being discussed within government and will shortly be decided on. It is not a dead question; it is a live one.

[Baroness Neuberger]

I thank the Minister very much indeed. We are much encouraged to hear that and I hope that we will continue to be brief on that subject. Will he perhaps take back the question on traffic light labelling of food, which was asked again and again, particularly as evidence came from some corporations that they were doing something about this? It is something that could be pursued through a business network and the Government could lean harder on that. We would still like a serious response on advertising on foods harmful to children. I hope that the noble Lord will write to me and other Members of the Committee. I thank everybody who spoke and the Minister for his response. I beg to move.

Civil Service: Training and Development

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of reductions in Civil Service numbers and training budgets, and the closure of the National School of Government, what steps they are taking to ensure that civil servants receive the necessary training and development to provide high-quality policy advice to Ministers.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, as the House will be aware, we published the Civil Service reform plan on 19 June, which set out recommendations on training and development, among other proposals. Civil Service Learning is now in place to provide greater choice, flexibility, quality and value for money. It ensures that the current and future skills requirements of civil servants are met. Civil servants can access more than 130 e-learning resources, 75 classroom-based courses and 4,000 learning resources through the Civil Service Learning website. The new policy curriculum is also available through Civil Service Learning. It provides a comprehensive range of policy training and was developed in consultation with people currently working on policy and with subject matter experts in specific policy areas.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

I thank the Minister for his helpful reply. Given that these reforms are coming at a time when the Civil Service is reducing in size by some 23%, thereby putting a premium on sharper and more agile policy advice, which as the reform plan itself says should be clearly based on “robust evidence”, will the Minister explain what evidence exists to show that opening up the policy development process to external competition, including from the private sector, will lead to higher quality, more cost-effective and, above all, impartial policy advice?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, it is not entirely the case that all Civil Service training was provided by the public sector before this. The evidence is to be found in particular in the rather critical NAO report of last year. Among other things, it quotes the Civil Service people survey of 2010, which said that,

“only 48 per cent of civil servants said that the learning and development they had received in the last 12 months had helped them to be better at their job”.

A lot in the NAO report was critical of the inefficient and divided provision of training, particularly between different departments. It discovered among other things that the cost of comparable courses in different departments varied by a factor of four.

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, do we not have to be extremely careful in going down this kind of path? We have a first-class Civil Service that is actually the envy of the rest of the world. Certainly, when I was a special adviser, although I had my disagreements, they were disagreements at a level that enabled me to appreciate both the integrity of civil servants and how excellent they are. Are we not in danger of undermining the Civil Service with this kind of approach, rather than appreciating the excellent people who work for us?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I would have loved to have met the noble Lord when he was a special adviser to observe his skills. We are working with Ashridge, Roffey Park, Westminster Explained and a number of other providers. As we have been working with them, we do not see that this in any sense endangers the impartiality or quality of the Civil Service. Roffey Park, as noble Lords know, is a non-profit making organisation that provides top-class skills. We think that there are advantages in having central control of the Civil Service buy-in, which is Civil Service Learning, but with a variety of provision by a variety of providers.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

Could the Minister explain to the House exactly what was wrong with the National School of Government?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the National School of Government provided extensive residential accommodation for extensive residential courses. The Civil Service and other providers are moving away from extensive residential courses to shorter ones, very often for one day each. It is intended that the different mix will be better met and more efficiently provided by a range of different providers.

[Baroness Fookes]

My Lords, are civil servants given any training in the precise workings of this place and, indeed, the other place? Sometimes, the impression is given that the ignorance is complete.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, certainly there are training courses for civil servants in how to work with Parliament, particularly for those going into private offices. I have met a number of civil servants who have been through such courses.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Does not the Minister protest too much? Is not the key driver of this move away from the school and a return to learning on the job simply cost saving?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is not the key driver, but it is one factor. The National Audit Office report’s discovery led from the next generation human resources proposals of 2009, so we are talking about some continuity from one Government to another. The discovery that the provision across different departments was so remarkably unco-ordinated and could be provided much more cheaply should naturally be taken into account by any Government—the previous one or this.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

My Lords, I warmly welcome these reforms. I declare an interest as a former Civil Service Minister and underpin the remarks that have been made. Does the Minister appreciate the importance of recognising the integrity, independence and impartiality of our Civil Service, while embracing the need for further education and training?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am very happy to put on the record yet again our deep commitment to a high-quality and impartial Civil Service. I remind everyone that the challenges to the Civil Service at the moment—the data revolution and a whole set of new ways of working—are such that we need to look on a regular basis at the balance of training provided and the way in which one may necessarily have to change to adjust to different circumstances.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I am tempted to ask whether the Government are now training civil servants to deal with ministerial U-turns, but I will not. I have a serious question. Last week, the Prime Minister set out a new programme of welfare reform: not for this Government, but for after the next general election. Will civil servants now be working on that policy agenda and preparing policy advice for the ideas set out by the Prime Minister?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that was a good joke. The Prime Minister’s speech set out proposals for what he thought the Conservative Party should do post-2015. That is rather beyond my brief.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, what is being done to ensure that civil servants communicate in plain, concise English? Will he arrange for all civil servants to be given a copy of Sir Ernest Gower’s classic work, The Complete Plain Words, so that they write and speak English and we get rid of the appalling jargon that disfigures so many public documents?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thought that the noble Lord was going to pay attention to Civil Service spelling mistakes. Perhaps I should inform the House that I discovered some rather bad spelling mistakes in Hansard last week, which I have reported to the Hansard writers.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, perhaps the Minister could answer the question put by my noble friend on the Front Bench. Is the Civil Service now being asked to work on the welfare reforms spelt out by the Prime Minister the other day? It is a simple question.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Prime Minister was setting out some long-term thoughts on how the policy should be developed after 2015. I have no knowledge of the Civil Service being asked to work on that at present.

Local Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2012

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft regulations be referred to a Grand Committee.

Motion agreed.

Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order 2012

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft order laid before the House on 9 May be approved.

Relevant documents: 2nd Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, considered in Grand Committee on 25 June.

Motion agreed.

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

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 29th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, this is the sixth sitting day since Easter for us to enjoy being able to discuss aspects of Lords reform. It is a pleasure to hear a number of positive speeches about some degree of Lords reform being made around the House. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, opened up the wonderful prospect of a whole series of extremely modest Bills carrying on for several years, slowly and gently putting through little bits of Lords reform. I am not sure whether that would take more or less time than one comprehensive Bill but it is at least an interesting prospect.

The right reverend Prelate is a very brave man to raise the question of age limits and whether one’s relevant and current expertise and responsibilities should be taken into account when considering continuing membership of the House. I have sometimes wondered whether, if the possibility of retirement were put to a vote, the proposal that 95 should be the age limit would pass the House. No one has yet tried; perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Soley, will try it with a Private Member’s Bill in the next Session if it is needed at that stage.

I intend to take to heart the opening comment of the noble Lord, Lord Steel, that the less said about the other Bill in this context the better. We are discussing a Private Member’s Bill and this is an extremely modest proposal. I will simply answer a few of the questions that have been raised, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt.

The Government’s response to the Joint Committee does indeed say in paragraph 53:

“The Government agrees with the Joint Committee that allowing individuals to maintain relevant professional expertise and attracting individuals who would not want to commit to a full-time role would strengthen the reformed House, as it does the present House. The Government therefore accepts that it is desirable that appointed members should not necessarily be expected to attend every sitting day of the reformed House”.

