Q1 Grant
Shapps: Going back to your original opening
questions, Baroness Fritchie, I do not really think the system works and I
draw as my evidence that only one in five people think it does work. In
your own report you say that, that the public perception is that it does not
work. I want to put it to you that the reason it does not work is that
actually everything you do is against the grain of the natural process. You
have been set up for a very specific reason that we all know: the 1992 to
1997 Major Government looked sleazy and the 1997 to 2005 labour government
looks like cronyism and you are the answer, together with your predecessor
Sir Leonard Peach. Really, what you are trying to do is apply sticking
plasters to all these little problems that it actually goes so against the
natural process that really it is making the whole thing bureaucratic.
Baroness
Fritchie: I wholly disagree.
Q2 Grant
Shapps: I thought you would.
Baroness
Fritchie: I think you are completely wrong
and I will tell you why. Something working is not just down to people who
are not involved with it knowing about it; that is a failing and more people
need to know and understand. There are a great many things for the citizens
in this country to know and understand about. Of course it is sad that one
in five people know nothing about it and more needs to be done, but we have
to manage public money very carefully. Marketing and spin would not be
helpful so careful work needs to be done. For me a natural order of things
is not anybody appointing who they like in any way they like to be
responsible for public policy and public money. Good governance is
certainly something that is on everyone’s lips. I believe in good
governance. I do not believe in bureaucracy for the sake of the process; I
do believe in a fair, open and proper system. I also believe that the
people who go into it need to have confidence in it. If you have a system
where people are merely picked because they know someone, then you are
picking from a very small part of the population who often live in a very
small part of this United Kingdom. I think you are wrong.
Q3 Grant
Shapps: Yes and obviously I am heartened
that you think I am wrong and of course you are right to give a spirited
defence; it is what you have been doing for the last six years and no-one
wants to think they have wasted their time. However, in the example that
the Chairman gave right at the beginning he was saying that if a minister
wants somebody then surely they should be able to select them, to which you
said, no; actually what the minister does – quite properly – is draw up a
spec of the type of characteristics that that person might have, the kind of
person that the minister would want to put in place. But we all know from
our own real life experience – buying a house when you draw up a spec for
the kind of property you like; or, in my case, interviewing and taking on
people for my small business that I started 15 years ago, you draw up a job
spec for that person; or even in finding a partner or spouse, the person you
are going to end up with – you have in your mind a set of categories, a set
of qualifications if you like, that you think that that person is going to
have and lo and behold when you find the house you want, the person you are
going to spend the rest of your life with or the individuals you employ, in
fact they are completely contrary to the things you originally drew up.
Your system prevents that natural process from taking place.
Baroness
Fritchie: You are describing a system that
is natural to you; that is not natural to me.
Q4 Grant
Shapps: We have probably all bought a house
and ended up with a house we never thought we would look at.
Baroness
Fritchie: You have made my point
beautifully for me, thank you. A house you never thought you would look
at. If a minister thinks they know everybody who is right and through force
of circumstance because the description says “Here is a person that you
would not normally look at, we would like you to look at”, they say, “Oh my
goodness, you are right, this is a better person; it is better than the
person that I thought I knew”. Therefore I quite understand that ministers
need to have confidence in the people who are appointed but I do not believe
that ministers know everybody who are good at everything to do with public
bodies and from this small black book of names they would be able to select
just the right people from throughout the United Kingdom.
Q5 Grant
Shapps: I accept that entirely, but you are
not putting yourself in the position of employment agency are you, which is
almost the way you seem to describe yourself in that response? I am not
suggesting that the ministers know everybody; they clearly need outside help
to find the right person from agencies or whatever the equivalent is within
government. What you really do is add layers of bureaucracy to the process;
you make it much more complicated and critically you remove the
responsibility from us, as members of Parliament, to really effectively
scrutinise the decisions of the ministers because it is made much more third
party to the ministers so you cannot really hold the ministers to account
anyway. In many regards you are part of making this place less effective
with the best will in the world and for all the right reasons. That is the
outcome of it, is it not?
Baroness
Fritchie: No. Absolutely not. I would
really appreciate some time for you to come to my office and see what we
do. I am not a recruitment agency; I set a framework and I try to be a
reasonable regulator with a light touch that says, “Let us look at a simple
framework that says here are the proper things to do”. It is a matter for
the government departments and the ministers to decide how wieldy or
unwieldy they decide to make that process. In some cases they make it very
unwieldy because the minister is not consulted and involved at the earliest
stage of the process and therefore when we get to the end she or he says, “I
don’t like the results you’ve got; what are you going to do about it?” and
it is that. We need to speed up the process; the process needs to be
simplified; departments need to have a central team for doing this on a
regular basis so they get better and better at doing it. A whole range of
new things need to happen, but people who are in any party or in no party in
this country have to have confidence. Those who spend billions of pounds of
public money and make decisions locally and regionally that affect
communities, they must have confidence in the people who are appointed and
the best way to do that is to have the widest range of good people who can
come forward, be considered and be appointed on merit.
Q6 Grant
Shapps: So it adds bureaucracy, makes
ministers less accountable, the public does not think it works but you think
you are doing a good job.
Baroness
Fritchie: The public do not know about it.
