Monitoring written Parliamentary questions€¦ · Procedure Committee Monitoring written Parliamentary questions Seventh Report of Session 2012 13 Report, together with formal minutes

HC 1095 Published on 8 May 2013

by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited

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House of Commons

Procedure Committee

Monitoring written Parliamentary questions

Seventh Report of Session 2012–13

Report, together with formal minutes and oral evidence

Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 17 April 2013

Procedure Committee

The Procedure Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to consider the practice and procedure of the House in the conduct of public business, and to make recommendations.

Current membership

Mr Charles Walker MP (Conservative, Broxbourne) (Chair) Jenny Chapman MP (Labour, Darlington) Nic Dakin MP (Labour, Scunthorpe) Thomas Docherty MP (Labour, Dunfermline and West Fife) Sir Roger Gale MP (Conservative, North Thanet) Helen Goodman MP (Labour, Bishop Auckland) Mr James Gray MP (Conservative, North Wiltshire) Tom Greatrex MP (Lab/Co-op, Rutherglen and Hamilton West) John Hemming MP (Liberal Democrat, Birmingham Yardley) Mr David Nuttall MP (Conservative, Bury North) Jacob Rees-Mogg MP (Conservative, North East Somerset) Martin Vickers MP (Conservative, Cleethorpes) The following Members were also members of the Committee during the Parliament: Rt Hon Greg Knight MP (Conservative, Yorkshire East) (Chair until 6 September 2012) Karen Bradley MP (Conservative, Staffordshire Moorlands) Andrew Percy MP (Conservative, Brigg and Goole) Bridget Phillipson MP (Labour, Houghton and Sunderland South) Angela Smith MP (Labour, Penistone and Stocksbridge) Sir Peter Soulsby MP (Labour, Leicester South) Mike Wood MP (Labour, Batley and Spen)

Powers

The powers of the Committee are set out in House of Commons Standing Orders, principally in SO No 147. These are available on the Internet via www.parliament.uk.

Publications

The Reports and evidence of the Committee are published by The Stationery Office by Order of the House. All publications of the Committee (including press notices) are on the Internet at http://www.parliament.uk/proccom.

Committee staff

The current staff of the Committee are Huw Yardley (Clerk), Lloyd Owen (Second Clerk) and Jim Camp (Committee Assistant).

Contacts

All correspondence should be addressed to the Clerk of the Procedure Committee, Journal Office, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA. The telephone number for general enquiries is 020 7219 3318; the Committee’s email address is [email protected].

Procedure Committee 1

Contents

Report Page

Summary 3

1 Introduction 5

2 Unsatisfactory answers 5 Trial exercise in monitoring unsatisfactory answers 5 Rejected complaints 6 Complaints followed up 6 Result of trial exercise 8

3 Timeliness of answering 8 Provision of statistics on timeliness of answering 8 Performance of Government departments 10

Correspondence with poorly-performing departments 10 Department for Education 10

4 Conclusion 11

Recommendations 12

Formal Minutes 13

Witnesses 14

List of written evidence 14

List of Reports from the Committee during the current Parliament 15


Summary

In October 2010, in response to a report by our predecessor committee in the last Parliament, we began a trial exercise in monitoring unsatisfactory and late answers to written Parliamentary questions. We have received just over 50 complaints from Members in response to the exercise, of which we have followed up around half. As a result we have obtained answers for Members on a number of occasions in circumstances where they would otherwise have found it difficult or impossible to follow up on an inadequate response, and we have been able to use the opportunity to emphasise to Ministers the importance and value of engaging adequately and appropriately with this particular form of Parliamentary scrutiny. We now intend to bring this trial period to an end and put the exercise on a more permanent footing.

We have also considered a memorandum from the Leader of the House providing statistics in a standard format on the time taken to respond to WPQs in 2010–12. We have sought from the Ministers in charge of poorly-performing departments an explanation of the reasons for the level of performance recorded in the memorandum, and of what steps their department is taking to improve. We have also followed up in appropriate cases questions remaining unanswered at the end of the 2010–12 session. We have published the answers we have received on our website and will be looking for Ministers to make good on the assurances of improved performance which they have given.

In the case of the Department for Education, whose performance was especially poor, we have taken oral evidence from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary and a senior official in the Department, and followed that up with a session with the Permanent Secretary and Secretary of State when we were dissatisfied with the evidence given at the first session. We cannot be sure that the actions which the Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary set out in response to our concerns will be sufficient until we see performance actually improving. We will continue to take a close interest in the answering performance of the Department for Education, and will demand further account from the Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary if performance does not improve markedly.


1 Introduction 1. In July 2009, our predecessor Committee published a report on written Parliamentary questions. The report considered concerns about the rising number of questions and the pressure which was thereby being created both on the House authorities and on Government, and made a number of recommendations designed to address the issues arising. The report also considered concerns about the quality and timeliness of answers.

2. In response to those concerns about quality and timeliness, our predecessors proposed that the Procedure Committee assume a role in monitoring the answering of written Parliamentary questions. The role proposed would take two forms: firstly, investigating complaints from Members about answers which they considered unsatisfactory; and second, receiving and evaluating (1) a list of questions unanswered at the end of each session of Parliament, and (2) sessional statistics in a standard format on the time taken by departments to respond to WPQs, accompanied by an explanatory memorandum setting out any factors affecting their performance. Announcing its intention to undertake this role, our predecessor Committee said

It is in order to uphold [the] system of WPQs and reiterate the responsibilities of those involved in it that we have put our Committee forward to act as a monitoring body. Not only will this allow us to gauge the extent of any problem, it will also send a clear signal to Government that apparently inadequate answers to questions will not go uninvestigated. […] We are determined to ensure that the WPQs system is treated with due respect by Government departments and that the questions asked by the public’s elected representatives receive the answers they deserve.1

2 Unsatisfactory answers

Trial exercise in monitoring unsatisfactory answers

3. We accordingly launched an exercise in monitoring unsatisfactory answers to written Parliamentary questions in October 2010. We did so by writing to all Members, inviting them

to refer to us specific instances where you are dissatisfied with the answer received to a question tabled by yourself. This could be, for example, where an answer clearly does not address the question or where information is refused when requested through a WPQ but is made available by other means. It does not include cases where the dissatisfaction is with the policy expressed in the answer. The Committee will examine every submission and in cases of particular concern we will refer questions to Ministers for comment and review. We will also inform the Leader of the House if we identify broader concerns, in particular weaknesses in answers on a particular topic or from a particular department, and will produce Reports from time to time on trends in unsatisfactory or inadequate written answers and departmental performance.

1 HC (2008–09) 859, paras 104, 103.

6 Procedure Committee

Members are also invited to refer to the Committee complaints about late answers which will be processed in a similar way.

4. We added

It is important for us to stress that what makes an answer unsatisfactory may well be a subjective judgement and the Committee does not undertake to investigate every answer referred to it. Members should also be aware that this is initially a monitoring exercise and that the Committee at present has no power to impose sanctions on the Government for unsatisfactory answers. Nevertheless, we hope that Members will find this a useful facility for addressing inadequate and late answers, that the data gathered will give us a clearer picture of the extent of the problem and that Government departments will improve their performance as a result.

5. Since the launch of the exercise in October 2010, we have received just over 50 complaints from Members about answers to written Parliamentary questions. Around half of these complaints have warranted further investigation or action by means of correspondence with the relevant Secretary of State.

Rejected complaints

6. The most common reason for rejecting a complaint has been that we considered there was scope for following up an inadequate answer by means of further written questions. As the guidelines which we issued when we started this exercise make clear, “Members should note that they will be expected to have sought advice from the Table Office on what further action is possible to obtain the information they require before the Committee will usually consider a specific answer”.2 We have also occasionally rejected a complaint because it amounted to disagreement with the policy contained in the answer received, rather than being the result of an unsatisfactory answer; we reiterate that “disagreement with the policy stated in an answer will not be accepted as a basis for deeming the answer to be inadequate”.3

Complaints followed up

7. The complaints we have followed up, and the responses we have received, have taken a variety of forms. Cases we have pursued have included:

• Failures by the department concerned to answer questions fully. For example, Mike Weir asked a series of questions about a new Treasury post in Scotland, which were grouped together and only partially answered.4 We were successful in obtaining for him full answers to all his questions.5

2 See www.parliament.uk/proccom > WPQ monitoring

3 ibid

4 HC Deb, 10 Sep 2012, col 102W.

5 www.parliament.uk/ proccom > Publications > Session 2012-13 publications > Monitoring Written Parliamentary Questions - written evidence > Letter from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rt Hon Danny Alexander MP, concerning Parliamentary questions asked by Mr Mike Weir MP (dated 20 December 2012)


• Failures by the department concerned to provide the information requested because the question has been misinterpreted. For example, Alison Seabeck asked two questions of the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government requesting information about social and market rents, which received an answer relating instead to the Government’s affordable rent policy.6 Following our intervention, a full answer providing the information requested was provided.7

• Inadequate information provided in response to questions, particularly when answers refer to websites. For example, Tom Greatrex was directed by the Cabinet Office to the Government’s “Contracts Finder” website in answer to a pair of questions about that department’s contracts with Atos.8 It being impossible to find any such contracts using the website, we obtained not only a clear reply for Mr Greatrex to his request for information, but also an acknowledgment that “there is scope for improving the search facilities” and an assurance that officials were scoping this work.9

• Inappropriate content in answers. Gordon Marsden referred to us a complaint about an answer containing what he referred to as “a tendentious, partial and lengthy attack on the previous Government”.10 The Secretary of State’s response to this complaint referred to a press release issued by Mr Marsden; in our reply, we made clear that written parliamentary questions are not an appropriate vehicle for responses to press releases, and noted that we shared the view taken by the Speaker that “Ministers should avoid putting in their written answers to written parliamentary questions any polemical matter that would not be allowed in the questions themselves.”11

• Late answers. This was a particular concern of our predecessors in their 2009 report and evidently continues to be a problem today. We obtained answers, and apologies, for Members on a number of occasions where a response had been unreasonably delayed. We have more to say about timeliness of answers below.12

8. We are very pleased that, where we have followed up a complaint, the result has almost always been the provision of a more satisfactory answer—or at least, an explanation of why it was not possible to provide one. Ministers have, as should be expected, been courteous and cooperative in responding to our request for further information and explanation in following up Members’ complaints. There has been no suggestion that our assumption of this role has placed an unreasonable burden on Government or been anything other than helpful to the task of ensuring that, as our predecessors desired, “the WPQ system is

6 HC Deb, 3 Nov 2010, col 817W.

7 HC Deb, 13 Dec 2010, col 488W.

8 HC Deb, 14 Jun 2012, col 578W.

9 www.parliament.uk/ proccom > Publications > Session 2012-13 publications > Monitoring Written Parliamentary Questions - written evidence > Letter submitted by the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, Rt Hon Francis Maude MP (dated 21 December 2012)

10 HC Deb, 23 Jan 2012, col 50W.

11 HC Deb, 24 January 2012, c183.

12 Chapter 3.


treated with due respect by Government departments and that the questions asked by the public’s elected representatives receive the answers they deserve”.

Result of trial exercise

9. We consider our exercise in monitoring unsatisfactory answers to have been a success. We have obtained answers for Members on a number of occasions in circumstances where other means of following up on an inadequate response may have proved either ineffective or disproportionate, and we have been able to use the opportunity to emphasise to Ministers the importance and value of engaging adequately and appropriately with this particular form of Parliamentary scrutiny. It is, therefore, time to end the experimental period and put the exercise on a more permanent footing. We intend to continue to receive and, as appropriate, pursue Members’ complaints about unsatisfactory responses; and we expect Ministers to continue to engage with the process in the constructive manner which they have demonstrated so far.

3 Timeliness of answering

Provision of statistics on timeliness of answering

10. The first memorandum from the Government providing sessional statistics in a standard format on the time taken to respond to WPQs, relating to the 2009–10 session, was submitted to us in February 2011; we reported on it in our Second Report of 2010–12.13 In that report we deprecated the length of time which it had taken to provide those statistics. We are pleased that the statistics for the 2010–12 session were provided by the Leader of the House, as promised, within three months of the start of the following session. They were published on our website in October 2012.14 We have also published a summary of departmental performance in 2010–12, giving percentage figures for timeliness of answering of both ordinary written and “named day” PQs.15 That summary is reproduced here as table 1.

13 www.parliament.uk/ proccom > Publications > Session 2010-12 publications > 2nd Report - Improving the effectiveness

of parliamentary scrutiny: (a) Select committee amendments (b) Explanatory statements on amendments (c) Written parliamentary questions (HC 800, 2010-12)

14 www.parliament.uk/ proccom > Publications > Session 2012-13 publications > Monitoring Written Parliamentary Questions - written evidence > Memorandum submitted by the Leader of the House of Commons, Rt Hon Sir George Young MP (P35, 2012–13)

15 www.parliament.uk/ proccom > Publications > Session 2012-13 publications > Monitoring Written Parliamentary Questions - written evidence > Departmental performance on Parliamentary questions in 2010–12 (summary table) (P 41, 2012–13)

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Performance of Government departments

11. The statistics provided by the Leader of the House show wide variations in the performance of different Government departments. The Department of Health, despite handling by some margin the greatest number of PQs in the session, answered 97% of ordinary written questions within a working week of tabling, and replied substantively to 99.6% of named day questions on the day named. The Department for Work and Pensions, on the other hand, answered only 39% of ordinary written questions in timely fashion (although it replied substantively to 97% of named day questions on the day named); and the equivalent figures for the Department for Transport were just 34% of ordinary written questions and 52% of named day questions. Worst of all was the Department for Education, about which we have more to say below.