I do not have to hand the figures for how many Members of the House of Commons attend every day. Of course, Members of the House of Commons often argue that constituency work is more important than attendance at the House every day.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, the Government have also said that they do not expect elected Members of your Lordships’ House to dabble in constituency work. The whole purpose of these elected Members is to be here in Parliament. The calculations do not show 75% attendance by the 20% of appointed Members; they show 75% attendance by Members of the reformed House. It is quite remarkable that the expectation is that elected Members will attend your Lordships’ House 75% of the time when their sole purpose will be to be here to scrutinise legislation.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is precisely the point that the Government’s response deals with. We have a House that consists of a large number of Members who continue to have other aspects to their lives outside. The point has frequently been made on the Labour Benches that the last thing that we want is for Members of a second Chamber to spend a great deal of their time on constituency work. This response deals with that area. However, at present, I do not wish to be drawn further into discussion of a different Bill from the one before us. I merely draw attention to the excellent article by a Conservative—

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

I thank the Minister for giving way. In view of his recent comments, will he make it clear that it is the Government’s intention that people will be paid around £50,000 a year not only not to do constituency work but not to turn up here? Is it not clear from the logic of what he is saying that the public are being asked to accept that a part-time elected Member should be paid a salary of the order of £50,000?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is not the case. We do not need to get into a detailed discussion at this point. Members will be paid for the number of occasions on which they come to work in this House. Some, as now, will be here every single day; others will have a mixture of Lords and other responsibilities.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

I think the Minister misses the point. Is he being quite clear in saying that, by his estimate, the amount of money that will be paid will be for someone who will come here not full-time but part time—75% of the time, or whatever? Therefore, the figures that have been put in the public domain are what the elected Senators—or people with no name, as we must now call them—will be paid for attending, on average, three-quarters of the time.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think it is entirely clear. As now, some will receive more than others. The question of how many will be here every day will evolve with the new Chamber.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, will the Minister clarify the point that he made? I understood him to say, “not a lot of constituency work”. I understand that the intention behind the Bill that was produced this week is that Members of this Chamber, whatever they are called, will not do constituency work. I have yet to meet anyone who, faced with a problem, does not go to the person who they think is most likely to take up their case and fight it. However, I understand that the Bill is predicated on Members not having constituency work.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That understanding is entirely correct. The common understanding is that many of us here do a number of activities outside the House that might be considered constituency work. It is not constituency casework, although since becoming a Member of this House I have often received letters and e-mails that would be regarded as constituency casework, to which I have, by and large, said, “Not me”. However, in Bradford, York and Leeds, I frequently see Labour Members of this House, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, at meetings to discuss regional issues. Many of us will rightly continue to discuss regional issues. I meet the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and others who come from my part of the world. I wish there were more Members of this House who, like the noble Baroness, come from outside the south-east of England and naturally spend their weekends going around areas other than the south-east of England, picking up what is going on and feeding back what they have learnt—as part of their relevant and continuing expertise—into the House. If that is regarded as constituency work, it is perhaps something that we will naturally continue to do. However, constituency casework does not seem to us to be a necessary part of this House.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I wonder whether the Minister would take the opportunity of answering the point by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, that whatever one’s view of reform, it is not helpful to the discussion for there to be disparagement of current Members of the House of Lords, not just by the Deputy Prime Minister but by Simon Hughes, Tim Farron and, I regret to say, also by a Member of this House, the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown. Can he give us an assurance that he will make his best effort to make sure that this kind of slurring of current Members of this House ceases forthwith?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am tempted to say that I would like to give the House an absolute assurance that I will speak severely to the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, immediately after the end of this debate. It would give me immense pleasure so to do. I will make sure that in his next speech he refers to the immense experience and expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

If I understand what the Minister said, under the Government’s proposals Members of this House will be paid according to attendance. He has also said that they will not have to do constituency work. Does not this fall into exactly the phrase that the Deputy Prime Minister used as a criticism—that people are being paid just for turning up?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, again, we do not wish to go too far into the other Bill. We are all conscious, if we are critical, that of those of us who turn up regularly, many of us work extremely hard but not all of us work as hard as the others. That will very likely be the same in an elected House, but we hope that the level of hard work will be even broader than now.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I apologise to my noble friend for intervening, but since I seem to have uncharacteristically ruffled the feathers of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, I suppose that I ought to put matters on the record. I do not insult the work done by Members of this House. The work that noble Lords do is partial, since it is a revising Chamber, but noble Lords do it exceedingly well. I wish that noble Lords also had the power to hold the Executive to account more effectively, since the place at the other end does not do so. That we do not do so effectively—that is not noble Lords’ fault but the fault of the institution. I do not in any way cast any aspersions on the integrity or hard work of Members of this House. What I cast aspersions on is the way in which we get here.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

I am very glad that I let the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, speak first, because I am very pleased to hear his admission that this is a revising Chamber and not one that makes the law, as the Deputy Prime Minister has tried to claim.

Will the Minister address the point again about constituency work? What is there to stop elected Members of this House choosing to do constituency work? The fact that the Government would rather they did not do it is neither here nor there. When they are elected, it will be up to them to decide whether or not they do that work. It is very unlikely that I would ever be one, but if I were ever to be an elected Member of this House, I would be tempted to cherry pick the constituency work to choose those high-profile cases that might have a real impact, thereby undermining the position of the constituency MP. The Minister looks puzzled, but I assure him that this subject was discussed over and over again on the Joint Committee of both Houses when we looked at the Bill. It is a matter of real worry to colleagues at the other end of this building, and I would be very grateful if he could answer. What is to stop elected Members of this House doing constituency work?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there is nothing to stop Members of this existing House taking up individual cases, and they do so. I really do not see what the difference is. There will be no funds for those Members to take up constituency work, but it would be entirely appropriate for Members of a revising Chamber, whatever it may come to be called, to take up particular issues of civil liberties and people in prison, for example. My noble friend Lord Avebury might perhaps be accused of taking up many constituency cases across the country, as might the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. That is, perhaps, what we do already.

[Lord Hughes of Woodside]

My Lords, I know that we have recently been exhorted not to intervene on Ministers’ speeches too often, so I apologise for transgressing that rule, but will the Minister look at what happened in the Scottish Parliament? There are two sets of elections—one direct and one top-up. When it was envisaged, it was said that the top-up Members would receive a lower salary than those directly elected because they would not do constituency work. That did not last long; as soon as they got their feet under the table, they changed the rules. As my noble friend just said, the list Members constantly interfered, cherry picked cases that got the headlines and undermined the directly elected Members. It follows as surely as day follows night.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I look forward to many enjoyable days at the end of the year discussing this and other questions on another Bill than the one before us at present. At the present moment—

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have given way a great many times, and I think that I ought to draw what I hoped would be my brief remarks to a close. The Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Steel, is an extremely modest and incremental proposal. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, has already given notice that he intends to table amendments in Committee, but I trust that the Bill will pass relatively quickly through this House and will be perhaps an indication that there are at least some ways in which this House is willing to move on reform. On that basis, I hand back the wind-up to the noble Lord, Lord Steel.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all those who have taken part in this debate. I particularly liked the reference by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, at the beginning to not mentioning the war. It was inevitable, of course, that the two Front-Benchers, when winding up on my Bill, would talk of nothing else except the war. As for my noble friend Lord Fowler, he did not just mention the war—he positively conducted it single-handedly. I cannot possibly associate myself with his remarks of support. In the brief moment that he referred to my Bill, he made one point to which I would like to respond. He thought that I had been too generous in the drafting in saying that non-attendance should apply to a whole Session. I remind the House that I rather agree with that and, in the original Bill, the time of non-attendance was six months. But I was giving way to the feeling in the Committee stage on that Bill, which is why it ended up as a whole Session. So I do not think that we can keep going back and revisiting this issue; we discussed it at great length under the previous Bill, which is why we are where we are now. I hope that my noble friend accepts that.

