DWP Offices (Fylde)

Mike Penning Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Dobbin, to serve under your chairmanship with a new portfolio; I am in my third position in the past 18 months. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). I understand he was first reserve or last reserve—whatever reserve it was—and it is right and proper that he was ready to represent his constituents. Given that this is a half-hour debate, he has done well to get colleagues from across the House to talk about this constituency issue.

As I am relatively new to my portfolio, a lot of what I say will have been written for me by my civil servants. I will challenge that as we go forward; if some of the things I say do not match my colleagues’ local knowledge, they should let me know. I intend to visit this wonderful part of England in the near future to look at the points that have been raised and carefully consider what we can do. I cannot draw a line in the sand on the Norcross site because demolition is taking place as we speak. I hope I can, however, alleviate some of my colleagues’ concerns about what is going on with other parts of the site.

I have a piece of paper in front of me from the MOD on the part of the site that is not within my portfolio. It has shared services from the DWP and the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency, an executive agency of the MOD. That piece of paper says that that part of the site is not part of the redevelopment plans and is there to stay. It is a completely different set of buildings and their quality is completely different from the pre-war prefabs, which would have cost us a lot of money to refurbish and would not have given us any degree of longevity. I hope I can alleviate any concerns on the shared services.

The other thing I want to address is the concept that a civil servant is a civil servant. They are not completely interoperable. They are a bit like us, in many ways; there are many different sorts of MPs and we all do things in a slightly different way. Inside the civil service, people have specific jobs to do. It is not the case that because closer desks are available, those civil servants could have automatically gone to them. I know that it is logical that if there are closer desks, they should move to them, but it does not always work that way.

Given the skills that we need from civil servants in the Fylde, we could not just have moved them to the closer premises, not least because I have a responsibility to the taxpayer to ensure that we get best value. If we look at how the Government estate, for want of a better word, has been managed and operated around the UK over the years, we see that there has been, to say the least, a lack of joined-up government, no matter who has been in power. That is because the estate is complicated.

Demolition is taking place on the Warbreck site. We are not the owners of the site, but we have a contractual agreement on the site. We have a financial interest in what is developed on the site, once it is levelled and redeveloped. After costs, we will get an income into the Department from it.

[Paul Maynard]

It is the Norcross site that is being demolished.

[Mike Penning]

As soon as I said it, I knew I had said the wrong one. It is the Norcross site; Warbreck is a completely different kettle of fish and we are using it to its fullest capacity.

Coming back to Norcross, which is what I was supposed to have been talking about, demolition has started and it would be expensive for us to row back from that. It would have cost in excess of £30 million to do it up to a standard that would have given us any longevity. It would have cost us £100,000, should we have had a problem.

The costs are immaterial—we are where we are. There would have been legal costs and a new negotiation, because we are not the freeholders but the tenants. An income to the Department is built into the redevelopment, although we do not yet know what the exact amount will be, because we do not know how the market will perform. There is an exciting future for the Norcross site and things will move forward. [Interruption.] This is where the note comes through saying, “Minister, you might have said the wrong thing.” The cost of redevelopment would have been £20 million, not £30 million as I said, so I apologise and put that on record.

The important point made by my hon. Friend was that we must work much harder on the concept that someone sitting in Sheffield, London or Timbuktu can look at Google Maps and think, “That’s a great idea. We’ll do it that way.” Anyone who knows my previous roles—I know that my hon. Friend was on the Select Committee on Transport—will know that when I made the decision on the future of the coastguards, I specifically did not do things in that way. I looked at the needs, where it could be done and the economic effects on that part of the community. I assure him that that is exactly what I will do as we move forward.

The debate on this topic back in 2006 or 2007, secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace),was the right debate. He managed to secure a commitment from the Minister to visit. Ministers get huge demands on their time for visits around the country, but it is important that they are seen not to be London-centric—that they actually go out and understand what is going on in the community and see the effects of decisions.

I also want to praise the civil servants in the Department for Work and Pensions. The welfare reforms have been a massive transformation. There has been a lot of uncertainty, which I fully understand, as we have moved from the disability living allowance to personal independence payments, but the civil servants have done a brilliant job and the enthusiasm I have found in offices around the United Kingdom has been overwhelming. They have asked for a chance to get on with it, because they now know where they are and how to move forward.

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

I have two things to say on that point of reform. I want to put in a bid for the Fylde to be seriously considered as a location for a universal credit hub as it is rolled out across the country. As the Minister rightly said, we have excellent civil servants, who could operate it brilliantly. It is therefore even more important that we do not have just a civil servant, but a senior-grade civil servant like a camp commandant, who can provide answers. Much of the work force feel disjointed from the management in Sheffield and London, because they cannot get the answers locally as the senior grades that they should have are not there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

That is an enormously important point. Both my hon. Friend and I come from the military, so I understand exactly the concept of ownership—the feeling that someone is part of a bigger picture. We will certainly look at the issue that he raises, as services come on stream. There is a huge amount of work still to be done, particularly in my portfolio—this issue is not all mine, even though the Department estates we are talking about are very much mine; the DLA to PIP transfer is also mine.

In conclusion, I have huge admiration for the staff involved; I will personally come to the area and thank them. In the meantime, I would be grateful if colleagues thanked their constituents on my behalf. I come with an open mind as to where we can go forward, but I cannot rewrite the books. We are where we are, and we need to move forward with this particular development.

Question put and agreed to.