Correspondence with poorly-performing departments

12. We wrote to the Minister in charge of each department whose answering performance fell below 80% of questions answered within accepted the timescale. Our correspondence invited them to account for the reasons for the level of performance recorded in the Leader’s memorandum, and to let us know what steps their department was taking to improve its performance in the timeliness of answering of written Parliamentary questions. We excluded from this exercise both HM Treasury and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, both of whom included along with the performance statistics provided in the Leader’s memorandum comments on the reasons for their performance in 2010–12, and assurances about what they were doing to tackle the issue. At the same time, we invited Ministers in relevant departments to comment on a list of outstanding questions which had not been answered at the end of the 2010–12 session.

13. We have received replies to all this correspondence, and have published them on our website.16 We are pleased to see that in all cases the Ministers concerned have recognised the importance of the issue, and have committed themselves to securing improvements in the timeliness of answering. Assurances have also been given about questions left unanswered at the end of a session. We shall be reviewing progress when we receive the memorandum from the Leader on performance in the 2012–13 session, and will be looking for Ministers to make good on the assurances of improved performance which they have given. Where performance falls short of acceptable standards, or the improvement which might reasonably be expected is not made, we shall consider inviting the Minister concerned to account in person, as was the case this year with the Department for Education.

Department for Education

14. The further exception from the exercise in seeking written assurances about future PQ answering performance was the Department for Education. DfE answered only 18% of ordinary written questions, and just 17% of questions for named day answer, within acceptable timescales. Unsurprisingly, given these figures, the department was the subject

16 www.parliament.uk/ proccom > Publications > Session 2012-13 publications > Monitoring Written Parliamentary

Questions - written evidence


of a large proportion of the complaints we received from individual Members about the late answering of their PQs.

15. These figures suggested to us that there may be a serious problem in the Department for Education which merited closer investigation. Consequently we invited the Secretary of State to send the appropriate Minister and officials to give evidence to us in person. Accordingly Elizabeth Truss MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, and Hilary Spencer, Director of Strategy, Performance and Private Office Group, gave evidence to us on Wednesday 12 December 2012.17

16. Regrettably, that session raised for us more questions than it provided answers about the reasons for the department’s poor performance. In particular, we were very concerned about the role which special advisers appeared to be playing in the answering process. We were also unconvinced that the department was on top of the problems or that any improvements could be expected. We therefore invited the Secretary of State and the Permanent Secretary for a follow-up session.

17. That session took place on Wednesday 23 January.18 In the intervening period, the Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary sent out a circular to the department. The circular set out a “comprehensive action plan to transform the way we deal with PQs in 2013”. We questioned both our witnesses on this “action plan”, as well as on other aspects of the PQ answering process in the department which concerned us. While we were reassured to some degree by the answers we received, clearly we will not be able to be sure that the actions which the Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary have set out will be sufficient until we see performance actually improving. We will continue to take a close interest in the answering performance of the Department for Education, and we will demand further account from the Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary if performance does not improve markedly.

4 Conclusion 18. Written Parliamentary questions are a vital tool for the accountability of Government. The effectiveness of this form of accountability depends on Members receiving answers which are both timely and which respond adequately and appropriately to the question which has been asked. As the committee charged with considering the practice and procedure of the House in the conduct of public business, we have a central role in ensuring the continued accountability of Government to this House. The task which we have taken on as the recipients of complaints about inadequate and late answers, and in assessing the performance of departments in the timeliness of answering PQs, is an important addition to our role in ensuring accountability. We will continue to discharge it rigorously and in full acknowledgement that good scrutiny contributes to good government. We look forward to making further reports to the House on the discharge of this aspect of our responsibilities.

17 Qq 1–150

18 Qq 151–211


Recommendations

1. We intend to continue to receive and, as appropriate, pursue Members’ complaints about unsatisfactory responses; and we expect Ministers to continue to engage with the process in the constructive manner which they have demonstrated so far. (Paragraph 10)

2. We shall be reviewing progress when we receive the memorandum from the Leader on performance in the 2012–13 session, and will be looking for Ministers to make good on the assurances of improved performance which they have given. Where performance falls short of acceptable standards, or the improvement which might reasonably be expected is not made, we shall consider inviting the Minister concerned to account in person, as was the case this year with the Department for Education. (Paragraph 14)

3. We will continue to take a close interest in the answering performance of the Department for Education, and we will demand further account from the Secretary of State and Permanent Secretary if performance does not improve markedly. (Paragraph 18)


Formal Minutes

Wednesday 17 April 2013

Members present:

Mr Charles Walker, in the Chair

Mrs Jenny Chapman Nic Dakin Thomas Docherty Sir Roger Gale Helen Goodman

Tom GreatrexJohn Hemming Mr David Nuttall Jacob Rees-Mogg Martin Vickers

Draft Report (Monitoring written Parliamentary questions), proposed by the Chair, brought up and read.

Ordered, That the draft Report be read a second time, paragraph by paragraph.

Paragraphs 1 to 18 read and agreed to.

Summary agreed to.

Resolved, That the Report be the Seventh Report of the Committee to the House.

Ordered, That the Chair make the Report to the House.

[Adjourned till Wednesday 24 April at 3.00 pm


Witnesses

Wednesday 12 December 2012 Page

Elizabeth Truss MP and Hilary Spencer, Department for Education (previously published as HC 817-i) Ev 1

Wednesday 23 January 2013

Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Chris Wormald and Sam Freedman, Department for Education (previously published as HC 817-ii) Ev 16

List of written evidence

(published on the Committee’s website www.parliament.uk/proccom > Publications > Monitoring Written Parliamentary Questions – written evidence)

1 Rt Hon Sir George Young MP

2 Rt Hon Patrick McLoughlin MP

3 Rt Hon Vince Cable MP

4 Nicholas Howard

5 Mr Mark Harper MP

6 Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP

7 Rt Hon Chris Grayling MP

8 Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP

9 Rt Hon Maria Miller MP

10 Rt Hon Owen Paterson MP

11 Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP

12 Rt Hon Francis Maude MP

13 Further letter from Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP

14 Rt Hon Michael Gove MP

15 Further letter from Rt Hon Michael Gove MP

16 Rt Hon Danny Alexander MP

17 Further letter from Rt Hon Francis Maude MP


List of Reports from the Committee during the current Parliament Session 2012–13

First Report Sitting hours and the Parliamentary calendar HC 330

First Special Report Reasoned opinions on subsidiarity under the Lisbon Treaty: Government Response to the Committee’s Fourth Report of Session 2010–12

HC 712

Second Report Review of the Backbench Business Committee HC 168

Second Special Report Sitting hours and the Parliamentary calendar: Government Response to the Committee’s Fourth Report of Session 2010–12

HC 790

Third Report E-tabling of written questions HC 775

Third Special Report Review of the Backbench Business Committee–Government Response to the Committee’s Second Report of Session 2012–13

HC 978

Fourth Report Explanatory statements on amendments HC 979

Fifth Report Statements by Members who answer on behalf of statutory bodies

HC 1017

Sixth Report HC 1094Debates on Government e-Petitions in Westminster Hall

Session 2010–12

First Report Ministerial Statements HC 602

First Special Report Ministerial Statements: Government Response to the Committee’s First Report of Session 2010–12

HC 1062

Second Report Improving the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny:

(a) Select committee amendments

(b) Explanatory statements on amendments

(c) Written parliamentary questions

HC 800

Second Special Report Improving the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny: (a) Select committee amendments

(b) Explanatory statements on amendments

(c) Written parliamentary questions: Government Response to the Committee’s Second Report of Session 2010–11

HC 1063

Third Report Use of hand-held electronic devices in the Chamber and committees

HC 889

Fourth Report Reasoned opinions on subsidiarity under the Lisbon Treaty

HC 1440

Fifth Report 2010 elections for positions in the House HC 1573

Sixth Report Lay membership of the Committee on Standards and Privileges

HC 1606

Third Special Report Lay membership of the Committee on Standards and Privileges: Government Response to the Committee’s Sixth Report of Session 2010–12

HC 1869

Seventh Report Debates on Government e-Petitions HC 1706


Fourth Special Report Debates on Government e-Petitions: Government Response to the Committee’s Sixth Report of Session 2010–12

HC 1902

Eighth Report E-tabling of parliamentary questions for written answer

HC 1823

Ninth Report

2010 elections for positions in the House: Government Response to the Committee’s Fifth Report of Session 2010–12

HC 1824

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Procedure Committee: Evidence Ev 1

Oral evidenceTaken before the Procedure Committee

on Wednesday 12 December 2012

Members present:

Mr Charles Walker (Chair)

Nic DakinHelen GoodmanMr James GrayTom Greatrex

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Elizabeth Truss MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education, andHilary Spencer, Director of Strategy, Performance and Private Office Group, Department for Education,gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: Minister, would you like to make a briefstatement before we start? You do not have to.Elizabeth Truss: Maybe it is best to start with thequestions.Chair: Right. Well, I will say hello.Elizabeth Truss: Hello.Chair: Thank you for coming here to see us.Elizabeth Truss: Not at all.

Q2 Chair: I think it is a bit mean that you have beenoffered up as the sacrificial lamb bearing in mind youhave only been in post for a couple of months, butthank you very much for agreeing to do it. Well, wedo not know whether you did agree to it; you mighthave been instructed to do it, but thank you for beinghere anyway.Elizabeth Truss: I am saying nothing on that point.

Q3 Chair: To be honest, Minister—and I will callyou Minister, is that all right?Elizabeth Truss: Yes.Chair: I will call you Minister. Minister, I think theCommittee and colleagues are concerned that theperformance of the Department for Education is prettypoor compared to your peer group in otherDepartments. It really is a cause of concern, as I havesaid, and we would like to explore over the next halfhour, 45 minutes, why it is so poor and what can bedone to improve it. Without further delay, I shall askmy colleague Mr Gray to open up proceedings.

Q4 Mr Gray: Minister, I think the Chairman askedthe first question, in a sense. First of all, would youaccept that the Department for Education issignificantly worse in this regard than everybody else?Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Q5 Mr Gray: Can you think of a reason why thatshould be the case?Elizabeth Truss: Well, there are a whole series ofreasons why that is the case. I agree that theperformance is not what it should be completely. Thatis evidenced from the—I wonder if Hilary might—Hilary is overall in charge in the Department of thePQ process.

John HemmingMr David NuttallJacob Rees-MoggMartin Vickers

Q6 Mr Gray: Do you run the parliamentaryDepartment?Hilary Spencer: Yes, the parliamentary team is oneof the teams that reports to me. There are a numberof reasons.

Q7 Mr Gray: I am sorry; I am being a bit dim. Ihave not read my papers properly. Would you mindjust introducing yourself properly?Hilary Spencer: Yes, of course. My name is HilarySpencer. I am the Director in charge of Strategy,Performance and Private Office Group in theDepartment.Mr Gray: Strategy, Performance and Private Office.Thank you.Hilary Spencer: As to the reasons why theDepartment’s performance is poor, I do not thinkanybody is disputing the fact that the performance inthe Department is objectively poor in terms of ourresponse rates to parliamentary questions andcomparatively poor with other GovernmentDepartments.The reasons for it being poor in the Department forEducation are several. One is that there is a bit of acultural issue around the way that people approachparliamentary questions. They are so keen to get thedetail right and accurate that quite a lot of—oh, dear,I fear that I have just pre-empted the next question. Ido think there is some nervousness around not gettingthe detail right in questions. I think we have hadparticular problems with our IT system. There havebeen two particular points in time where the entire ITsystem has failed—one in February 2011 and one inJune this year, which has caused a particular problem.This is one of the things. You will be aware that wehave recently published the DfE review; one of thekey things that we are saying as part of that is that theDepartment needs to get better in terms of its poorfunctions as a Government Department, one of whichis these types of things.

Q8 Mr Gray: That is not a reason. Let us unpick thefirst two reasons you gave there, if I may. First of allyou said it is a cultural matter and the Department forEducation are particularly keen to get the answers

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Ev 2 Procedure Committee: Evidence

12 December 2012 Elizabeth Truss MP and Hilary Spencer

right and detailed. I have two difficulties with that.One is that, presumably, every Department of State istrying to get the answers right.Hilary Spencer: You would hope, yes.

Q9 Mr Gray: Therefore, I cannot see why it shouldtake you any longer than anybody else.Secondly, a couple of examples we have in front ofus that we will be testing the Minister on in a momentdo seem to me to demonstrate that the Department forEducation specialises in producing waffly, SirHumphrey answers that provide no useful informationat all. I have one in front of me. Shall I give you anexample, Minister, and perhaps you could comment?Elizabeth Truss: Yes, go ahead.

Q10 Mr Gray: This, funnily enough, comes fromsomeone who was a Minister in the Department untilrecently—Tim Loughton. He tabled this question on22 October to ask the Secretary of State which youthprojects firstly he, the Secretary of State, and,secondly, each Minister of the Department, had visitedsince May 2010. Pretty simple. It is just a list of youthopportunities that you have visited in the last twoyears.That was answered on 6 December, a month and a halflater. Bearing in mind that parliamentary questions aresupposed to be answered within three days, a monthand a half is not brilliant. It was a very factualquestion: which youth clubs have you visited in thelast two years? The answer comes back, “Since May2010 the Secretary of State and his ministerial teamhave visited a wide range of settings andestablishments working with and for young people”.Either you, Minister, or Hilary—do you think thatactually answers the question at all?Elizabeth Truss: I am happy to answer. It perhapsdoes not go into the level of detail you might expect.

Q11 Mr Gray: Minister, you cannot be serious. Thisis not an episode from Yes Minister. The question wasextremely specific. The question was which youthproject has the Secretary of State and other Ministersvisited: a very, very specific, factual question. Theanswer bears no relationship at all to the question. Yousay it is short on detail, but there is no detail of anykind at all. Don’t you think that brings the whole issueof parliamentary questions into disrepute?Elizabeth Truss: I do not think it does. There is awhole continuum of questions the Department getsasked. I agree with you—this is what I was trying tosay in my answer, Mr Gray, that I absolutely agreewith you that that does not go into the level of detailthat one might expect.Can I just come back on some of the points Hilaryhas outlined? We do recognise that there is a problemhere and an issue here in the length of time theinternal process is taking within the Department.Essentially, what Hilary is saying is that theDepartment for Education review is all aboutchanging the Department from one where it does gothrough quite a lot of steps in the process to a muchcleaner process that is more focused on outcomes andmore focused on getting good responses.