In relation to the general war, let me say that this Bill is required even if the Bill as drafted by the Government were to sail through both Houses and come into full effect in 2025. We would still need this measure up till then. So regardless of any views that Members may have on the Government’s proposals, I think that this Bill should be proceeded with as soon as possible.

The noble Lord, Lord Wills, the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, all made reference to there being no appeal procedure for those expelled for reasons of criminal conviction. Initially the intention of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth and me was to bring the rule in this House entirely into line with that in the House of Commons. If in the course of the redrafting we have somehow lost that, I will certainly look at it very carefully before Committee, in the light of the comments that noble Lords have made, and be in touch with them about it in the hope of trying to avoid amendments—but we may have to have amendments in Committee. It is a reasonable point. I assure Members that the intention was to make the rule in this House exactly the same as in the House of Commons.

On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, about retrospection, I assure noble Lords that I took very careful account of this, because I was concerned that it should not be retrospective. All the legal advice that I had was that it is not retrospective. In fact, no law is retrospective, unless it says so otherwise. So I was advised that it was not necessary to put a provision in saying that it was not retrospective because it manifestly is not. That is what I have been told and, therefore, Members can be assured that it is not retrospective in any shape or form.

My noble friend Lord Tyler was kind enough to refer to my excellent article in the Independent last week. That is not so much mentioning the war as, certainly, mentioning guerrilla tactics, so to speak. We certainly should not be trying to debate that now, but I disagree with his comments on my excellent article because the suggestions that I put forward for an elected House avoided a lot of the dangers which are present in the government legislation. However, that would be taking me away from the purpose of the Bill which, as my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire said, is a modest, effective measure. I hope that it will proceed.

Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order 2012

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order 2012.

Relevant document: 2nd Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the order will provide the legal basis for a second electoral registration data-matching trial by enabling the sharing of specified data between the DWP and local authority electoral registration officers. An initial round of data-matching schemes took place in 2011 and, in the Government’s response to pre-legislative scrutiny and public consultation on individual electoral registration and amendment to electoral registration law under Command Paper 8245 of February 2012, the Government announced that they were minded to use data matching to simplify the transition to individual registration for the majority of electors, subject to further testing this year.

Before I set out what the order does, perhaps I may provide the Committee with some background, with which I think most noble Lords present will already be familiar. All sides of the House agree that we need to improve our electoral registration system. We need to make the register both more accurate and more complete than it is at the moment. We need to ensure that it is not vulnerable to fraud but that people find it as easy as possible to register and are encouraged to register.

The Committee will recall that an initial round of data-matching schemes took place last year. The initial trials involved comparing the electoral register against other public databases in order to identify people who were missing from the register, which would then give an electoral registration officer the chance to contact them and find out whether they wished to be added to the register. The 2011 data-matching schemes were also aimed at identifying potentially inaccurate and/or fraudulent entries on the register. The electoral registration officer would then be able to take the necessary steps to remove them.

The evaluation of these schemes told us that further piloting work was required, and I shall say more about that in a few minutes. An unexpected benefit of last year’s pilot schemes was the discovery that it might be possible for a significant majority of existing electors to be confirmed as accurate to an acceptable standard by matching the electoral register against data held by the DWP. We hope that this will address one of the criticisms of some of our individual registration proposals, but there may be a risk of a reduction in the number of registered eligible voters. In the transition to individual registration, those electors whose details were confirmed through data matching would therefore be automatically placed on the new individual electoral registration register without having to make a new application.

We want to test this proposition in the pilots run under the order, but with a larger sample so that we have good, robust evidence. The instrument before us now will enable us to test the capability of the data-matching process to confirm existing electors on the register. It will involve a range of areas in England, Wales and Scotland. The results of the trial will be evaluated by the Cabinet Office and the Electoral Commission and will enable us to confirm that this matching process will assist the transition to 2014 and enable us to find a process for carrying it out. I should add that the reason for not including Northern Ireland in this pilot scheme is that Northern Ireland already has moved to individual electoral registration.

--- Later in debate ---

Finally, should anything like the worst-case scenario occur and the register become less complete, what steps would the Government take to mitigate this fall, whether by ongoing data matching or by other means? I hope that the Minister, or people close behind him, will be able to respond to most of those questions.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am tempted to start by saying that I now have writer’s cramp from attempting to write down all those questions as they were thrown at me. I remind the Committee that we all share an interest in this and I hope that it is very much an all-party concern that we should have as accurate and complete a register as possible. I think that we also all share an awareness that our electoral register has been becoming less accurate and complete, for a number of reasons. Young people have been moving around more and, in particular, I fear that a number of them are not actively interested in getting themselves on to the register. It has also been rather more difficult, particularly in some inner-city areas where people are in multiple accommodation and moving relatively quickly, to keep up with people as they move.

I think that we also all share an awareness that the issues about which people hold what data are moving very fast. The Government now collect a great deal of data that were not available for collection before. Private sources, from Experian to Google to Tesco, also collect a great amount of data, and there are some very large issues that we will have to deal with over the next few years about how that is handled and what privacy guarantees are introduced to hold on to the individual’s rights against what I see from one of my notes is regarded as the data-collecting state. In revising the register, we have to take all these different issues into account.

The purpose of the pilots is to ensure that individual electoral registration is as complete as possible. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, the issue of the impact on business and credit checks is one that we are aware of, but it is not something that many young people are aware of. When the Bill comes before the House we will have to discuss that in detail, because a lot of young people do not understand that your credit registration and the way in which business can operate with you partly depend on whether you are on the register. That is part of what may need to be an information campaign on all this.

There certainly will be independent assessment of the effectiveness of these bilateral pilots. I liked the question about what happens if the Cabinet Office and the Electoral Commission come to different conclusions on this; if they did, clearly they would have to discuss and reconcile their evaluations of the schemes. Actually, it is highly desirable that there should be two different forms of evaluation. I remember going to talk, when I worked at a think tank, to the new research director of a major international company and him asking his predecessor, who was introducing me, why they needed advice from a think tank when the company had its own research department. The former head of the research department said, “Because you might want a second opinion”, and the same is true in this case. Involving both the Electoral Commission and the Cabinet Office is a good way of making sure that there is a second opinion and, if the second opinion is different, that will have to be reconciled.

I think that I understood the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, as saying that we might even think about putting people on the register automatically if they were found on the DWP database or, alternatively, only if they responded to follow-up letters or visits. Again, that is something that we will be discussing when the electoral registration Bill hits the Lords. It is an important and difficult issue, because it raises questions about citizen involvement and responsibility as opposed to individual privacy when it comes to this public database—indeed, one of the most important public databases that we have.

I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, that local authorities manage registers, and electoral registration officers work for local authorities. With these pilots, we are very much concerned to look at the completeness dimension. Last year’s pilots looked rather more at accuracy and I assure the noble Lord that it is very much a concern of ours that this should be as complete as possible. Combining my answer to him with at least one of the dozen or so questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, that I wish to answer, I remind noble Lords that electoral registration officers already make use of a number of data sets that are available to local authorities. These include the register of births and deaths, council tax records, registers of households in multiple occupation, local land and property gazetteers, housing benefit applications, lists of persons in residential and care homes and, when allowed, details of attainers—those aged 16 or 17—held by education departments.