It is not that the public does not think it works. When it is explained to
them and in the MORI poll they said, “This is fantastic; can we have more of
it” and indeed – if you would like to have the whole of the MORI poll – they
go on to say, “We don’t want ministers involved at all because we do not
want to have them politicising at the end; we would much rather have
confidence in people who have just come through a proper process.
Q7 Grant
Shapps: We could have government entirely
by proxy and administration; we do not need politicians at all if you follow
that to its natural conclusions.
Baroness
Fritchie: Of course those ministers are
accountable to those bodies and therefore, as they make the final selection
and they make the appointment – and they disappoint as well as appoint –
then of course they are accountable to Parliament because they have set in
train what kind of people they want, what they have to do and how they
should get there and then they make the final choice. I do not think they
could be much more accountable and have a fair and open system.
Transcript of
questioning of Ed Straw by Grant Shapps MP:
Q1 Grant
Shapps: Still on the same line, you present
a real quandary - certainly to me and I imagine to others here – which is, I
hate the idea of the politicisation of the Civil Service as an abstract
notion. When we said we were going to discuss it Alastair Campbell said it
was a real problem, civil servants or paid political appointees telling the
Civil Service what to do and the rest of it. On the other hand I very
passionately believe that the power of politicians and Parliamentarians
should be at the heart of everything we do because we are the only ones who
are truly accountable. I have started, I suppose, to move in a way towards
your direction which is to think that bodies like the Commissioner for
Public Appointments are complete nonsense (but having said that I now have
go and visit her so she can prove otherwise). Essentially that is your
line, is it not?
Mr Straw:
The whole regulation of politicians and ministers needs sorting. That
includes that bit of regulation and of ministers that resides with the Civil
Service. There is huge role confusion. You cannot both regulate someone
and report to them and be accountable to them for delivery; it does not
work. You have to take that out and clean up regulation. Regulation
includes as much about disclosure and transparency as it does about having
bodies and people doing it. That is absolutely vital. If you could sort
that I would be very pleased.
Q2 Grant
Shapps: So scrap bodies like ...
Mr Straw:
Stand back, take a look at their role, balance that role against other
things. At the minute we have the role of regulation and anti-cronyism up
here and waste and delivery and efficiency down here. Balance them and then
design really effective regulatory mechanisms which work. I am thinking
about recent cases as well as those in the long distant past that really
work. I, in my organisation, am on the end of some pretty ferocious
regulation, codes of ethics, standards of behaviour, disclosure and goodness
knows what. We do them because we know it is necessary, but it is a
reasonably coherent system and we know why we are doing it.
Q3 Grant
Shapps: I remember when you were last here
somebody pointed out that your organisation was being sued for millions of
pounds and a number of us left afterwards to say, “My goodness, if only
government was actually exposed to the same level of scrutiny then
government would be sued presumably for billions every day”. Just to take
the exact example of the MPC which has been raised several times, it is
politically appointed – one hundred per cent – you say it works because it
is transparent, because they publish their minutes, because it is open to a
lot press and public scrutiny. I want to put to you that the reason the MPC
actually works is actually a minority example because it is quite sexy, it
is quite interesting, people are prepared to publish newspaper articles
about what the MPC is doing, thinking and saying. Most of these other
bodies, if they were done in the same way, would not get an inch of copy
anywhere in the daily newspapers; they are just not that interesting so
those are the ones that end up needing to be administered and what have you
by bodies.
Mr Straw:
Horses for courses. I agree with you entirely and I am not saying organise
everything round the MPC. I have argued in my paper for project teams; I
argued in relation to the comment here about the accountability for
agencies. Things are different. Indeed, when people were jumping up and
down about what had happened over Iraq and the dodgy dossier I made the
point that the organisational arrangements for scrutiny of decisions going
to war are actually different from the organisational arrangements that you
need for tax collection. That point is writ large across the organisation.
The MPC I think works: clear role, clear performance measures; it is
independent of both government and Civil Service in its decision making.
Specialists are appointed for expertise and reputation; transparent
deliberations and decisions.
Q4 Grant
Shapps: Would you accept the reason it
works is because of the immense press and therefore public scrutiny of the
MPC which just would not exist elsewhere?
Mr Straw:
You can create that level of transparency and accountability in all sorts of
different ways. For example, in the States you can go onto the website and
you can look at the crime figures in your borough and you can compare them
against the crime figures on average for the city for burglary and so on and
so forth. If I were in Enfield and I had that level of information and
burglary was going up more than it is in neighbouring boroughs I am suddenly
creating a lot of local press interest and I am suddenly creating a lot of
discussions.
Q5 Grant
Shapps: It is a whole other area but it has
not really worked in health, has it? I mean the publishing of league tables
of hospitals has not really helped.
Mr Straw:
Then where is the accountability chain in that? How do I hold my local
hospital to account? Well, I elect a government which produces ministers; I
do that once every four years. There is a whole chain of appointing trusts
and boards and goodness knows what who appoint chief executives who appoint
doctors who deliver services. What if there were elections every four years
for the chief executive of the hospital? I then have a direct link between
the citizens and the users and that chief executive. The problem there is
that there are no real personal organisational consequences for success or
failure then those being measured by the citizens and customers.
Promoted by Amanda Perkins on behalf of Grant Shapps, both of Maynard House,
The Common, Hatfield, AL10 0NF