We are well aware of this problem. This problem isdiscussed at both the management board and the DfEboard of the Department and we are working onsolutions—so both a solution in process terms but alsoa solution in terms of the IT problems that Hilaryoutlined. I think those are the two key issues from theDepartment’s point of view. I acknowledge that it is aproblem and the evidence is clear that it is a problem.

Q12 Tom Greatrex: You referred to processproblems just then. Maybe it would be helpful for theCommittee to outline the process in your Departmentfrom when you receive a question from a Memberto when an answer goes out. What process does itgo through?Hilary Spencer: Yes, I am happy to answer that. Atthe point at which the PQ arrives in the Department itis then—there are two issues with this. We have a PQtracking system, which is the system that has failedand we have taken it out of service from June thisyear. The process that we were following up to thatpoint was at the point at which a PQ came into theDepartment, it gets logged electronically; it gets fedinto the system; it is allocated by 10.30 that day to thelead drafter and to the responsible deputy director,who has overall responsibility for making sure that thecontent of the parliamentary question is correct andtimely. They then return that to the parliamentarybranch at midday the next day, and that then is passedon to our adviser’s office, which clears all of theparliamentary questions that come into theDepartment and all the responses that come out of theDepartment. It then goes the following day through toone of the Ministers’ offices. Some of our PQs arecleared by two Ministers, depending on which Housethey go to or which topic they relate to.

Q13 Tom Greatrex: Right. If you had a verystraightforward question with a straightforward,factual, simple answer, that could take three days togo from start to finish?Hilary Spencer: Yes.

Q14 Tom Greatrex: That example that Mr Grayquoted from was six or seven weeks.Hilary Spencer: Yes.

Q15 Tom Greatrex: In those types of examples,which bit takes the longest?Hilary Spencer: It varies. If it is a verystraightforward question, about 40% of our PQs at themoment are answered on time. In general, they are themost straightforward.Tom Greatrex: It is 18% of the time.Hilary Spencer: Which statistics are you looking atfrom there?Tom Greatrex: Parliamentary written questions 2010to 2012.Hilary Spencer: Yes, so that is the first two years ofthe parliamentary session. That relates to May 2012.At the moment our latest statistics for October werethat 43% of our Commons ordinary written PQs metthe deadline.

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Q16 Tom Greatrex: Which would still besignificantly worse than every other Department.Hilary Spencer: No, I agree; I am not disputing that.I am not disputing the relative performance and I notsaying it is good enough, but I think if 40% of ourPQs were reasonably simple that process does workreasonably effectively for a straightforward PQ. Someof the delays occur in the process where a request ismore detailed. The process of trying to get a list of allthe youth centres that every Minister in theDepartment has visited over the last two and a halfyears involves every diary manager in each of theMinisters’ offices tracking back through the diary tolocate it.

Q17 Mr Gray: The diaries being electronic?Hilary Spencer: Yes, but it would take—

Q18 Mr Gray: I cannot think of anything simpler.That would seem to me to be an incredibly simplething to do—go through an electronic diary and statewhen you visited. Apparently, the Minister himself,Tim Loughton, thinks it should be pretty simple. Whyis that complicated? Why is that difficult?Hilary Spencer: It is not inherently complicated. Itwould take a diary manager about at least two hoursto do an electronic search to check that.

Q19 Tom Greatrex: Not seven weeks?Hilary Spencer: No, it should not take seven weeks,I agree.

Q20 Tom Greatrex: Which bit in those types ofquestions takes the longest? Is it the bit to get theministerial sign-off? Is it the bit when the adviser isclearing it?Hilary Spencer: Well, the truth is it probably varies.On some questions, the assembling of the informationis difficult. In other areas, particularly wheresomething is politically more controversial—obviously, Tim Loughton is a former Minister of theDepartment—our advisers and Ministers would wantto be careful about it. But I do not see that that is aparticular reason. Our system has failed. Theelectronic system has failed and that is causing quitea lot of upheaval.

Q21 Chair: But given your not answering his verysimple question—it was an extremely simplequestion—you must tell us why a decision was takenin the Department not to ask the diary secretaries toproduce the information. Am I right in thinking he haslodged an FOI for this information now?Hilary Spencer: I am not sure; I do not know aboutthat.

Q22 Chair: I think he might have. Can you pleasejust explain to my colleague why a decision was takenwithin the Department not to ask the diary managersto go through their diaries?Hilary Spencer: A decision would not have beentaken. The diary managers would all have been askedto go through the diaries.

Q23 Chair: But why is the information not furnishedhere? The information is not here. What, they wentthrough the diaries, provided who with theinformation, and then a decision was taken not to giveit to Mr Loughton?Hilary Spencer: I am not sure about the details of thatspecific one. Can I look into it and provide you witha report on what happened on this specific PQ?Chair: Have you finished, Tom?Tom Greatrex: Yes.

Q24 Nic Dakin: I think we have all had answersfrom Education similar to this one, which take longerthan they should. I think you recognise the failure interms of quality standards on that, but then I think wewould all agree that this does not answer the question.If in seven weeks you have been assembling the listof things and that comes out after seven weeks, okay,it is late but at least the question is answered. It failson the standard of timeliness and fails on the standardof quality of answer. Would you agree?Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Q25 Nic Dakin: I think Tom was trying to tease outwhere the blockages in the system might be. Onealternative, one possible solution, one possibleexplanation might be that it is the political adviserarea where a blockage lies because there is sensitivityand there is pause there. It is reasonable for us to askif that is where the blockage is. Can you give us someconfirmation or challenge to that test?Elizabeth Truss: I personally do not have a view. I donot think we have the data on where in the system ithas been blocked.

Q26 Nic Dakin: This has been going on for a coupleof years. The performance has improved but it is stillthe poorest across the whole of Government, but youdo not have the information on where it is. I ran acollege for many years and if I did not have thatinformation at my fingertips in terms of where theproblems were, then I would be quite properlycriticised by the Department.Hilary Spencer: Yes, and it is worth saying that therewere significant improvements in the Department’sperformance between January and April this year,which is when we got much more detailedmanagement information, which did allow us to trackto the hour how long different parts of the processtake.

Q27 Nic Dakin: So you could share that managementinformation with us?Hilary Spencer: At that point we did. We had it forfour months between January and April, then ourelectronic system started having problems in May andwe have not been able to retrieve the same level ofmanagement information since then. I am very happyto share with you the data for the beginning of theyear, which does set that out in more detail.

Q28 Nic Dakin: I think that might be helpful. Theother thing that strikes me is that if you look at Health,which is not a dissimilar area of political activity interms of controversy and so on, Health is performing




astoundingly well, which is to their credit. I justwonder what the Department has done in terms oftrying to learn from Health’s experience.Hilary Spencer: Yes, we have. Our parliamentaryteam has conducted visits to the Department forTransport, DFID, DECC, the Ministry of Justice, theDepartment of Health, and DCMS to try to understandwhat they do that enables their performance to be somuch better.

Q29 Nic Dakin: What has it learnt from those visits?Hilary Spencer: The key thing we have learned isthat most Departments do it in slightly different ways.Some of them have a reasonably large parliamentaryteam who manually go round. They have a big centralteam that goes round and chases people to make surethey meet deadlines. There are other teams that havebetter IT systems, which enable more consistenttracking.I hesitate to walk into the area we have coveredbefore, but there are some Departments that givemuch shorter answers than other Departments. TheCabinet Office, I think, is an example of one of those.I think a lot of it is to do with the managementinformation; as you say, management information thatallows you to identify at which point the blockage isoccurring in the system because then you know whatto do to tackle it.

Q30 Nic Dakin: You are not convincing me that youhave the management information now to addressthe problem.Hilary Spencer: I would not try to. At the moment, Ido not think we have because our IT system hasfailed. Our management committee signed off at theboard meeting in October the procurement for a newIT system, which should be live by Easter 2013.

Q31 Nic Dakin: So we have another year to gobefore we get proper delivery in terms ofparliamentary answers?Hilary Spencer: Well, I think we will be able to seesignificant improvements faster than a year. Thespecific problems we have had with the systemcollapsing in May and June were that we had nomanagement information and we have been running itoff a manual system. That was a crisis measure whilewe tried to fix the system.We have concluded that as the system currentlystands, it is not possible to fix it and we have lookedat the options of importing IT systems from otherGovernment Departments that have worked moreeffectively. Our conclusion has been that we cannotdo that, but in the meantime we have strengthenedthe manual process. We have put extra staff into theparliamentary team to try to cope with that so thatwhere we cannot do things electronically we have atleast a bit more human resource into trying to fix thesystem.

Q32 Nic Dakin: Final question from me, then. Whatsort of level of performance would you expect to havebetween January and March next year?Hilary Spencer: Between January and March?

Q33 Nic Dakin: What are you aiming for? You seemsatisfied—well, not satisfied, but from 18% we arenow talking about 40%, you tell us, although you arealso saying your management information is not goodenough to give total assurance around that. I am justinterested in what sort of level of performanceimprovement you expect to have in the first quarterof 2013.Hilary Spencer: Well, I would hope that we aresomewhere between 40% and 50% in January,February and March.

Q34 Nic Dakin: Which would still put you prettymuch at the bottom of the league, would it not?Hilary Spencer: I agree. I am not claiming that thatwould bring our performance to a good standard. Ithink it would be acceptable. It would be better thanit is now, but it would be disingenuous of me to saythat with no further improvements to our IT we willsuddenly be as good as a number of otherDepartments.

Q35 John Hemming: I have two areas I would liketo look at. One is particularly the question here aboutwhat places have people visited. I do not know whois the appropriate person to ask there, but given thatthe question is about each Minister and which placesthey visited and given that that information would beavailable from the electronic diary, would it beaccurate to say that none of the diary secretarieslooked up the information?Hilary Spencer: As I said, I just do not know enoughabout the details of this particular case.

Q36 John Hemming: In other words, you need tocome back on this particular question?Hilary Spencer: Yes.

Q37 John Hemming: Obviously, one would presumethat at least one person is sufficiently competentwithin the Department to look up a diary and list theappointments within the period of time it took toanswer the question and that somebody took adecision not to provide that information. Say it comesfrom a diary secretary and the diary secretaryproduces the information. Where does it go next?Hilary Spencer: If it is something that relates toMinisters’ diaries, the collation of that would then goto the principal private secretary as the senior civilservant in charge of private office.

Q38 John Hemming: It goes to the principal privatesecretary. Does it go to anyone else?Hilary Spencer: The principal private secretary wouldbe responsible for clearing the accuracy of theinformation and making sure that the overall—

Q39 John Hemming: Once the principal privatesecretary has looked at it, does it just get then sent tothe House?Hilary Spencer: No, the process I outlined in responseto an earlier question—it then goes on to our advisersand to the Minister’s office before it goes back to theHouse.




Q40 John Hemming: It goes to an adviser, sobasically somewhere on that point if any informationwas provided to start out with and it has been stopped,who would be likely to have stopped it?Hilary Spencer: I am reluctant to say more about thiswhen I am not completely sure of my facts.

Q41 John Hemming: Without investigating theindividual question.There is another issue I would like you to go awayand look at as well. I had a real battle with theDepartment that involved lots of references to theProcedure Committee about two years ago when theMember for East Worthing and Shoreham was, in fact,in office. A lot of it related to what is happening tochildren in care.There is a thing called the SSDA903 return. I acceptthat that is the specific responsibility of the Memberfor Crewe and Nantwich, but it is still the EducationDepartment. We got a compromise where I would e-mail backwards and forwards with the statisticians,because I had been previously banned from talking tothe statisticians under the previous Government. Butbecause I understand how the database works I knowthe questions to ask.My concern about it is that a number of children arelost by local authorities each year. That includestoddlers who are lost; 180 babies that leave the systemand nobody knows where they go. I just wonderwhether the acceptance of that by the Department forEducation would be seen as complacent—thatchildren disappear from the care system for otherreasons and we do not know where they have gone.There is an equivalent system in American calledAFCARS, which tracks children that run away. Now,a baby running away is a bit difficult, really. I justwonder whether you think that is reasonable.Hilary Spencer: I am trying to compute the bit of mybrain that has been geared up to talk about PQs withthis specific question.

Q42 John Hemming: It is about the issue ofaccountability. My worry about it is that theDepartment is complacent about accountability ingeneral. Now, obviously, these things I was handlingthrough parliamentary questions and we got acompromise when there were so many things flyingaround that we would handle it through e-mailsdirectly rather than through parliamentary questions. Iwonder if you could come back with a detailed writtenresponse from the Department as to whether it isreasonable to have children completely disappearfrom the care system and not know what has happenedto them.Chair: John, I hear where you are coming from, butwe are here to talk about PQs.John Hemming: Well, it is all a question ofaccountability. These were PQs at one stage and Ihave asked these in PQs as well, so it is relevant.But it comes down to this question of process andaccountability and whether the Department iscomplacent in the sense that it does not matterwhether or not you answer questions.Chair: There is a lack of willingness to shareinformation.

John Hemming: A lack of willingness to shareinformation. It seems quite clear.

Q43 Helen Goodman: On 1 November, I put downa question to the Secretary of State to ask whichnewspaper and other media proprietors, editors andsenior executives he has met since 1 July 2012. I amsure the Minister will recall this because she sent methe answer on Monday 10 December. The answer wasthat the Secretary of State had met the followingmedia executives since 1 July 2012: in July, AnneMcElvoy of The Economist; in July, Louise Rogers,the TES; in August, David Wooding of The Sun; inOctober, Gary O’Donoghue and Vicki Young of theBBC; and in October, John Micklethwait, Joel Buddand James Astill, The Economist. There was a furthersentence in the answer that the Minister signed off:“This does not include media executives who mayhave been in attendance at lunches or events alsoattended by the Secretary of State”. Do you think thatthat was a complicated question to answer?Elizabeth Truss: No.