In Northern Ireland, the move to individual electoral registration has led to an improvement in the completeness of 18 year-olds coming on to the register because authorities have worked actively with Northern Irish schools to encourage 16 and 17 year-olds to come on to the register and to check names as they arrive. There are problems in some English local authorities where there are district and council authorities and the ERO belongs to one authority and the schools belong to another. That, again, is a question we might wish to discuss further when the Bill comes to the House. However, in looking at completeness, we hope that the use of secondary schools and 16 and 17 year-olds will help to ensure completeness in one of the precise areas where we are worried about the number of people who put themselves on the register.

Are we confident that the methodology in place this time is sufficiently robust to deliver successful pilot schemes? We are confident. We have adopted a more prescriptive approach to the pilot methodology than was possible last year. There is clear guidance for each of the pilot areas, on the basis of which we hope to draw robust conclusions from the evidence. We have developed the methodology in liaison with the Electoral Commission and we have asked all the pilots to agree to the methodology before they start work. That means that we have started work on developing a more sophisticated algorithm to reduce the resource intensiveness of the process for electoral registration officers.

As to the purposes of these orders, the impact is limited to the pilots and not beyond. Again, we will return to many of these issues when we are discussing the Bill. Are more pilots needed? This is an on-going process in consultation with the Electoral Commission and if more pilots are needed—and the area of young people is one that we are particularly concerned about—we will continue to a further pilot. Are we satisfied with the spread of authorities? We are satisfied that we have a sufficiently robust spread of authorities. One or two extra rural authorities might have been more appropriate—in the other place, the question of Scottish rural authorities was raised—but this is a fairly good spread across all three countries and across a range of different authorities. We are confident that this will give us a fairly strong result.

I am afraid that I am unable to say at the moment whether Peers will be able to vote in 2015 for the third of this House that will be elected. I was happy to hear the noble Baroness say “will be elected in 2015”. I promise to buy her a drink after she and I have been to vote on that occasion—if and when we have been allowed to do so.

Are there any other questions that I should have answered? Will further work be undertaken? We have said yes, it will. On the question of whether the new register will be ready for the Scottish referendum, we are determined that the same basis for the register will be in place throughout the country for each election. The impact of the pilots will not be used for a different foundation for the electoral register from one local authority to another. The purpose of these pilots, which have been worked on with the Electoral Commission and others, is to ensure, as far as possible, that everyone in the country and in different political parties has the maximum confidence that the new register is both as accurate and as complete as possible. We shall return to this issue if we need more pilots—it would require another order—and when we discuss the individual Electoral Registration Bill in the House.

Motion agreed.

Voluntary Sector and Social Enterprise

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, on what we are discussing today there is a lot of common ground across the Chamber and across all parties. I do not intend to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in her slightly partisan wind-up because there is a great deal of common ground.

We are all volunteers. Volunteering, after all, has a long tradition in Britain. Long before the welfare state grew up there were churches and chapels; philanthropy and charitable activities by the well-off; friendly societies; co-operatives among the working classes; trade unions, of course; and, above all, women. My mother retired from her last voluntary post when she was older than a considerable number of the women in the old people’s home of which she was chair. She was one of that generation who would have had a career had she not married. As we know, one of the problems that we are facing in the voluntary sector is that there is no longer that great pool of capable women who are not able to work because they are married. We therefore have to rely on the fit retired much more than we did.

I suppose that in some ways I am one of the fit retired who is a volunteer, as are half the government Front Bench. I work but I am not paid, although that is partly because I have quite a generous academic pension—not, of course, half as generous as doctors’ pensions—which enables me to provide my contribution. Most of us in this House are actively engaged in one way or another in the third sector. Indeed, I remember some months ago the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and myself being taken by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, to the Bromley by Bow Centre, a remarkable generation of investment, started on the basis of a rather dilapidated congregational church and now involved in the regeneration of a large area in east London. So I welcome the focus on volunteers and recognise, as do the Government, that support for volunteers is very much part of what has to happen in this sector; you often need paid staff to train and support volunteers. At a reception for small charities the other evening, I met the leaders of a small charity in north Yorkshire which has two part-time paid staff who, in turn, support several hundred women in visiting elderly people living on their own in homes. That is a good example of the sort of thing that all of us wish to support and encourage, but which the state does not easily provide.

Several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, have talked about the proper balance between state, society and market. That is what we are all really concerned about here. We need to make sure that, in that balance, there is a strong civil society as part of the mix, both in relationship to the market and in relationship to the state. The Prime Minister has labelled this “the big society”. I, as a Liberal Democrat, would prefer to call it “the responsible society”, or even “the liberal society”: empowered individuals working within strong communities, working with a decentralised state. I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that Ed Miliband said in a speech last year:

“I have been clear that we should recognise the shortcomings of the centralised state”.

Indeed, we need to go back, as far as is possible, to much more local engagement and local accountability. Of course, this is a process. Change takes time. The Localism Act 2011 is another part of this, and so is the provision of diverse funding streams—Big Society Capital—now getting under way and, as the noble Baroness rightly says, building on work of the previous Government with other support schemes providing matching funds—for instance, Community First, the Community Endowment Fund, community foundations and private bodies. They are all very valuable, giving grants to social enterprises when they are set up. I was very happy to visit the Community Foundation for Calderdale, which my noble friend Lord Shutt had a great deal to do with starting. Now there is also the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012.

Then there is the whole question of government contracting, on which we have had a number of contributions and, rightly, some criticisms. The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, raised the particular question of Close Protection UK. I understand that Close Protection UK has taken full responsibility for the very poor treatment that its staff suffered, and has offered an apology to all concerned. The Security Industry Authority has written to CPUK asking for further information to ensure that it is in compliance with the relevant legislation. We in no way wish to see volunteering as a mandatory requirement for individuals to claim benefits, but volunteering is part of the way in which you get people back into the idea of work, and should therefore be offered, as far as is possible, to people as they begin to get out of long-term unemployment and back on to the job market.

There is a changing culture in government contracting, and that also takes time to change. We have a new Crown representative for the civil society sector, who took up post on 18 June, so this is very much a new initiative. He will work closely with the Crown representative for mutuals and the Crown representative for small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve changes in how the Government do their business, and to ensure as far as possible that we catch the small social enterprises and local companies, which we all wish to do. Social impact bonds are another way of trying to help social enterprises cope with payment by results. A number of experiments are under way in that area.

On funding, all businesses, including mutuals and social enterprises, must consider the VAT question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, as part of their business planning. Our evidence from mutuals has not suggested that VAT is a major barrier to mutualisation, but I will be very happy to talk to the noble Lord further about some of the issues he raised.

The financing of social enterprises was raised by a number of people. We are concerned to encourage charitable donations, giving as much as we can. We recognise that the welfare state cannot meet all the demands that will be placed on society over the next 20 or 30 years, particularly in adult social care. As the noble Baroness will recall, the consultation on the Budget proposals on high taxpayers was intended to raise the issue for implementation in the 2012 Budget. Some extremely vigorous consultation has been under way, as we will all have noticed, and we have taken it into account.

The world of for-profit companies has been raised by a number of people, the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, and my noble friend Lord Phillips in particular. This raises wider issues about the future of company law and what companies’ formal obligations are, which are rather beyond the limits of this debate. Corporate social responsibility does not save you from takeover when it comes. I lives in what was a company village, built by Salts of Saltaire with its very strong sense of local social responsibility, not far from where Rowntree’s did the same in York and left substantial endowments for regional social benefit. I am aware of Cadbury’s and others in that wonderful Quaker tradition. As such, I am conscious that we have gone a long way back in our corporate sector. That includes the Quaker bank, which educated me and of which I remain rather ambivalently a customer, which has lost a lot of its corporate sense of social responsibility. However, that is a wider question, which I encourage the noble Lord to put down for another debate.

We are learning and reviewing as we go. This summer, we will have a social economy review, which will look at how social enterprises operate. Also this summer, after five years of the Charities Act, there will be a Charities Act review, which my noble friend Lord Hodgson has well under way. I was very happy to be briefed extensively by him on the sheer complexity and diversity of the charity sector. I hope he will not mind my saying that I emerged from it confused at a far higher level than I was before.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, asked whether we were, none the less, cutting down on the public sector. The evidence that we have shows that we are moving towards mutuals where we can. We are also experimenting with mutuals and there will be a mutuals task force report this summer on the experiments in mutual pathfinders in public sector delivery. Some of the evidence that I have seen, which is still limited, suggests that improving job satisfaction and better workforce morale lead to both higher productivity and greater customer satisfaction, which supports experimenting further with the mutual model. That also raises the question of impact measurement, on which we are working in partnership with the voluntary sector. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, spoke about this, particularly the role of Triangle Consulting.

The government focus is on communities where social capital is low. This is very much part of the thrust. We will all have different labels for what the Prime Minister calls the big society. We have a vibrant civil society in many areas of Britain. Indeed, in my own village of Saltaire, we are almost embarrassed by the number of local bodies, such as the Saltaire Festival, the Saltaire Arts Trail, the Saltaire Village Society, the history society, the allotment society and so on. However, within five miles of Saltaire are large 1950s and 1960s estates, where social capital is very low. The Community Organisers scheme that the Government are running and the national citizen service are very much aimed at encouraging people who have lost the hope that they can control their own lives and manage their own communities to regain hope and faith in that.

Social enterprises play an important part in this because, as noble Lords have said, they employ people locally and reinvest locally. That is exactly what we need. Last year I was in a very large estate in Yorkshire—I had better not say which one—in which the largest single area of local economic activity appeared to be illegal cannabis growing in sub-tenancy council houses. I was going round with the local police support group. We need to get people back employed within their own communities as far as we can, with community associations and organisers and the encouragement of social enterprises, which feed into a revival of self-confidence and a strengthening of local community links.

I would call that building a liberal society. Conservatives would talk about strengthening the little platoons on which a strong society and state should rest. Labour would talk about local co-operation and self-government. I hope that we would all agree on the underlying objectives and admit that we had not got it right but have continued to work on getting it right—and also admit that there is a limit to what central government can do, because much of this has to come from the local level. We have learned that top-down government is not good for civil society. We have also learned that increasing government expenditure on welfare runs up against strong resistance to paying high levels of taxation. Let us hope that the enterprise on which we are embarked in rebuilding a very strong civil society based on voluntary contributions of all sorts in time, money and social enterprise helps to bridge the gap which we may otherwise face in providing support for a changing society, a much larger proportion of elderly people and all the other contributions that we need to make.

Businesses: Regulation

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 19th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I declare an interest as a chartered surveyor, with a professional involvement in many aspects of regulation.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are meeting their aim of not increasing the cost to business from domestic regulation. Through the Red Tape Challenge we have begun to remove or simplify ineffective, unnecessary or obsolete regulation. We recognise that how regulation is delivered is as important as the regulations themselves, which is why we have established the Better Regulation Delivery Office in Birmingham, to improve regulatory delivery and to ensure that the business voice is heard.

[The Earl of Lytton]

I thank the Minister for that reply, and I applaud the Government’s intentions with regard to the reduction of red tape. However, does he agree that not a week goes by without some fresh example of regulatory excess occurring, of burdensome and thoughtless use of non-recourse powers by both government agencies and other bodies? Does he further agree, first, that there should be a national protocol or code that governs the way in which regulations are formulated and applied, and secondly, that some person or body should be vested with legal power to intervene in cases of excessive or inappropriate use of regulatory powers?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we all understand that there is a constant tug-of-war between those who want more regulation and those who want less. For example, what I do should be entirely unregulated because I can be trusted, what you do should be carefully controlled, and what he does should be stopped.

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market]

Is my noble friend aware of pilot studies that have recently been carried out in Solihull and Leicester, where local regulators have sought to reduce burdens on small businesses by streamlining the amount of information they collect, co-ordinating inspection visits and sharing data? Can he say whether the evaluation has been carried out, and when we can expect to see the results?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Baroness for that question. Yes, that is exactly the sort of thing that the Better Regulation Delivery Office is concerned about. Eighty per cent of regulatory inspection and enforcement is carried out by local authorities, so that the experiment being conducted with these authorities is intended to feed very much into improving the quality of local regulation.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that the lack of regulation of certain businesses in relation to cooling towers in Edinburgh has resulted in a fatal outbreak of legionella, in which two people have died and many others have been seriously injured? Surely the Health and Safety Executive should be doing more to find out the cause of this, and to make sure that it does not happen again. Will the Minister undertake to raise this with the prosecuting authorities in Scotland, to ask why there is no fatal accident inquiry or other kind of inquiry into something that has killed two people and caused so much injury, and why we do not yet know what the cause of it is?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I do not know how far that aspect of health and safety is devolved or not devolved. However, I will certainly feed that back and will write to the noble Lord if necessary.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, on the brilliant wording of his Question. He asked the Government whether they are making progress against the test of coherence, efficiently exercised regulations, and objective assessments of need, risk, proportionality and cost benefits. Will the Minister affirm that these are the criteria that the Government are using in the better regulation exercise? Will he further affirm that where removing regulations from consumers, customers and the general public is being considered, the same tests, particularly the objective assessment of need, risk, proportionality and cost benefit, will be considered before any protections are removed?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I can confirm that. These are close to the five principles of good regulation as set out by Christopher Haskins in 1998 under the authority of the then Cabinet Office Minister, David Clark. We are continuing very much on a course set by previous Governments. There is a constant pull and push between demands for further regulation and the constant need to make clear whether the regulations are still needed. I was very pleased to see that one of the Red Tape Challenge repeals has included the trading with the enemy regulation, which is felt not to be so relevant today as it was perhaps 60 years ago.

Civil Service Reform

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 19th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will repeat a Statement on the Civil Service.

“The British Civil Service plays a crucial role in modern British life. It is there to implement the policies of the Government of the day, whatever their political complexion, and its permanence and political impartiality enables exceptionally rapid transitions between Governments.

Most civil servants are dedicated and hard-working, with a deep-seated public service ethos, but like all organisations, the Civil Service needs continuous improvement. I want today to set out the first stage in a programme of practical actions for reform.

In 2010 we inherited one of the largest budget deficits in the developed world, and, despite success in improving Britain’s financial standing, we still face significant financial and economic challenges, as well as rapid and continuing social, technological and demographic changes. The Government have embarked upon a programme of radical reform of public services to improve quality and responsiveness for users and value for the taxpayer.

In order to succeed we need a Civil Service that is faster, more flexible, more innovative and more accountable. Our Civil Service is smaller today than at any time since the Second World War, and this has highlighted where there are weaknesses and strengthened the need to tackle them.

We need to build capabilities and skills where they are missing. We need to embrace new ways of delivering services. We need to be digital by default. We need to tie policy and implementation seamlessly together. We need greater accountability, and to require much better data and management information to drive decisions more closely. We need to transform performance management and career development.

Today Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the Civil Service, and I are publishing a Civil Service reform plan, which clearly sets out a series of specific, practical actions to address long-standing weaknesses and build on existing strengths. Taken together, and properly implemented, these actions will deliver real change. They should be seen as the first step on a programme of continuing reform for the Civil Service.