Q44 Helen Goodman: Why do you think that it tooksix weeks to get an answer?Elizabeth Truss: Well, I think we are back to thisprocess question here, which is that as a Ministersigning off the question I see the end of the processbut not the whole process. I completely agree withwhat Hilary is saying about absolutely we need properinformation about each leg in that process. At themoment, it is a black box and that is not ideal. Whatwe are saying here first of all is that the Departmentis having an overall review of its processes, which isthe DfE review, which is all about having a moreefficient Department that is focused on outcomes andproper processes.At the moment, more broadly than PQs, myobservation as a Minister is things are going throughmore processes than they need to. Certainly at DfEboards I feed that into the Permanent Secretary, whois overall responsible for the efficient working andrunning of the Department. I think as you can hearfrom Hilary and my responses, there certainly is notcomplacency at the DfE. We absolutely recognise thisis not what it should be. We are asking otherorganisations in the education world to be efficientand we want to be efficient as well, which is why theDfE review is being conducted, which is why we aresourcing this new IT system. Absolutely I would loveto have the management information on the processthat question went through and how long the stagesare, but I am afraid I do not.

Q45 Helen Goodman: I must say I am sure youwould love to have the management information, butI think that the idea that questions cannot be answeredswiftly and people cannot do what they need to dobecause you do not have an adequate tracking systemdoes not entirely hold water.Elizabeth Truss: I did not just say the trackingsystem, by the way; I said the process as well.

Q46 Helen Goodman: The process. I asked the samequestion to four other Departments. They all replied




within five days, not the six weeks that it took theDepartment for Education. How can it possibly be thatyour process is so complicated that it takes seventimes as long in your Department as it does in fourother Departments?Elizabeth Truss: What I am saying is that there isclearly a problem with the process, which needs to beimproved. Absolutely.

Q47 Helen Goodman: There is one problem herethat is about time. The other, which we have surfacedbut I want to ask you a little bit more about, is content.We have here a list of people whom the Secretary ofState met and then a general disclaimer, “This doesnot include media executives who may have been inattendance at lunches or events also attended by theSecretary of State”. Do you think that he will havemet more media executives at lunches and events inthat time than had formal meetings?Elizabeth Truss: I honestly do not know.

Q48 Helen Goodman: Because I can think ofseeing photographs—Elizabeth Truss: It sounds like Hilary does know.

Q49 Helen Goodman: I have seen photographs ofthe Secretary of State at media events with mediaexecutives in the newspapers. For example, I haveseen a photograph of him at The Spectator lunch. Ithink it is pretty clear that there will have been a largenumber of people. Do you think that this answer issufficiently forthcoming to make parliamentaryaccountability meaningful?Hilary Spencer: I think I can probably help explainwhy the question was answered in this particular way.The searches I was talking about earlier, when wehave a specific request about who a Minister has met,the information that is contained in the diary invitationon the electronic system will say, “Minister meetingwith XYZ”. They will be named in there, which ishow you would do a search on it. It is unlikely that—

Q50 Mr Gray: Even though it did not, buttheoretically it could have done, yes.Elizabeth Truss: It was in this case.Hilary Spencer: But it is unlikely that the electronicbits in the calendar would also have a list of allother attendees.

Q51 Helen Goodman: You have said that you arereviewing your processes and you want to become amore efficient Department.Hilary Spencer: When you say “you”, that is thePermanent Secretary’s role and that is what he isworking on at the moment. That is the whole purposeof the DfE review.

Q52 Helen Goodman: Okay. Ministers have takendecisions to reduce the amount of resource they areputting into running costs in the Department forEducation, have they not? Could you just remind theCommittee what percentage cuts in running costs yourDepartment has agreed with the Treasury?Hilary Spencer: Yes, we have agreed a 50% cut in ouradministration budget from May 2010 to May 2015.

Q53 Helen Goodman: Now, an agreement on thesize of administrative cuts is the responsibility ofMinisters. It is not the responsibility of officials. Itis Ministers who undertake the negotiations with theTreasury. I would like to ask the Minister whether shebelieves that if there is a 50% reduction in resource itis likely that the Department’s efficiency with respectto handling PQs and correspondence fromparliamentarians will improve, stay the same or getworse.Elizabeth Truss: Well, I think we have to improve. Ithink that Parliament is due answers in a much shortertimeframe than we have been doing as a Department.I think that is imperative. One of the issues I pointedout with the process, which as discussed has more ofa black-box element than I would like at the moment,is that it is going through a lot of stages.I think we need to simplify things and make themmore efficient—and that is a general point about theDepartment and the way we use IT, the way we dealwith correspondence. It is a classic case of process re-engineering that needs to happen across the board. Ido think that the problems we have at the moment arenot caused by a lack of resources, financial or human.The problem we have at the moment is not having aclear process that is properly tracked and understood.That is the issue. Just can I—

Q54 Chair: I will let you ask one more question andthen we will bring someone else in.Helen Goodman: One more question.Elizabeth Truss: Oh, I was just going to reply to—Chair: Okay, finish your answer, Minister, sorry, andthen one more question, Helen.Elizabeth Truss: I was just going to reply to aprevious question. The negotiations with the Treasuryare not my specific responsibility within theDepartment, so I cannot really answer you on thatpoint.

Q55 Helen Goodman: Okay. We have heard thatinitially a question goes to the policy area or theperson responsible for the issue under question.Obviously, it has to be finally sent off to a Minister,by definition. There are two other processes inbetween that: going to the parliamentary unit andgoing to special advisers. If one is looking forshortening the process, presumably it is the twomiddle points where things can be shortened. Youcannot really shorten it at the beginning or at the end.Elizabeth Truss: No, I would not necessarily agreewith that because I think one of the issues is it can goto multiple policy officials. One of the changes in theDfE review is to have a more flexible, multifunctionalapproach rather than having officials working onabsolutely micro areas of the portfolio.

Q56 Helen Goodman: Well, that may be so but—Elizabeth Truss: The idea is if you could have betteraccessible information and a more flexible structure,then that enables you to do things more quickly ratherthan a process that goes to multiple people, which itdoes at the moment. I think the point is in the processHilary outlined there are sub-layers to that process,which is what is taking the time. It does not just go to




one policy person and then on to one parliamentaryperson. It is going round.Helen Goodman: That may be so in some cases, butin the example I have given you it can only have goneto the Secretary of State’s diary secretary. There isnowhere else in the Department where it can havegone. I do not have any further questions.Chair: Right. I know lots of colleagues want to getin, but I will take them in order.

Q57 Martin Vickers: I think it has already beenmentioned. In your opening remarks, “culture” wasthe word that you used. I am sure it is the culture ofyour Department and every Government Department,if they were asked, that they would say, “Yes, we wantto be as open and transparent as possible”. Would youagree that if we take the example of the question thatwe have been talking about—I am sure there arehundreds of others we could point to—if we assumethat the Minister himself did not approve that answer,then either the special adviser or the official clearlydoes not understand the culture of openness andtransparency?Elizabeth Truss: Which question are you referring to?

Q58 Martin Vickers: Well, I was referringspecifically to the one that we have been talkingabout, the reply about visits to youth projects.Elizabeth Truss: I think the point is that we need toinvestigate the details of how that question wentthrough the process because we do not know.

Q59 Martin Vickers: But would you accept thatwhoever approved that answer was unaware that youwanted to be as open and transparent and helpful aspossible? Would he or she have been under ministerialinstruction to be as helpful or as unhelpful aspossible?Hilary Spencer: Again, I am really wary of givingyou misleading information by not being on top ofthe detail.

Q60 Martin Vickers: Well, I am not askingspecifically about this question; I am just using thatas an example. Is it ministerial instructions to specialadvisers and officials to be as open and transparentas possible?Elizabeth Truss: Absolutely.

Q61 Martin Vickers: And informative? So whoeverapproved this was not aware?Elizabeth Truss: We want to be informative in theanswers that we give to our questions.

Q62 Martin Vickers: It would appear that someofficials or advisers are not aware that that is yourintention.Elizabeth Truss: We do not know the cause of howthat answer has come into being. That is the point Iam making. We do not know what happened to resultin that answer. That is a question we do not have theanswer to. I think Hilary has already committed thatshe is going to come back with the details of that.

Q63 Martin Vickers: Indeed, but are your officialsand advisers under instruction to be as helpful andopen and transparent as possible?Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Q64 John Hemming: I apologise because I need togo another Select Committee—Chair: Martin, I will come back to you.John Hemming: I think to assist the Committee, itmight be best if the Department simply provided acopy of all the correspondence and e-mails relating tothe answering of this question. Is there any problemwith that?Hilary Spencer: I do not think so. I will check.

Q65 John Hemming: If you do that, then we canunderstand exactly who provided what information towhom and how it was edited. That seems a verysimple solution because that way we will understandwhy a very simple, straightforward question ends upwith a nonsense answer. That is a very good solution.I apologise because I need to go.Chair: Martin, back to you?Martin Vickers: No, it is okay.

Q66 Mr Nuttall: Where does one start? First of all,can I ask a really straightforward, simple question?Would I be right in thinking that all the staff withinthe DfE are able to communicate with each other bye-mail?Hilary Spencer: Yes.

Q67 Mr Nuttall: They can. They are all on an e-mailsystem and they can all communicate by e-mail—verysimple, good. Consequently, presumably, assumingthat the system works on a daily basis, there is nodelay in one member of staff being able to talk toanother member of staff? Send them an e-mail andthey either ignore it or they reply?Hilary Spencer: Yes, I guess, subject to other thingsthat they are doing, but yes.

Q68 Mr Nuttall: Well, subject to other things, butthat is the truth, isn’t it? They get the e-mail; theyread it, they either respond there and then or they wait.We are told by the Secretary of State in a letter to theChairman on 17 November that the previous ITsystem collapsed. Could you just explain to mebecause I do not quite understand? I could understandhow a building collapses; I am not quite sure how anIT system collapses. Could you explain how itcollapsed to my very simple brain? What happened?How did it collapse?Hilary Spencer: Yes, I can do. That is referring toFebruary 2011, is that right? That is that reply?

Q69 Mr Nuttall: It said since June 2012.Hilary Spencer: Yes. So, as I said at the beginning,there have been two points where the PQ system hasfailed. One was February 2011 and the other one wasin June 2012. You are right; “collapse” does soundlike a building metaphor so perhaps we could thinkabout our drafting on some of that.Basically, what we have had is a freestanding PQsystem that does not interact with our e-mail system.




It is a contact record management system wherethings are logged electronically and are thentransmitted. In order to access a PQ, you as a drafter,someone who is trying to write the responses, wouldneed to log into the system to get what the PQ is andthen draft your answer in the system, close it, save it.It would then get sent to your manager or the deputydirector for approval and then, once they hadapproved it, it would then get sent electronicallythrough this internal system to the parliamentary teamand so on and so on through then the rest of theprocess. That system stopped working.

Q70 Mr Nuttall: Right. It stopped working.Hilary Spencer: Yes.

Q71 Mr Nuttall: I am still not quite sure why itstopped working. Presumably—Hilary Spencer: If I knew that, I would have fixed it.

Q72 Mr Nuttall: Did the IT people just say, “That isit, the system has shut down” and all the informationon it was lost?Hilary Spencer: No. It started first having some initialproblems in April, which our IT team manager fixed.It is a system built by Capgemini. In May they sentin a number of people to try to help us restore thesystem. The intention was to try to fix the system.They put in some temporary solutions, which didrestore it a little bit. The specific problems thatoccurred in it were that it was taking a huge amountof time to download the questions when they firstcame in. Things were taking two hours to get into thesystem per question to download.

Q73 Mr Nuttall: Excellent. That brings me back tomy original point, because you can see where this isgoing, can’t you?Hilary Spencer: No, I agree.

Q74 Mr Nuttall: If I was an operative there, I wouldsay, “Well, this system is rubbish, but I will tell youwhat, I am just going to send them an e-mail”.Hilary Spencer: That is indeed the system we are nowoperating. It is our emergency system.

Q75 Mr Nuttall: We established at the outset that ane-mail more or less goes instantaneously to the newperson.Hilary Spencer: Yes.

Q76 Mr Nuttall: I am not quite sure—an e-mail isinstantaneous—why when this new IT system comeson board it will be any faster than sending somebodyan e-mail.Hilary Spencer: Because it will be integrated withOutlook so it will be exactly the same system. Youare completely right. It was a system that wasprocured before I took over responsibility for this. Itdoes not work. It is not functional. It has had twomajor malfunctions, which have rendered large partsof it inoperable. It does not work. It is not fit forpurpose and so we are operating at the moment on asystem where we are using e-mails. It is proving insome instances easier for people to use it. In other

instances it is harder because it means you cannot seewhere things are at different points in the systembecause it is all happening through people’s inboxes.The new system that we are procuring will be fullyintegrated with Outlook. We have learnt the lessonsfrom that and the new system should do that.Chair: One last question.

Q77 Mr Nuttall: One last question. Okay, I will tryto phrase it as one.Chair: It can be a long question.Mr Nuttall: It is all to do with WPQs, thoughobviously there are two sorts of WPQs: ordinary andnamed day. So far in this session we have not reallyexplored in what way the Department prioritisesnamed-day questions. It seems to be that we have onlyever heard of one process, and yet I would havethought that the fact that when a Member puts in anamed-day question they are expecting a speedieranswer, that somehow there must be some sort ofexpedited system within the Department that willresult in a faster answer being given.Although looking at the statistics, which show thatnamed-day questions were only 1% behind those ofan ordinary written question, it appears that there isno prioritisation at all. In fact, it seems to be that,according to this PQ performance chart, ordinarywritten questions were 18% on time; named-dayquestions were 17% on time. You were probablybetter off—Hilary Spencer: That is a proportion of how on timethey are.Elizabeth Truss: Yes. That is referring to the overallstatistics—

Q78 Mr Nuttall: Yes, I am sure you are going to tellme that things have improved. I hope so.Hilary Spencer: They have. I can give you thestatistics.