This is not an attack on the Civil Service, and nor have civil servants been rigidly resistant to change. The demand for change does not come just from the public and from Ministers but from civil servants themselves, many of whom are deeply frustrated by a culture that is overly bureaucratic, hierarchical and focused on process rather than outcomes. This was revealed in the responses to our ‘Tell us How’ website, which aims to get fresh ideas from staff about how they could do their jobs better. Civil servants bemoaned a risk-averse culture, rampant gradism and poor performance management.

This action plan is based heavily on feedback from civil servants, drawing on what frustrates and motivates them, while many of the most substantive ideas in this paper have come out of work led by Permanent Secretaries themselves. Reform of the Civil Service never works if it feels like it is being imposed on civil servants by Ministers, and neither would it succeed if the Civil Service was simply left to reform itself. Because we want this to be change that lasts, we have discussed these proposals widely, including with former Ministers in the last Government to draw on their experiences and ideas.

The Civil Service of the future will be smaller, pacier, flatter, more digital, more accountable for effective implementation, more capable, and more unified, consistent and corporate. It must also be more satisfying to work for. These actions, therefore, must help to achieve this.

Under published plans, the Civil Service will shrink from around 500,000 to around 380,000 by 2015. It is already the smallest since World War II. Sharing services between departments will become the norm. This has been discussed for years—it is now time to make it happen.

Productivity also needs to improve. For too long, public sector productivity was at best static, while in the private services sector it improved by nearly 30%. Consumer expectations are rising, and there is, as we have been told, no money. The public increasingly expect to be able to access services quickly and conveniently, at times and in ways that suit them.

We are conducting a review with departments to decide which transactional and operational services can be delivered through alternative models. Services that can be delivered online should be delivered only online. Digital by default will become a reality, not just a buzz phrase.

We should no longer be the prisoner of the old binary choice between monolithic in-house provision and full-scale privatisation. We are now pursuing new models: joint ventures, employee-owned mutuals, and new partnerships with the private sector. MyCSP, which manages the Civil Service Pension Scheme, became the first joint venture mutual to spin out of government recently, and provides a model for future reforms.

The Civil Service culture can be slow-moving, hierarchical and focused on process rather than outcomes. Changing this would be very hard in any organisation. We can make a start by cutting the number of management layers. There should only exceptionally be more than eight layers between the top and the front line, and frequently many fewer. This helps to speed up decisions and empower those at more junior levels. Better performance management needs to change the emphasis in appraisals emphatically towards delivery outcomes, and to reward sensible initiative and innovation. We also need to sharpen accountability, which is closely linked to more effective delivery.

Management information in government is poor, as the NAO and the PAC, the Institute for Government and departmental non-executive board members have all vigorously pointed out. By October this year, therefore, we will put in place a robust and consistent cross-governmental management information system that will enable departments to be held to account by their boards, Parliament, the public and the centre of government.

We will make clearer the responsibilities of accounting officers for delivering major projects and programmes, including the expectation that former accounting officers can be called back to give evidence to the Public Accounts Committee.

The current arrangements, whereby Ministers answer to Parliament for the performance of their departments and for the implementation of their policy priorities, will not change. However, given this direct accountability to Parliament, we believe that Ministers should have a stronger role in the recruitment of a Permanent Secretary.

We will therefore consult the Civil Service Commission on how the role of the Secretary of State can be strengthened in the recruitment process of Permanent Secretaries. The current system allows the selection panel to submit only a single name to the Secretary of State. At other levels, appointments will normally be made from within the permanent Civil Service or by open recruitment. However, as now, where the expertise does not exist in the department, and it is not practicable to run a full open competition, we are making it clear that Ministers can ask their Permanent Secretaries to appoint a very limited number of senior officials for specified and time-limited executive and management roles.

By common agreement both inside and outside the Civil Service, there are some serious deficiencies in capability. Staff consistently say in surveys that their managers are not strong enough in leading and managing change. In future many more civil servants will need commercial and contracting skills as services move further towards the commissioning model. While finance departments have significantly improved their capabilities, many more civil servants need a higher level of financial knowledge. As set out elsewhere in the plan, the Civil Service needs to improve its policy skills, and to fill the serious gaps in digital and project management capability.

By autumn we will have for the first time a cross-Civil Service capabilities plan that identifies what skills are missing and how gaps will be filled. For the first time, therefore, leadership and potential leadership talent will be developed and deployed corporately.

In 1968, the Fulton commission identified that policy skills were consistently rated more highly than skills in operational delivery. This is still the case today. We will establish the expectation that Permanent Secretaries appointed to the five main delivery departments will have had at least two years’ experience in a commercial or operational role. We will move over time towards a more equal balance between those departmental Permanent Secretaries who have had a career primarily in operational management and those whose career has been primarily in policy advice and development.

A frequent complaint of civil servants themselves concerns performance management. They feel that exceptional performance is too often ignored and poor performance is not rigorously addressed. In the future, performance management will be strengthened by a Senior Civil Service appraisal system that identifies the top 25% and the bottom 10%, who will need to show real improvement if they are to remain in the service. Departments are already introducing similar appraisal systems for grades below the Senior Civil Service.

The Government are committed to ensuring that the Civil Service will be a good, modern employer and continues to be among the best employers in the country. Departments will undertake a review of terms and conditions to identify those that go beyond what a good, modern employer would provide. We will also ensure that staff get the IT and security they have been asking for so that they can do their jobs properly.

Another key goal is to improve and open up policy-making so that there is a clear focus on designing policies that can be implemented in practice. Too often in the past, policy has come from a narrow range of views. Whitehall does not have a monopoly on policy-making expertise and in the future open policy-making will become the default. We will create a central fund to pilot policy development commissioned from outside Whitehall.

I repeat that this plan is just the first stage in a programme of reform and continuous improvement. It responds to concerns expressed by Parliament, Ministers and former Ministers but, most importantly, civil servants themselves. None of the actions in the plan is in itself dramatic and none will matter unless it is properly implemented. But together, when implemented, they will represent real change. I will oversee the implementation of this plan. As the paper sets out, Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the Civil Service, and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, will be accountable for its delivery through the Civil Service Board.

Change is essential if the Civil Service is to meet the challenges of a fast-moving country in a fast-changing world. I commend the plan to the House”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Baroness very much for her cross-party welcome for these proposals. Indeed, much in them builds on and extends the experience of the previous Government. As she will know from watching the exchanges in the Commons, a number of former Ministers also welcome the proposals and regretted that in one or two respects they did not go further. I shall do my best to answer her questions. The search for an effective and efficient Civil Service is constant, and one has to return to it every few years. The demands on the Civil Service are rapidly changing. The digital revolution is an enormous challenge for the Civil Service and for all of us. Those changes are part of what is driving this whole process.

Perhaps I may say as a former academic and think-tanker that outside advice from academics and think tanks comes far cheaper than management consultants. I say that partly with bitter regret at how cheaply I sold myself on occasions to government. However, that is part of what is intended. As the plan sets out, there is a preliminary budget of £1 million for piloting this access for outside advice. I assure the noble Baroness that we are thinking not so much about going back to the consultants who provided their extremely expensive advice but about drawing on outside think tanks and the wealth of academic advice that we have in this country and elsewhere. Again, the previous Government did a certain amount of this; indeed, in the Cabinet Office only yesterday I met an academic whom I know very well and who I know was actively engaged in advising the previous Government.

In terms of ideas and implementation, we are already piloting some delivery models and this is very much a process that we will be pursuing. Those following this will know that the idea of mutuals is being tested. There is already some evidence that it improves the morale and therefore the effectiveness of those involved, and it will be taken further if it proves successful.

Something that we are also always looking at is whether we are sufficiently staffed in the right places. Sometimes you find that you have too many staff in one area and not enough in another. Those of us familiar with the BSE scandal will remember that part of the problem was that not enough staff were left in place for the contingencies that took place. It is a constant problem.

On consultations, I simply repeat that there were very wide consultations inside the Civil Service. Some of us were a little frustrated that more civil servants appeared to have seen earlier drafts of this paper than we had. The extent to which senior and relatively junior civil servants had their views taken into account was very wide. That has very positive implications for morale because, if you are carried along with proposals for change, you feel that you are part of it.

As far as the diversity of the Civil Service is concerned, I think that our predecessors, the Labour Government, did extremely well with this, particularly regarding the number of highly talented women in the Civil Service. The departments that I am aware of also have a much higher number of people from different ethnic minorities. I asked a rather senior ethnic minority civil servant what he would say to a young woman of Chinese origin in the Civil Service—a former student of mine—who asked me whether there were any barriers to getting to the top. He said he had not noticed any. I compliment our predecessors on how far they moved on that and assure them that we are continuing very much along that line.

In terms of the budget for implementation, this plan builds in the promise that there will be at least five days of training per year for officials. Civil Service Learning is setting out how this will be done using a range of different providers inside and outside the Civil Service.

We are constantly looking for metrics and measures of success. Management information systems are of course best for measuring the achievement of success, and improving management information systems is a vital part of this.

Finally, I turn to the independence of and challenge for senior civil servants. I can only quote what a senior civil servant who is a very good friend of mine said to me many years ago. He said that at a certain level a competent senior civil servant should always have at the back of his mind that he could move before telling Ministers his thoughts. That was under the previous Government. I think that a number of senior civil servants would say the same but we are always looking for robust and independently minded civil servants who will express their thoughts to Ministers. Of course, the other side of that is that Ministers need to accept that their relationship with officials has to be on that basis.

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, it so happens that this evening the Public and Commercial Services Union is holding its annual parliamentary reception in the Strangers’ Dining Room, so I went along to talk to its members. I found that they were very concerned because they believe there is the possibility of hundreds of redundancies and they do not seem to have had very much consultation or negotiation. I promised them that I would faithfully represent them as far as consultation is concerned.

Criticism in certain areas of public work has indicated a lack of public acceptance, but members pointed out that, rather than fewer public servants, in many instances there is a case for having more. They pointed out, for example, that at airports there were very long queues because there simply were not enough staff. That is true in many areas of public service where the union believes there should be more public servants rather than fewer.

Public service is very necessary to ordinary people. If you are very rich, you do not rely on public services, but if you are not very rich you do. Therefore, an effective public service is something that we expect the Government to provide. From what the officials of this union told me—and one must remember that they represent 280,000 public servants—it is quite clear that they do not feel they have been consulted or had the opportunity to negotiate on what is a very substantial plan. Is the Minister making arrangements for this union and other unions in the sector to be properly consulted and properly involved before we proceed with what seems to be a very large upheaval within the provision of public services?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I can promise the noble Baroness that there is a constant dialogue with all the unions. I am sorry that the PCS feels it has not been consulted sufficiently but I am well aware that the dialogue goes on. I am also well aware that people in all sectors of society have contact with the public service. If the noble Baroness has read the Times today she will know that there are some rich people who prefer not to hear from HMRC, but HMRC is indeed determined that they should hear from it.

[Lord Shutt of Greetland]

My Lords, it is true that managing change and driving though radical policies can prove difficult. It is also true that there are areas where the private sector can and does deliver good-quality public services at competitive costs. We should not be opposed to moving the boundaries between public and private sector delivery of public services where it can be justified or in testing payment by results as a way of promoting greater efficiency and value for money for the taxpayer. However, for the past 140 years we have benefited from a public service selected on merit and political neutrality. As someone who stood down from government last month, I can say that I found civil servants civil, hard-working and helpful. Does the Minister agree that we should not approach public sector reform with a mindset of “public sector bad, private sector good”?

I do not think there is evidence that the public sector yet has in place the kind of legal, contractual and commissioning expertise to make sure that the taxpayer is going to be properly protected or the quality of service required guaranteed. Does the Minister agree that it is essential that the reforms have built into them full and proper systems of parliamentary accountability? We must ensure that, in commissioning externally sourced policy-making, we do not fall into the habit of commissioning external consultancy almost as an alternative to ministerial decision-making.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, as we all know, a number of processes are under way. This Government are also committed to decentralisation as far as possible, and one reason why the central Civil Service will shrink is that more decisions and areas of policy delivery are being put down to the local level. Some of this will be carried out through local authorities; some of it will be carried out through mutual and other agencies. The division between the public and private sectors is not entirely a binary one; there is also, as we all know, the third sector or voluntary sector. I think we all agree that, together with the decentralisation of the delivery of public services, some services are better delivered as a partnership between the public sector and the third or voluntary sector. All those processes are under way. Put together with the technological revolution that is pushing us towards a much greater dependence on digital services, this is part of the revolution we are facing.

On the question of parliamentary accountability, there is less in this plan on the details of accountability than there might otherwise be because there has been a deliberate decision to await the study of the House of Lords Constitution Committee on that very area. That will feed into further consultations on how we strengthen accountability to Parliament. However, noble Lords will be aware that the role of Commons parliamentary committees in particular in relation to the Civil Service has strengthened over the years. I was reading the Osmotherley Rules earlier today and began to look at how they may need to change further as part of this. That is the sort of thing that the Constitution Committee will be considering.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

My Lords, the Statement paid lip service to the quality of the Civil Service but it sounded to me—as, I am afraid, it will sound to many civil servants—like a litany of criticisms. Will the Minister accept from me that, while proposals for improved performance by the Civil Service are always necessary and welcome, it is essential to their success that the Civil Service should be led and not just driven—as the Statement said—and should not be reviled and unattributably dumped on when Ministers’ policies run into difficulties?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I strongly agree with that. I am very conscious—again, I make a non-partisan remark—that there have been occasions under successive Governments over the past 50 years or more when some Ministers have occasionally wished to blame their civil servants for things not happening. I would be extremely upset if the noble Lord interpreted this plan as being an attack on the Civil Service. We have emphasised very strongly that that is not the case and that it has come out of a partnership between Ministers and the senior Civil Service with extensive consultation. We value the quality of leadership within the Civil Service. I am one of the many within government who have serving and former civil servants as close members of their family. It matters very much for the quality of our society, our public services and our country as a whole that we have the best-quality Civil Service working for government and the state as a whole. We very much hope that this plan strengthens that.

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

My Lords, I very much support much of what the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said. Although it is perhaps not a series of attacks, the Statement rather dodges along a line that opens it to that sort of criticism. With the Government talking as they are, perhaps I may repeat the phrase, “There are no bad men, only bad officers”. The need for leadership in the Civil Service is absolutely critical, and I very much support many of the practical measures in the Statement. The devil will be in the detail, but the figure that hits very hard is that there will be a 25% reduction in Civil Service numbers over the next three years. This has happened before and, in some cases, it has been achieved simply by transferring people to independent agencies and moving them out of the Civil Service. Can my noble friend give some indication of how those figures are to be achieved and to what extent it will be a case of smoke and mirrors or of a genuine reduction in Civil Service numbers? If local government is to take up some of the strain in areas that have been covered by the central Civil Service, will that involve an increase in numbers in local government?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I merely repeat that this is not intended in any sense as an attack on the Civil Service and we very much value its quality. A certain amount will be achieved by putting more on to the digital level, and this is well under way. Members of this House may remember our discussions about universal benefits and the extent to which that scheme will enable us to provide those sorts of payments and services more efficiently with fewer staff. That is the sort of reduction that we see coming through. We plan for more services to be provided in partnership with local authorities and through third-sector organisations. We are already experimenting with that sort of model.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, perhaps I should remind the House that in a former life, quite a long time ago, I was the general secretary of the First Division Association, which represents senior civil servants.