Q79 Mr Nuttall: What are the latest figures?Hilary Spencer: For October, Commons named-dayPQs were 22% on time and Commons ordinarywritten were 43% on time. That does not really helpme address the question that you asked, though, doesit? Almost the contrary.

Q80 Chair: I will say, Ms Spencer, you are doingvery well. I genuinely mean that because I think this isdifficult and I think you are taking it with good grace.Hilary Spencer: Right.Chair: We will come back to this at the end justwhere we take this, because I suspect this will not bethe last time we have a brush with the Department forEducation unless things improve dramatically.

Q81 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Minister, thank you forcoming in. It seems to be a splendid chance, goodfortune, that the improvement in the Ministry’sperformance coincides with your arriving there, whichallows me to get on to the issue of ministerialresponsibility. It seems to me that this is an area whereofficials are valiant but it is actually a fundamentalpart of a Minister’s responsibility to Parliament and,




therefore, process is not particularly relevant. It isday-to-day ministerial responsibility.My first question is about how important you as aMinister feel accountability to Parliament is in youroverall role. Is it the most important part of your role?Is it secondary to being a servant of the Crown? Is itthird to being a political figure? Where do you putbeing accountable to Parliament in your role?Elizabeth Truss: I think it is very important.

Q82 Jacob Rees-Mogg: You think it is veryimportant?Elizabeth Truss: Can I just comment on the process,though? I think the issue here, which we have goneinto, is that at the moment the process does not workas it should. That is not just the IT process. Clearly,officials are manually intervening in running a processthat there is not visibility of. As a Minister, I do notnecessarily have the information I would need.Absolutely I want things to happen on time, but interms of why they are not happening on time, thatinformation is not available to me. I would point outthat in terms of the administration of the Departmentthat is very clearly the responsibility of the PermanentSecretary. Ministers do not have the power to hire andfire, as you are well aware, in the British system.

Q83 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I am well aware. At whatpoint do you know that a parliamentary question isyour responsibility?Elizabeth Truss: When it arrives on my desk to signoff.

Q84 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Okay. Is it up to you as aMinister to say that when a question comes in that isin your area of responsibility it should be brought toyour attention as soon as it is in Hansard? Or couldyou, in fact, look in Hansard to see if any of thequestions belong to you as a Minister?Elizabeth Truss: I do not know how I would gain afront-end view of the process, really.Hilary Spencer: Yes. The way the system and itsbroken bones are working at the minute, we couldbuild—Elizabeth Truss: That would be extremely helpfulinformation, Jacob. You are telling me it is inHansard.

Q85 Jacob Rees-Mogg: It is in Hansard every day.Sorry, it is in the questions book. It is on the OrderPaper every day. Every day you can see that there arequestions and for which ministry. You will know as aMinister whether they are in your area ofresponsibility or not. What really puzzles me is thatthese rotten answers that come—I quite understandhow a Minister six weeks late will sign off a questionbecause you must at that point feel it is better to saysomething than go back to the beginning of theprocess and be three months late.Elizabeth Truss: That might be correct, yes.

Q86 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I would have thought that asa Minister you would want to know the day a questionis down that it is your responsibility, which means youcan then say to your officials, “Where is the answer?”

Just doing some very simple maths, there were 4,398ordinary questions. That is 15 per sitting day in thefirst two years. There are what, five Ministers? Thatis three per day per Minister.Elizabeth Truss: Yes, although the distribution is notequal between Ministers and I sign off a fair few ofthem.

Q87 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I appreciate that, but this isonly per sitting day and Ministers obviously work onother days as well. It is not an unmanageable amountfor a Minister to know on day one and to take chargeof the process. The process, yes, of course, the writingof the answers, the checking of diaries, is somethingto be done by the civil servants. The accountability toParliament is the job of the Minister and, therefore, toensure that the job is being done is the job of theMinister. I just wonder whether you as a newMinister—you are not at fault for what has happenedin the period we are really looking at—were now totake complete charge of the questions that came toyou, you could conceivably show your colleagueshow it could be done.Elizabeth Truss: Well, that is absolutely right. Youhave said that there is a distribution between theMinisters. As I say, the distribution is not equal byany stretch of the imagination, so I would find myselfprobably looking at rather more than 15 a day. Theissue here, though, is who is responsible for managingprocesses in the Department. Because there is onething about the style, the fact that I want the questionsthat I answer to be open and transparent and give fullinformation and be properly on time. That isabsolutely a ministerial responsibility and that is whatI have said to the Permanent Secretary that I want tosee. Likewise on correspondence, which you may beaware the Department also has an issue about. NewMinisters have been very clear that we also want tosee improvements on that front.However, if a Minister tries to manage every singleprocess that is going on, whether it is the answeringof parliamentary questions or policymaking processes,the critical thing is the machine has to work. Fixingthe machine is critical to making this work becausethen Ministers can have proper oversight of theprocess. I would completely agree with you, Jacob,that it would be very helpful for me to see, to be ableto monitor exactly which questions have come in thatrelate to my area.Sometimes it is not obviously clear which area thequestions are in and sometimes they can be in multipleareas as well, as we have seen with the question aboutyouth visits. It has to be a departmentally managedprocess. It has to be under the responsibility of thePermanent Secretary, but absolutely Ministers have tohave much better information about what is happeningand what is going through the process. We have justhad a board meeting of the DfE board where we havebeen through all this because at present theinformation—let us be clear, it is the responsibility ofofficials to provide that information to Ministers. Wehave to operate over a number of areas, all of whichare extremely important.I absolutely believe in accountability to Parliament. Ido not think the performance is good enough and I




want to see an improvement in PQs andcorrespondence, but also we have to make sure thatwe get things like the National Curriculum out by thetime we have said we will get it out. Lots of differentprocesses to manage and it is the responsibility in theBritish system of the independent Civil Service tomanage those processes. Yes, I need to haveinformation about it, but to actually take charge ofmanaging every single part of the Department wouldrequire me to become a civil servant, which I am not.

Q88 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I think there is a differencewith things in Parliament and things outsideParliament. The implementation of the NationalCurriculum—the policy decision is yours; theimplementation is the Civil Service’s. As far asParliament is concerned, an answer that has yourname on it and a question that comes to you is entirelyyour responsibility. If that question—Elizabeth Truss: That is not entirely so. Ministers areultimately accountable—

Q89 Jacob Rees-Mogg: They are accountable—andvery directly, for what they say or write to Parliament.Elizabeth Truss: Absolutely, which is why I sign itoff.

Q90 Jacob Rees-Mogg: You could, if you wanted to,take every question that came in that you thought wasfor you and do a manuscript answer and give it in tothe Table Office. You would be constitutionallyabsolutely correct. You cannot put it off to process.The Civil Service may be letting you down, but thisis so fundamentally ministerial responsibility.Elizabeth Truss: But take the question about whichyouth projects have Ministers visited in the last sixmonths. That is not a question that I could give amanuscript answer to unless I was making it up.

Q91 Jacob Rees-Mogg: You could have said,Minister, how many you have visited and allowedyour other ministerial colleagues—it could have beenanswered by every Minister individually, which mighthave been the easiest way to do it.Elizabeth Truss: But if you multiply that—becausewe have said there are 15 questions per sitting day—Jacob Rees-Mogg: You might get a few more butit is—Elizabeth Truss:—and let us say, for example, that Imight do twice as many or three times as many asthat. There is a proper way of managing things, whichall other Departments manage. This is not some pie inthe sky idea that is not possible. As has been pointedout by members of this Committee, DCMS, theDepartment of Health, manage to answerparliamentary questions on time without having tohave the process you are suggesting.I think it is important to get the answers on time, butI do not think that means that Ministers should takeup the role that is properly the role of civil servants,which is making the process work. I am absolutelyresponsible for the content of the answer; I completelyunderstand that. I am also responsible, with theSecretary of State, for making sure that theDepartment is prioritising the right things. One of the

other factors about the DfE review is that there isgoing to be more effort to focus on ministerialpriorities, which I think is absolutely critical.We are working on all those things, Jacob. In my view,the answer is not to give answers that would not beproper answers. A lot of the questions are quitetechnically detailed, so it is how many academies andfree schools were set up in this particular borough. Itis not the kind of thing that I can summon up.

Q92 Chair: With the greatest of respect, Minister,how many academies were established in the boroughof Broxbourne could be done, as my colleague MrNuttall said, with a simple phone call. None of this isrocket science.Elizabeth Truss: I personally—Chair: No, you could not do it, but—Elizabeth Truss: I can tell you, Mr Walker, that Iwould not know who to phone to get the answer tothat question.Chair: That is because they are keeping you in thedark.

Q93 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Minister—the reason Iwould encourage you to do this. If you started givingsome answers that had not been through all thisbeastly process and gave them on time, that might girdthe civil servants who are not giving the answers, andperhaps some other people involved, into actionbecause they would prefer to get their answers out ontime rather than have your perhaps moreindependently-minded answers appearing ratherearlier. Sometimes taking what is your responsibilityinto your own hands may be a way of forcing thesystem to work.Elizabeth Truss: I think we need to terminate thissession before I get too much encouragement, MrChairman.

Q94 Mr Gray: I want to focus on one little part ofthe process, if I may. First of all, Minister, do youaccept that parliamentary questions by definition mustbe absolutely factual and must be replied absolutelyfactually?Elizabeth Truss: Well, there are different ways ofgiving a factual answer. Obviously, they should not befictitious so what is—

Q95 Mr Gray: No, the distinction is not betweenfacts and fiction. The distinction is between facts andopinion. Parliamentary questions by definition, underthe law of the land, must be factual.Elizabeth Truss: Yes, in which case I agree withthat, yes.

Q96 Mr Gray: If I ask a factual question, you mayonly answer it factually. You may not put your opinionthere. You may not spin it. You must answer thefactual question I have asked factually. Do you acceptthat is the case?Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Q97 Mr Gray: Right. Given that is the case, amoment ago—perhaps I could turn to Hilary—yousaid that one of the hold-ups was that some of the




questions are politically more controversial and theymay take longer. What did you mean by that?Hilary Spencer: In some instances, where a Memberhas asked a question about something that is shortlyto be announced, then there is the provision to holdoff, or a commitment that a Minister needs to makeannouncements to the House first, but it is reasonablenot to—

Q98 Mr Gray: That is not political. A reasonabledelay is fine if some announcement is to be made, butthat is not politically more—the word you used was“controversial”. You said very often questions can bedelayed because they are politically morecontroversial. What sort of question might bepolitically more controversial?Hilary Spencer: I will try to think of a reasonableexample of this.

Q99 Chair: Can I help you here?Hilary Spencer: Do.

Q100 Chair: I think you have drawn the short straw.The reason they are controversial is that a specialadviser gets involved and holds the whole process up.Can you explain to Mr Gray and the Committee whatyour relationship is with the special adviser andperhaps, Minister, you could talk about the role ofthe special advisers in answering questions. Because Ithink it is a little unfair that you are having to coverfor the political practices within your Department.You talk about the role of the special adviser and thenthe Minister will talk about the political role of thespecial adviser in answering ministerial questions.Hilary Spencer: Yes. I suppose this question aboutwhat is politically controversial or not, some of it isto do with the content of the question that is asked.Some questions are asked by Members of Parliamentthat are completely factual and are asked in that spirit.I think we all know that is the case. I think there aresome questions that come in from Members of theHouse that are intended to achieve some sort ofpolitical effect or obtain some sort of information thatcould be used for political purposes.

Q101 Mr Gray: Well, they are all used for politicalpurposes, but they are factual. Every single questionhas a political purpose behind it, of course it does. Forexample, you would not be allowed to put down aquestion that would say, “Would you agree theConservative Party has wrecked education?” Thatwould be controversial; you cannot do that.Hilary Spencer: No, I agree.

Q102 Mr Gray: All you can ask for is the numberof schools and visits. These are factual questions.How could they not be answered factually? What theChairman is getting at, and I think he is absolutelyright, is if I am right—I am right because the rules ofthe House are absolutely plain: you can only ask afactual question and it must be answered factually. Ifthat is the case, why do they go to special advisers atall? What role does a special adviser have inanswering a factual question?

Hilary Spencer: Well, it is reasonably standardpractice across Whitehall for parliamentary questionsto go to advisers.

Q103 Mr Gray: It was not when I was a specialadviser. I never saw a PQ once. Why do the specialadvisers see PQs?Hilary Spencer: Partly to make sure that they areconsistent. They are a point in the process. Our specialadviser would see all of the parliamentary questions.They would make sure that they were consistent interms of a response that came out of the Departmentin a way that there is not an official who does exactlythe same thing because they—Mr Gray: Consistent?

Q104 Chair: But you said the Permanent Secretaryhad total oversight. What is the Permanent Secretary’sinvolvement with the special adviser—a politicalappointment?Hilary Spencer: I am not quite sure I understand that.

Q105 Chair: In answering the questions, the Ministerand yourself, the Minister said the PermanentSecretary has oversight for the running of theDepartment and the process. I was not aware thatspecial advisers reported to Permanent Secretaries, sothe Permanent Secretary does not—Elizabeth Truss: No, they advise Ministers.