In the Statement, the Minister said, “We need a Civil Service that is faster, more flexible, more innovative and more accountable”. No one could argue with that as a general statement, but the whole issue is about how that is to be achieved. I do not think that the Minister properly answered the question of the noble Lord, Lord King, about how you achieve a reduction of 120,000 civil servants in less than three years—only two and a half years. Is there going to be a system of compulsory redundancy and, if so, has that been costed? To what extent will there be a charge on the public purse for compulsory redundancies? Those are crucial questions when we are arguing about something that ought to be costing less money.

The real point at issue in the Statement arises in relation to the future appointment of senior civil servants. It stresses the importance of political impartiality but we are told that the role of Secretaries of State will be strengthened in the recruitment of Permanent Secretaries. It is the duty of civil servants to maintain the confidence in their impartiality not only of Ministers but of those who may become Ministers after a general election. How does the noble Lord reconcile the appointment process, which includes politically appointed Ministers, whereby politically impartial civil servants can pass over to a new set of Ministers? Will there be a requirement for Permanent Secretaries appointed in that way to resign at the time of an election? It is an important point about the confidence of the Opposition.

It was also said in the Statement that it may not be practical to run “full and open” competitions. When will it not be practical to do so? How will the diversity of the Civil Service and the opportunity for women and people from ethnic minorities to break into the Civil Service ranks be maintained in those circumstances? At the moment, they come in through open competition.

Lastly, the Statement says that, “Ministers can ask their Permanent Secretaries to appoint a very limited number of senior officials, for specified and time-limited executive and management roles”. This is an important point. There was such a fuss in 1997 when two politically appointed people were, under Privy Council terms, given executive and management roles. I have to say that the Conservative Party going into opposition went ballistic about it. What will be done about this? Will it be done under Privy Council terms, and will those contracts be terminated on a change of Government? Those are very specific questions.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, as the plan states, the proposals on the role of Secretaries of State in very senior appointments are to be discussed with the Civil Service Commission. The proposals have been discussed with former Labour Ministers, and there have been criticisms from former Labour Ministers in the other place that these proposals do not go far enough. We have not committed ourselves fully on this, and there is therefore a dialogue to be had about the future relationship between the appointment of permanent secretaries and the role of Secretaries of State. Jack Straw said in the other place that he did not find our proposals terribly surprising because on three occasions he had insisted on having an active role in the appointment of permanent secretaries. So although we are not entirely moving from one world to another, we are discussing how much further we should move along a continuum.

On the scale of reduction under way, departments are already engaged in processes which will reduce numbers without compulsory redundancies. I will write to the noble Baroness if substantial compulsory redundancies are on the way. However, seven out of 10 civil servants are involved in the big five delivery departments: the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, HMRC, the Ministry of Defence and the UK Border Agency. Many of them turn over at a rate which I anticipate enables us to avoid very substantial compulsory redundancies, but if I am incorrectly briefed on this I will write to the noble Baroness afterwards.

[Baroness Browning]

I attended many courses at the National School of Government over the years, and I always reminded it that it was the best in the world. However, I recognise in the report today the need for change within the Civil Service, and I welcome it. Having had 15 years out of Government I returned last year to ministerial office, and I recognise some of the needs here, particularly in changing the culture. However, in making the changes that are needed, particularly in terms of management within the Civil Service and the skills needed by Ministers—because ultimately the buck stops at the Minister’s desk—it is very important to ensure that we do not confuse management systems that deliver competent management and those that lack the leadership skills that make the difference in culture. It is quite possible to be a competent manager at any level, but if you do not have the leadership skills you will get a culture as described in this document today—and again that applies as much to Ministers as it does to the Civil Service. I hope my noble friend will ensure that we do not miss out on what is a very important part of making these important changes.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my noble friend is right to point out that a number of things fit together here. Extending the role of Parliament in holding the Government and the Civil Service to account, which is part of what the Constitutional Committee will be discussing, will be continuing with what has evolved over the last 20 years with the relevant Commons committees. The question of the management skills of Ministers is very much a cross-party thing that we all need to discuss a great deal more. We do not currently train Ministers. We also need to discuss the changing role of the Civil Service itself. One point I did not answer for the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, was the question of the impact of these proposals for ethnic minorities and women. I remind the noble Baroness that for the first time, some six months ago, we reached the point at which there were more women than men at the level of Permanent Secretary. That is a real breakthrough. We have also had our first ethnic minority Permanent Secretary. Having a close female relative rising up the Civil Service, I hope this is a trend which will go further.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

I welcome parts of the Statement, and I welcome the conversion of the Minister who made the Statement in the other place. He was the man who was in charge of the Next Steps programme in the 1990s, which broke the Civil Service down into smaller pieces and split it up. He is now happily seeing the errors that were made, and bringing parts of it back together again.

I am concerned about the way in which we keep moving forward with changes in public service operations without actually speaking to the customers or the taxpayers. This is another example where the default position will be open policy making, where in fact the taxpayers and the citizens have not been involved one iota in this exercise. If they had been, we would have heard more complaints. I have a former connection with the Inland Revenue as I was the general secretary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation. If you go online now, you do not necessarily get answers to internet inquiries; if you go on the telephone, as was recently published, you wait longer for a reply from the Revenue than you did two years ago; and if you come into the country, you queue longer at one and two o’clock in the morning. In so many areas of the departments the Minister has just mentioned the Civil Service is falling down. Now we are faced with a cut from 500,000 down to 380,000 civil servants within the space of three years, on top of the other changes already taking place. I think an awful lot of taxpayers are going to be very unhappy indeed with the services that they will get in the next few years, unless there can be a quite different approach to that which we have adopted so far.

I hope there will be a way in which we can look at how we measure efficiency. Take two building societies, A and B, and put them together. Get a new computer system, cut the number of staff employed, and you can say that you have increased the company’s efficiency. Invariably, in practice you find that the customer suffers and waits longer for services from that combined building society. We have tried to bring the same principles to bear within the Civil Service. I hope we can have a clearer definition of what efficiency means. I am not against changes, or reductions in numbers, provided that ultimately the service will be better. However, there is nothing in this statement to prove that it will be.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I accept that challenge. The effectiveness of these proposals will indeed need to be challenged precisely in terms of how they impact on the quality, effectiveness and speed of delivery, and the satisfaction of the citizens who are receiving those services. Before we close, I remark that this is also part of a long process of change in the Civil Service. The proposals in the plan for bringing together some core services across Whitehall—the management of major projects, human resources, digitisation—are also part of trying to make a more economical and unified Civil Service. As I have observed in the five departments I have worked across since I joined the Government, there are real cultural differences between a number of departments across Whitehall, and we will benefit from bringing departments together, rather more into a single corps. We have also been looking at the estate of the Civil Service, and making a number of changes which make for more effective use of that estate. This will also provide a number of efficiencies and savings. However, I accept the challenge that a number of noble Lords around the House have made, which is that the impact of all of this will be seen in the quality of the services that are provided, we hope, with much greater productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in three to five years’ time.

Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order 2012

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft order be referred to a Grand Committee.

Motion agreed.