Q106 Chair: But the special adviser is part of theprocess, so how can the Permanent Secretary haveoverall responsibility for the process if the specialadviser, by your own admission, is part of the process?What we are trying to get at is it seems to me that thespecial adviser is part of the problem here. What doyou do, for example, when the special adviser puts ared line through a part of a question? Does he send itback to you or does he send it to the PermanentSecretary, the Minister? When a special adviserredlines a question, as they do, what then happens?What do you do when that happens?Hilary Spencer: As I outlined the process, a seniorcivil servant would sign off the draft of theparliamentary question in their area, including thebackground note, and that would then go back to theparliamentary team and then on to an adviser.

Q107 Chair: An adviser or special adviser?Hilary Spencer: It could be either.

Q108 Chair: What is an adviser?Hilary Spencer: We have policy advisers in theDepartment.

Q109 Chair: Are they a political appointment?Hilary Spencer: No, they are short term.

Q110 Chair: Who are they?Hilary Spencer: They are senior Civil Serviceappointments.

Q111 Chair: Right. When do they go to the specialadviser?




Hilary Spencer: Each day the advisers’ support office,the advisers’ private office, has a list of all theparliamentary questions that they are being asked toclear, and they will decide between them, quite oftendepending on workload and who is available that day.

Q112 Chair: But what happens when a red line isput through part of an answer? Does it get sent backor does it just go out?Hilary Spencer: In truth, it depends what they haveput a red line through. If they have put a red linethrough an apostrophe or a comma or there is somegrammatical change, obviously it will just get changedby their office and that will go straight on. Sometimesthey ask for more information to be included, and ifthey do that then it will go back to the drafting team.

Q113 Chair: What happens when they ask for lessinformation to be included?Hilary Spencer: It depends on what type ofinformation they are asking to be removed. If theinformation they are removing changes the factualbasis of the answer that has been signed off by asenior civil servant, it would go back to that seniorcivil servant so they can guarantee its factualaccuracy.

Q114 Mr Gray: I want to ask the Minister about this,if I may. What added value do you think the specialadviser places on a PQ? What is the purpose of thespecial adviser seeing a PQ answer?Elizabeth Truss: I just wanted to—because you areasking the question.Mr Gray: No, no. Answer the question.Elizabeth Truss: It is the same answer. I am honestlyanswering your question. You ask why the PermanentSecretary does not appoint the special adviser. No, thespecial adviser is there as an adviser to the Minister.That is the point. That is why they are involved inthe process.

Q115 Mr Gray: Yes, precisely. The special adviser’sjob is to—Elizabeth Truss: As Mr Rees-Mogg has outlined, theMinister has to be happy with the answer to thequestion and they have to answer the question. Wetalked about fact and not fact earlier, but if thequestion is what is the Government’s policy on thisissue—let us say that this is a matter on which theGovernment has never opined before.

Q116 Mr Gray: Then it would not be a PQ. Thatwould not be an allowable PQ.Elizabeth Truss: No, there can be. It is veryinteresting you should say that.

Q117 Mr Gray: Hang on a minute; I do want tofocus now. You are not answering the questions I amputting to you at all.I do not understand why it should be that in recentyears—it did not used to happen when I was a specialadviser—special advisers have become involved inthe parliamentary question system. If you accept thatparliamentary questions are factual questionsdemanding factual answers—no spin involved, no

discussion, no explanation, just factual answers tofactual questions—surely it could be argued that thespecial adviser whose job it is to provide a politicalinsight into something—the special adviser job is toprovide those things that civil servants are not allowedto do because they are political. Surely that means thatwe are moving into a position in which theparliamentary questions are becoming not factual butpolitical.Elizabeth Truss: I do not think that it is that easy todraw the line between fact and things like policy,which are what the Minister plans to do on something,for example. It could be a question on whether theGovernment plan to remove this special allowance orsomething like that. Now, either the Minister isplanning to do that or not planning to do that, but thatis a policy decision.There is not a clear line on those things. The questionsthat you highlighted earlier are very much factualquestions, but there are other questions that are askingfor a policy position, in which case I think it isperfectly proper that a special adviser should advise aMinister—because, let’s face it, there is quite a lot ofpolicy—on what the position might be on thatparticular policy.

Q118 Mr Gray: There may be some. There may besome delicate and sensitive parliamentary questionsthat require the special adviser’s very clever,politically astute, sophisticated input. That would besomething for the Minister to ask the special adviserto have a look at—“Have you seen this one? Have alook at this and let me know what you feel about that”.That would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do.What we are talking about here is that every singleparliamentary question is going through a specialadviser. I am a former special adviser and I have beenthere. I know they are bigger and more important nowthan they were when I was doing it, but he is sittingthere with one secretary. Piles and piles and piles ofparliamentary questions come through. We haveheard—we are told anecdotally—that the blockage inthe system is because special advisers are sitting onthem. Is that true?Hilary Spencer: I think it would be unfair to say thatthe special advisers are the cause of the blockages inthe whole system.Elizabeth Truss: There are a lot of issues, and I havealluded to this earlier, in assembling the informationfrom the policy teams.

Q119 Mr Gray: No, you cannot get away with a loadof waffle around the thing. Let us stick with thisquestion about the special advisers. You think they arenot the blockage. How quickly would you—Hilary Spencer: I think probably sometimes they area blockage in a way that sometimes, even when oursystem works on e-mail, if it is sent to someone andthey are out of the office or they do not read it andthey are not in a meeting, that might also be ablockage. All I am saying is I think it is perfectlypossible that the advisers are at points a blockage, butso, too, are a number of other things.




Q120 Mr Gray: Let us be clear about this. Howquickly would you expect the special adviser to cleara PQ?Hilary Spencer: The process I outlined at thebeginning—a five-day process that allows us toanswer things within the parliamentary timetable isthat they clear it within 24 hours.

Q121 Mr Gray: Quite clearly they do not. Some ofthese questions have taken two or three months.Elizabeth Truss: That is not necessarily that they weresitting in the special adviser’s office.Hilary Spencer: That assumes that all other bits ofthe process work perfectly.

Q122 Mr Gray: Not necessarily, but I am just askingwhether it was or not. If what you are saying is thatthe Department is taking three months to answer thesequestions and you can guarantee—and it is all on therecord. We are broadcasting here. This is aparliamentary inquiry. You are saying that delay thatwe are looking into, PQs taking three months, you areguaranteeing to us formally as evidence beforeParliament—it is not your opinion; it is evidence—that the special advisers are not delaying PQs in theDepartment for Education at all. Is that right?Hilary Spencer: I am not saying they are not delayingit at all. I think I have been quite clear about that. Iam saying it is highly likely there are points wherethe special advisers delay things in their office forreasons as much of administration as anything else,as, too, do other parts of the Department.

Q123 Mr Gray: A moment ago you said they doit in 24 hours. Are you saying that sometimes theydo not?Elizabeth Truss: No, that is the ideal.Hilary Spencer: I said that is the expectation—thatthey do it within 24 hours.

Q124 Mr Gray: So how long does it take?Hilary Spencer: It varies. Sometimes they do themwithin two hours, sometimes longer.

Q125 Tom Greatrex: Minister, you have made clearyour view of who is responsible for the process, butjust in terms of your role, when you get given ananswer to sign off you are presumably aware of thedate when the question was tabled?Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Q126 Tom Greatrex: I know you have only been aMinister for a relatively short time, but from thenumbers that you have alluded to, you seem to getmore than an equal share, amongst your ministerialcolleagues, in the Department. When you have lookedat the dates to see that a date you are signing off willbe six or seven weeks after the date it was tabled,have you gone back to ask why that is the case?Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Q127 Tom Greatrex: What have been the reasons?Elizabeth Truss: Well, the list of reasons that havebeen outlined. As I say, this is not just an issue with

PQs. This is an issue with correspondence as well andoverall systems and processes within the Department.

Q128 Chair: Do special advisers see correspondencebefore you sign it off?Hilary Spencer: Not generally.Elizabeth Truss: Sometimes. Sometimes, because it isa different issue but I also take correspondence fromparliamentary colleagues very seriously and want toget back to people as quickly as possible with a goodanswer. I do not think it is satisfactory, and otherMinisters do not think it is satisfactory, whencorrespondence is not completed in a reasonabletimeframe as well. There is a general issue that thePermanent Secretary has very recently identified aboutthe overall processes in dealing with these kinds ofissues within the Department.

Q129 John Hemming: There is a database thatrecords the parliamentary questions asked, all of them,and whether they have been answered or not. Do youmake any use of that database?Hilary Spencer: I am sure the parliamentary teamdoes.

Q130 John Hemming: I am just thinking that if youcan get access to this you can get a list of all thequestions that have not been answered by yourDepartment and somebody can then go through it andsay, “Well, those ones are a bit old”. It is not thatdifficult, is it?Hilary Spencer: No, and also our internal systemwould allow us to do that. When it is functioning, itought to be able to.

Q131 John Hemming: All I am saying is there is asystem that functions today that you could use and Iam just suggesting you might try to use it, that is all.Hilary Spencer: Yes, and I think the parliamentaryteam has explored that. Again, I will refer that.

Q132 John Hemming: “Explored” meaning what? Itis there. It works at the moment, as far as I know. Itmight be a useful thing to respond to the Committeeon, on the basis that you have looked at it, used it. Itis on the intranet and it just says which questions havenot been answered by the Department, so you couldjust find out.Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Q133 Martin Vickers: Hilary, a moment ago in replyto James you said that replies went through a specialadviser to ensure that they were consistent. That isright, is it not? But, Minister, you just said a momentago that correspondence does not go through anadviser. So correspondence could be inconsistent?Elizabeth Truss: Well, I have to say that I do showspecial advisers a lot of my correspondence forprecisely that reason—to make sure it is consistent.

Q134 Martin Vickers: If there is a logic to PQsgoing to a special adviser, surely the same logic wouldapply to correspondence.Hilary Spencer: Can I say a bit more about that? Ihave the dubious pleasure of also being responsible




for our ministerial correspondence, so I can probablysay a bit more about the processes that attach to eachof those.The example I gave in terms of a parliamentaryquestion, quite often questions come in that do notfit conveniently into one division or one senior civilservant’s area of responsibility. We have a number ofthings that are quite cross-cutting. It could be that thebalance of a question falls mostly in one division, sothey would draft an answer to it based on lines thatthey have from other colleagues or best intent, andthen another question that is on quite a similar topicbut is not phrased in exactly the same way, the balanceof the question means that it gets assigned to anotherdivision, who again would answer it to the best oftheir knowledge and then provide an answer. One ofthe functions that a single unit of advisers looking atthose two different PQs can serve is that they are onepoint of contact that looks across everything that iscoming out. That would be where they would addsome value in terms of consistency.In terms of the way the ministerial correspondenceworks, firstly, the volume is really different—weanswer somewhere between 200 and 300 letters aweek in terms of ministerial correspondence—but alsothe staffing around it is such that we have a leaddrafter for each Minister. There is there a point ofcontact who is seeing everything that goes into theMinister so is providing that checking andconsistency function.

Q135 Chair: How many members of staff are theredoing parliamentary questions?Hilary Spencer: There are now eight.

Q136 Chair: There are 15 questions a day; that istwo questions per person on average. It is never assimple as that, but that is two questions per personper day.Hilary Spencer: There have been eight people sinceabout a month ago. We have upped the staffing inresponse to—

Q137 Chair: What was it before?Hilary Spencer: It has been five up to May 2012. Wehave then put in two extra members of staff at moresenior grade.

Q138 Chair: It is just not extraordinarily onerous, 15questions a day spread among five people. Is it, MrRees-Mogg?Jacob Rees-Mogg: That was my point earlier.Chair: It is just not that difficult. Perhaps I couldsecond a member of my staff over to help becausethey deal with a lot more cases than three a day.Hilary Spencer: Again, as we started on this, I am notdefending the quality and timeliness of the PQs thatwe are giving back to you. We are not complacentabout this.Chair: I do not think that you are the problem, nordo I think the Minister is the problem. I think thepeople you work for are the problem.

Q139 Mr Nuttall: It is all about the backlog, really,isn’t it, now? There must be a backlog of questions

sitting there waiting. Do you know what that backlogis today? How many questions do you haveunanswered at the moment?Hilary Spencer: No, I cannot tell you exactly fortoday, no, but I can do if that is helpful.

Q140 Mr Nuttall: When was the last time youchecked?Hilary Spencer: Well, the figures for November.

Q141 Mr Nuttall: Okay, that is fair enough, yes. Wasthat the last day of November?Hilary Spencer: Yes, at the end of November we had81 Commons named-day PQs that were due foranswer and 56 were answered by the end ofNovember. Commons ordinary written PQs, 159 weredue for answer and 137 were answered.

Q142 Mr Nuttall: Well, that does not sound like thebacklog, does it? That just sounds like an interimfigure.Hilary Spencer: I do not think it is a huge backlog.We have had points with a significant backlog,particularly after June or July where we have had asignificant backlog. There was a bit of a build-upimmediately after the ministerial reshuffle, which Ithink is common to quite a lot of Departments whenyou have new Ministers coming in. I think there hasbeen a bit of a backlog following the reshuffle, butno, I think we are in a slightly better position now interms of questions being answered. I still think we arenot getting them out as fast as we ought to.

Q143 Chair: Right. All Governments have problemswith questions. What was it like at the Department forEducation in the last year of the last Government?You were obviously there before the general election.Hilary Spencer: I was actually in Washington DC.

Q144 Chair: Oh, right. Do we have any idea what itwas like in the year before?Hilary Spencer: In what sense? In terms of overallperformance?

Q145 Chair: Was the performance as bad as it wasafter the general election?Hilary Spencer: Yes, it was on average about 20%,25%.

Q146 Chair: You see, I just do not understand whyyou have been sent with a junior Minister who hasbeen there for two months to come and talk to us.Really, to be honest, I am disappointed—not in yourperformance, because I do not think we could haveexpected anything more. I think you have been givena hospital pass, as it is known. I think we need to getthe Secretary of State here. I think we need to get thePermanent Secretary and we need to get the specialadviser, because the evidence you have given suggeststhat your Department is wholly dysfunctional.As you have stated, the Permanent Secretary isultimately responsible for the process. I really do notthink that either of you is equipped to answer thequestions that we have asked today. You have done itto the best of your ability but, as I say, Minister, you




have been there for two months. With the greatest ofrespect, you are junior to your Permanent Secretary.If this has been going on for three years, then actuallythere is a cultural failing within your Department. Ithink the Committee needs to go into session after thisand discuss whether we invite the Secretary of Stateand the Permanent Secretary to come and see us.Colleagues, how do you—Mr Gray: And the special adviser.Chair: And the special adviser. All right?

Q147 Mr Gray: How many special advisers arethere?Hilary Spencer: Three.

Q148 Chair: It is just not good enough, is it? Twentyper cent. in answering questions, 40%, “We may getthere in the end”, when you have Departments outthere getting into the 70 percentile. This has beengoing on year after year after year. Has it not beenextremely depressing for you to be there over the lasttwo and a half years, just working around a culture ofdeprioritisation of parliamentary questions?Hilary Spencer: I think I probably ought to say thatour current Permanent Secretary has been in postsince April this year.

Q149 Chair: Well, great, he can come and tell uswhat his great vision is for the Department. But theSecretary of State has been there for two and a halfyears and he can perhaps tell us why this has notconcerned him more. Because what we have isParliament being bypassed at the moment. That isreally what this amounts to—that the concerns ofparliamentarians do not really warrant seriousattention by the Department for Education. That ispretty shameful and a pretty poor reflection on theDepartment. Colleagues, does anybody want to ask aquestion before we let these good people go?Jacob Rees-Mogg: Just to say that Health is at 99.6%on named-day questions on the named day in 2010to 2012.

Q150 Chair: Can I thank you both for maintainingyour good humour?Hilary Spencer: Not at all.Chair: You are both a credit to your organisation andI am sure you will go on to do great things. You arebeing held back by those ahead of you in the foodchain, but thank you very much.Hilary Spencer: Thank you.Chair: I am sure you enjoyed it as much as we did.

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Wednesday 23 January 2013

Members present:

Mr Charles Walker (Chair)

Jenny ChapmanNic DakinHelen GoodmanTom Greatrex

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Education, Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary,Department for Education, and Sam Freedman, Policy Adviser, gave evidence.

Q151 Chair: Secretary of State, thank you forcoming, Mr Wormald, thank you for coming, and MrFreedman, thank you for coming. Gosh, we havenever had so many people in the public gallery. I amsure they are not here because of me, but perhaps theyare here because of you, Secretary of State.Nevertheless, thank you for coming. You know whywe are conducting this inquiry. You know why youare giving evidence. Your Department’s record onanswering parliamentary questions is not good, andthat is probably a fairly generous interpretation.Personally, I feel it is about accountability—howseriously your Department takes accountability to ourParliament and to the Members of that Parliament.There were parts of the evidence session that indicatedthat accountability was not taken that seriously,because if it was, questions would be answered in amore timely fashion and in a more complete fashion.Do you want to make an opening statement, MrSecretary of State?Michael Gove: Yes. You are being more thangenerous to me, Mr Chairman. I think that you cannotbe bottom of the league table in Whitehall by such awide margin as we are and be anything other thandeeply disappointed at the incredibly poorperformance of the Department when it comes toparliamentary questions. More than that, thisweakness follows a weakness that we had withcorrespondence as well. I have been a Back Bencher,and I know how frustrating it is when parliamentaryquestions are not answered and correspondence iseither answered late or sloppily, or both, so on behalfof the Department I would like to apologise to you, tothe Committee and to the House. I hope, in the courseof this evidence session, we can explain, without everseeking to explain away, what has gone wrong.

Q152 Chair: That is very kind, and I would just sayfor the record that this has been an ongoing problemwithin the Department for the past four or five years,so there is no political motivation here. This has beenan ongoing problem for a significant amount of time.I have been assigned the first question, possiblybecause it is the least interesting, but could you justoutline to us the process that the Department is goingthrough to improve the situation? There has beensome correspondence, but your understanding of whatis going on—perhaps Mr Wormald would like to comein as well on that.

John HemmingMr David NuttallJacob Rees-MoggMartin Vickers

Michael Gove: Yes. I will give an overview, and Iknow that the Permanent Secretary will add somedetail. In essence, almost every part of the way inwhich we answer parliamentary questions has notworked. Firstly, I think that I and other Ministers havenot been clear enough about the need to answerquestions fully and rapidly, so I think there has beenan absence of clarity on that matter, which we havesought to correct by the Permanent Secretary and Isending a clear message to all the staff that theexcellent work that the overwhelming majority of civilservants do is overshadowed by weakness in this area.I think that we have particular weaknesses in ourparliamentary team. Not the Ministers, but thoseallocated responsibility for dealing with parliamentaryquestions in the Department were in a team that wastoo small and lacked the expertise to be able to makerapid and effective judgments. It is no criticism of theindividuals. They were being asked to do aparticularly difficult task. We did not staff or resourcethem appropriately.Beyond that, within the Department, I think at everystage when individual directors and deputy directorswere pursuing answers to questions, when peoplewere drafting answers to questions, and indeed whenthey were being finally cleared, there was a lack ofurgency. What made the whole situation worse wasthat we inherited an information technology systemthat had a number of weaknesses. I do not want toblame that system—that would be blaming ourtools—but it complicated matters. If we had beenoperating at the top of our game, it would have beensomething that we could have taken in our stride.Because we were not, it exacerbated the problems. Wenow have a situation where we are essentiallyanswering questions in a very traditional, paper-basedway. The message that we need to improve has gonethrough. We are going to get a better system in orderto deal with it. The system that was designed wassupposed to make it easier both for experts inparticular areas to answer questions and also for theprivate office to know who was dealing with anyquestion at any particular time. There were flaws withthat system, which I am sure we will explore.

Q153 Chair: Excellent. Mr Wormald, do you want tosay anything?Chris Wormald: Yes. The first thing I would like todo is endorse what the Secretary of State said aboutthe Department’s overall performance. The view that

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23 January 2013 Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Chris Wormald and Sam Freedman

it is unacceptably poor is one that we share in termsof the civil service management, as is our commitmentto improve the situation now. The Secretary of Statehas outlined quite comprehensively the changes weare making. I think the only things I would add arethat we have significantly upped the level of senioroversight in the system. Hilary Spencer, who you metlast time you considered this, is a member of theboard, and is the member of the board with directresponsibility to drive improvements in this area.The other big change we are making on the non-ITside is to go over to a system where there is a singlenamed individual who is responsible for trackingevery single individual PQ as it goes through its wholejourney through the Department. As I am sure we willcome on to, a lot of the delays and problems wereexacerbated by IT problems that the Secretary of Statedescribed, which I can go into more detail on if thatis helpful. It was becoming lost between stages. Whenit became delayed, it was very difficult to pick upagain, so there will be a person whose job it is tochase individual ones right through the system.The third big non-IT change is that we are going tohave much greater senior oversight when PQs firstcome in to agree strategy for answering this question.Another of the causes of the delay was civil servantsdoing a lot of work on a PQ, it then coming back tothe seventh floor, the more senior people looking at itand deciding, “That is not the right way to approachthis question. That is not what the MP was getting at”,and that then causes a delay as it is redrafted. Theidea is to have that discussion at the beginning of theprocess, rather than the end. Then, of course, the keyto it in the long term will be a new IT system that ishopefully procured rather more successfully than theone that we did in 2009 to 2010. Getting that ITsystem in place and having it properly procured,properly “spec-ed” and then tested and implementedis quite a long-term thing, so we are not relying onnew IT for the immediate improvements we want todrive. As the Secretary of State said, in the short termwe will be managing this on a much more traditional,paper-based, e-mail spreadsheet basis, and then in thelonger term we want to get back to a position wherewe have a proper IT system that tracks these thingsfor us and produces the kind of managementinformation that this Committee wants and seeks, andthe Department needs to manage the process properly.That will then allow us to give Ministers thereassurance they deserve that the Department is doingthis properly.

Q154 Chair: Thank you. Just before I bring in mycolleague Mr Vickers, Mr Freedman, could you brieflyoutline to the Committee what your role is in theprocess, just so they are up to speed, so you can beinvolved in this discussion as well?Sam Freedman: At the moment, all the PQs gothrough the adviser’s office; I am the adviser wholooks at them. I am the Secretary of State’s SeniorPolicy Adviser on Schools. At the moment, I look atall PQs, and that is, I think, part of the process thathas been questioned previously.Chair: You are a member of the civil service.

Sam Freedman: I am a member of the civil service,yes, exactly.

Q155 Martin Vickers: Secretary of State, in youropening remarks you mentioned that you had inheriteda poor IT system, which in effect means that theproblem has now been going on for, what, three yearsplus. Why is it proving so difficult, and why are otherDepartments seemingly able to overcome theseproblems? Are the systems not in any waycompatible?Michael Gove: The first thing to say—I think thePermanent Secretary will say a little bit more—is thatwe couldn’t give you a full answer without talkingabout the IT system, but I must emphasise that it ismuch more than the IT system. To use an analogyfrom medicine, it is an already weakened system, soanother thing going wrong forces it to collapse. Ahealthier system would have been able, as I mentionedearlier, to take this in its stride.We inherited a situation where the previousGovernment had entered into a contract with Capitato provide a variety of IT functions. It must bestressed that many of those functions have beendelivered in a way that has been entirely to thesatisfaction of the Department and to that of thevarious other individuals and agencies upon which theDepartment relies. But there were particular problemswith the parliamentary questions application that theyprovided for us. It was in the nature of the deal thatthey did care and maintenance overall for IT, and thenif we required a new application we had to go to themfirst. They had first refusal on the design of that.In the process of designing a system, which came inin 2009, to answer parliamentary questions, the designof the specification was given to the private office.Naturally, they reflected what Ministers wanted, and,to be fair to Ministers at that time, they wanted a lotfrom it, so the private office request was what ITpeople might call over-engineered or over-specified.The IT people said, “We will try to provide that”, butin the end essentially what should have been a cleanand clear process was over-specified and, as a result,the product at the end of it under-performed to theextent that a series of errors led to its crashing on twooccasions. When it crashed, it meant, in effect, that itwas impossible to know where parliamentaryquestions were in the system and how to answerthem—an appalling situation—and for that reason wehave gone back to a traditional, paper-based methodof answering them. We are seeking to ensure that wedo have an IT answer—I hate using these phrases, butyou know what I mean—that is appropriate. Earlierthis week—and I have to say stimulated by thisCommittee, but it would have happened anyway—thePermanent Secretary and I talked to the people incharge of IT procurement in our Department to walkthrough the weaknesses in the system that we hadinherited and what would be required in the future.Chris Wormald: I should say it is Capgemini, notCapita.Michael Gove: Sorry; Freudian slip.Chris Wormald: Yes. The story, again, is exactly asthe Secretary of State describes it. The intention of thetracking system that was introduced in February in

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2009 and 2010 was to address previous weaknesses inthe PQ system, and I understand it is quite difficultbecause there was very little correct managementinformation. From what we can see from the numbers,performance has not been great in this Department—as I think you said at the beginning, Chair—for quitesome time. The PQ system was supposed to be partof the answer to that system. As the Secretary of Statesaid, it was over-specified. In practice, it did not sitwell with the rest of the IT architecture of theDepartment. The other thing that happened was—again, it is quite difficult to tell because the data is sopoor—it appears that post the Election the number ofPQs the Department received, in line with lots ofDepartments—this was not special to us—went upquite a lot, which exacerbated the problems of analready weak IT system.I meant to say right at the beginning, as the Secretaryof State said, that these are explanations, not excuses.None of them excuses the Department’s performance,but in order to explain to the Committee, whathappened, as the Secretary of State said, was that itcrashed. It crashed first in, I think, February 2011—sorry, a bit before that—and my predecessorPermanent Secretary launched a programme toimprove the handling of PQs. The system was putback together, and there was then a period, which Iarrived in the middle of, when PQ performance wasimproving within the Department. It went up from17%, which was its low point, to somewhere around40% on time. Still nothing like good enough, but whatwe were seeing, both at ministerial level and senior-official level, was every month things getting slightlybetter. At that point we did believe that progress wasbeing made and we were heading in the rightdirection, from a very low base.In June 2011,1 the system crashed again and ourperformance collapsed, and at that point we movedover to the paper-based system and e-mail-basedsystem that we are currently using. We then spentseveral months attempting to fix that system, which inhindsight was a mistake made by me and my seniorcolleagues. We should have taken the decision at thatpoint that this system was never going to workproperly and chosen to replace it at that time. Wespent several months attempting to repair that ITsystem. We took the final decision that the systemwould have to be replaced, not repaired, in November2011,2 and, as I say, one of the mistakes we madewas to not make that decision to go for an entirelynew system early enough. Now, as the Secretary ofState said, we have made a big push around theDepartment, and we will be improving our currentsystem while we procure the new one.

Q156 Martin Vickers: Thank you for that. I am stillnot clear why your Department is seemingly uniquein terms of its IT requirements, compared to, say, theHealth Department.Chris Wormald: It shouldn’t be, and, as I say, I am notattempting to excuse the Department’s flaws. There isnothing unique about the Department’s situation thatled to this position. We had an expansion of PQs; so1 Witness correction: this should read “June 2012”.2 Witness correction: this should read “November 2012”.

did others. We have a number of PQs that is roughlysimilar to Departments of our size, and I havecertainly seen no evidence that they are any morecomplicated in our Department than in the others. Icannot give you a, “This is what was different atDfE”, other than, clearly, that the procurement of thatIT system did not go well, and then we should havedone our remedial action quicker. The difference youare looking for is in the decisions made by theDepartment, not any externality.

Q157 John Hemming: Here is something I preparedearlier for the Secretary of State, because it makes ita little bit easier to follow. As people probably know,I am a bit of a techie. Don’t try to read the first bit; itis just to demonstrate things. I thought, after the lastmeeting of the Procedure Committee looking at thingsin December, that Parliament had a system thattracked parliamentary questions and that it should bepossible from that system to find out which ones havenot been answered, and indeed that is the case.In the afternoon following the meeting, I found outwhich 61 questions had not been answered after onemonth, and those are the ones listed on the first sheet.The good news is that when I did the calculations thismorning and got the list—I have done it, so it can beread on pages 2 and 3—there are now only 36questions that are over one month old, which isobviously a lot longer than it is supposed to be.Interestingly, one of them is from Edward Timpson,and now he is the Minister I do not think he is toobothered about answering his own question. I didnotice Lisa Nandy putting in a question asking whenher question of 23 May 2012 would be answered, andher question is a very, very simple one, about howmuch money is spent on one particular person’sexpenses. There could be an answer; “We won’tanswer that”, or whatever it may be. The first one onhere is 9 May, due to be answered on 14 May, and itis asked by Lisa Nandy. There is no sense goingthrough all the details, because they are all there. Thebasic question is: why don’t you use Parliament’s ITsystem just to track which questions are not answeredand chase them on the back of that?Chris Wormald: I should clarify what I said aboutPQs getting lost. The problem is not not knowingwhich questions we have not answered; it is trackingthe PQ while it is in the Department that is quitedifficult to do—or certainly without the labour-intensive process that we are putting in now—withouta properly functioning IT system. We know whichquestions we have not answered. Once it has left ourparliamentary section the, “Who has it been e-mailedto?” “Who has that person forwarded the question onto?” and “Who is currently responsible for it beinganswered?” are having to be done manually. That isnot ideal, but your basic point is correct. We knowwhich questions we have to answer.

Q158 John Hemming: This is not IT. This is a verybasic thing. We know we can get a list of all thequestions that have not been answered, and some ofthem just have not been touched. You could have justasked them again within the Department. There is no




need to find out where it went to before. I think thisis absurd.Interestingly, on page 4, you are now not the worst interms of questions over one month.Chris Wormald: Some good news.John Hemming: I did a summary for all theDepartments, and DCLG is top at 47, MoJ numbertwo at 43, and the Department for Education is nowonly 36 on questions that have taken more than amonth to answer. But frankly the answer that youknow which questions is just not acceptable.Chris Wormald: As I will add in every answer, I amnot attempting to excuse the Department’s flaws. Theprocess you are describing is exactly the one we arenow going through. The problem is we are startingfrom too far back.

Q159 John Hemming: We had a discussion aboutthis on 12 December, when, one would presume, itwas clear that people were not happy with theperformance of the Department. It has improved a bit,but it has not improved that much.Coming further on, unsurprisingly I suppose, two ofmy questions that have been outstanding for a longtime were answered on Monday, which would besensible, given that you were coming to theCommittee meeting on Wednesday. As the Minister isaware, I am concerned about foreign Governmentswho are complaining about the UK child protectionsystem. I asked the question: “Have you had anycomplaints from foreign governments in any form?” Igot the response: “Ministers are aware of norepresentations received from Governments relating toforeign national children being adopted in Englandwithout parental consent”. I have spoken to theMinister about it previously. On page 6 of thedocument, we have a public statement by the SlovakRepublic. On page 7 of the document, I have a letterfrom the Czech Republic saying there is a problem.On page 8 of the document, I have a letter from theSpanish Government saying there is a problem. Onpage 9 of the document, I have a letter from theNigerian Government saying there is a problem, andthen I have a letter from the Minister who I sent theNigerian Government’s letter, saying, “Thank you forsending me the Nigerian Government’s letter.” Onpage 14, I have a translation via Google of a Slovaknews story, where a Slovak Minister spoke to WilliamHague at a foreign conference, complaining about ourchild protection system. My thought would be that ifthe Foreign Secretary was complained to, he wouldpass it to the Department as an issue to be looked at.The basic question is, having rapidly got a questionout of the way for this particular Committee meeting,is that a fair answer on page 5?Michael Gove: Speaking for myself, I would have toread all of the submissions. For example, I am notdenying that there is a problem here, but, for example,the Czech letter confirms that the Czech Governmenthas had concerns and is grateful to you—as I thinkwe all are—for raising it, but it does not say that theCzech Government had contacted the BritishGovernment.John Hemming: No, the one where I get the letterfrom the Minister that answered the question.

Michael Gove: Is Nigerian.John Hemming: I wrote to the Minister enclosing thecommunication from the Nigerian Government thatcomplains about the system, and then the sameMinister answers the question saying they are notaware of anything. One wonders what is going on. Ifwe just look at page 5—Chair: John, I do not want to look too hard at this,because it is a personal issue you have. I would likethe Minister to respond to the question: how are yougoing to deal with John’s specific concerns on this?Michael Gove: Of course.

Q160 John Hemming: If we can have a letter onthat, we would be grateful.Michael Gove: We certainly will. I would say onething. There is a tension sometimes between speedand accuracy. There is a—John Hemming: Yes, but this one was slow andinaccurate.Michael Gove: Indeed, but one of the points I wouldmake is that a superficial—and it is only superficial—reading of the letter from the Nigerian Governmentraises a number of issues of serious concern aboutchild protection, but they do not relate, so far as Ihave seen in my superficial reading, specifically toadoption.John Hemming: Except I know that they do.Michael Gove: On the basis of the letter, one cannotknow that.John Hemming: Yes. I do not think we can resolvethat in this particular hearing.Michael Gove: No, but the case is important. Theydeserve to be dealt with appropriately. On the basis ofthe question answered, I think that the answer is fair,but given the importance of this issue, the mostappropriate thing would be for either me or MinisterTimpson to meet you and to run through these cases.Chair: Excellent.

Q161 John Hemming: It sounds very good. On afinal point, going back to the meeting of 12 December,I have extracted on pages 15 and 16 some points fromthere. We have the IT issue and the issue about theDepartment being slow because it wanted to beaccurate, but frankly I do not think that is what isgoing on. We looked particularly at a question fromthe Member for East Worthing and Shoreham. In fact,one part of that is about the care system losingchildren, which is the thing I go on about a lot, but inquestion 64 on page 16, I asked the Department tosend us copies of the documentation relating to theanswering of the question by the Member for EastWorthing, and nothing has happened on that. We havehad a letter, but what we have not had are thebackground papers. Under the Freedom ofInformation Act we would get all of those papers. Isthere any problem giving us those papers?Michael Gove: I don’t think so, no. I know that aletter arrived with an explanation from my colleague,Hilary Spencer, and I do take your point. I will seekto ensure that all background papers are there. Onething I should say, with respect to that question, is thatthe answer that you were given is that I attended novisits to do with youth centres or youth activities. That




is actually inaccurate, because the question wasanswered without asking me. Quite rightly; the privateoffice dealt with it. They contacted my parliamentaryoffice. I know that I went to, to mention just oneexample, the Etihad Stadium as a guest of the FootballAssociation to present awards to those who wereinvolved with the K.I.C.K.S. Initiative, which is anexplicit youth initiative—not educational, notexplicitly sporting, but youth—and I did so in orderto show my support for it. That was not recorded. Itis just another example where, of course, the questionmakes me look bad—tant pis—but the point is that itwas inaccurate. I think one of the tensions sometimesis between speed and accuracy. We need to do betteron both.

Q162 John Hemming: Yes. I just make the point thatwe were promised these papers at that Committeemeeting and they still have not arrived.Michael Gove: I take your point. It is a fair point.

Q163 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I want to clarify that thatis all it is, Secretary of State. It was agreed that wewould get essentially all the papers relating to theanswer of one specific question which we thoughtmight be illuminating in regard to how other questionswere answered. If that in fact could be provided, Iknow the Committee would be very grateful.Michael Gove: It is an entirely reasonable request,and we will accede to it.

Q164 Chair: What we did get was a letter fromHilary, explaining the process around the questiontabled by Tim Loughton on 12 December, but nothingbeyond that.Jacob Rees-Mogg: Not the details.Chair: Not the details.Jacob Rees-Mogg: Internal versions.Michael Gove: Absolutely. Because I only knewabout this question when I read the transcripts of thisCommittee’s deliberations with Hilary and withMinister Truss, I was not aware of the process sotherefore I am speculating; I think that quite a lot ofit would have been conversational and some of itwould have involved looking through my diary, myministerial and my constituency diary. Some things inthe ministerial diary would be listed in generalterms—“Trip to Manchester”—without necessarilythe specificity that would help answer the questionaccurately, but of course all relevant papers we willshare with the Committee.

Q165 Mr Nuttall: Thank you, Secretary of State andPermanent Secretary, for your answers so far. Could Iturn now to the backlog and what is being done toclear it? First of all, when do you think the backlogwill be cleared? A simple question. Secondly, what doyou think is an acceptable length of time for a non-named-day question to be answered? Thirdly, whenwill it be that named-day questions, all of them, areanswered on the named day that they are meant to be?Chris Wormald: Non-named-day questions we aresupposed to answer within five days, and that is thetarget that we aim for, which we are a long way from,as you know. I do not have a target date for when we

will reach an acceptable standard, because in this kindof area what you want to do is to improve every singlemonth. There is not one Department that is at 100%,which is what we should all aspire to. The challengewe are putting ourselves under is to improve all thetime, so I do not think it is the kind of process whereyou say, “Right, it is finished now. Our system nowworks”, and so on. We will not have our—I don’tquite know how to describe it—ideal system, our IT-based system, fully up and running until the autumn,so we will certainly not reach our peak efficiencyperformance until then, but in terms of timeliness wewill be aiming to get our performance up muchquicker than that, basically by spending more stafftime. What we are doing to both clear the backlog andimprove the day-to-day performance is investing quitea lot more staff in this area so that they can both workthrough the backlog and improve performance to alevel that is, in the first instance, much more in linewith the Whitehall average, and then, in the longerterm, hopefully towards the kind of performances thatall Departments should aspire to.Mr Nuttall: I understand that the performance isimproving at the moment.Chris Wormald: Yes.

Q166 Mr Nuttall: At the current rate of performanceimprovement, how long, assuming that rate continues,will it be before you achieve the accepted target?Chris Wormald: We have made quite a bigimprovement in the last month or so. I think it is veryunlikely, given that we were going from a very, verylow base at that point, we would continue that rate ofprogress. I think we went up by about 20 points, fromour absolute low point, but of course the easiest thingto do is to get off the absolute floor—but we would behoping to improve by, yes, five or 10 points a month, Iwould guess. I am slightly reluctant to put numbers tothese things, because what we are really trying to do iscreate a system that actually works and is sustainablyworking. As I said, my and my senior colleagues’ ownmistake in that period from January to June was to beover-optimistic about the quality of the whole systembecause the numbers were getting better every month.My and my senior colleagues’ test has to be: not onlyare the numbers improving to a level that thisCommittee and Parliament in general finds acceptable,but have we created a system that can sustain thoselevels of performance over a period of time, ratherthan do what we have done over the last two years,which is slightly yo-yo up and down.

Q167 Mr Nuttall: Is there a process in place toensure that in the desire to meet targets there is noloss of quality in the answer? As the Secretary of Statesaid, there is often a pay-off between answering itquickly and getting the answer right.Chris Wormald: Yes. One very important bit, which Ihave mentioned before, about how we want toimprove the process is right at the beginning whenmore senior staff and advisers, and in some casesMinisters, look at the question not when the answerwas being drafted but as it comes in, so that moresenior people can be saying, “I think what the MP isreally getting at here is the following”. That would




seem to me key to setting us off on the right foottowards a quality answer.

Q168 Chair: Thank you. Just before I call Tom, thereis a lack of precision in the Department that worriesme. I have a letter here from the Secretary of State on17 November, which clearly the Secretary of Statedoes not write, because he is a very busy man. Inthe final substantive paragraph it says, “One of myministerial team will be attending your Committee on12 December, and I hope you will be reassured thatmy Department will do everything possible to returnto providing the level of service Members rightlyexpect”. There was no level of service to return to,and I am concerned that in your Department there arepeople who just have not grasped this. I know thisletter was written a couple of months ago, but there isa lack of precision there. I am addressed as the RightHonourable Charles Walker, Nick Gibb is referencedas the Right Honourable Nick Gibb; there is a lack ofprecision in how this is being dealt with and a lackof understanding that I think is causing me and theCommittee concern. I just wanted to interject that.Chris Wormald: Yes. Sorry, one comment: those arefair comments, and the reason that the Secretary ofState and I put out the message, the whole Departmentand the new process that we did last week as somesort of January offering to the Department, was toexplain the new system that we want to put in place,but also to get over to everyone involved in thisprocess—as the Secretary of State said, the problemsare throughout the organisation—the importance ofgetting it right. On your base charge, as well as howhave our systems not worked, have we not taken it asseriously as we should have done over those years, Ithink that is a fair comment.

Q169 Tom Greatrex: Could I ask the Secretary ofState when he became aware that there was a problemwith PQ answering? Was it almost from the start whenyou became Secretary of State?Michael Gove: Yes, I knew that we had inherited aproblem and that the old predecessor Department, theDepartment for Children, Schools and Families, hadan issue with it. I had, for the most part, relied on thedecisions being made by, firstly, Chris’ predecessor,David Bell, and then subsequently by Chris in orderto address it. One of the sources of particular concernto me, which of course the Chairman has just referredto, early in the life of the Parliament, wascorrespondence, and I was more acutely aware ofproblems there than I was aware of the scale of theissue that we had with PQs.Tom Greatrex: But you were aware there was aproblem in terms of speed of answering from prettymuch early on in your—Michael Gove: Speed and accuracy, yes. I think thatthe speed and accuracy issue related most acutely toPQs, but I think it also related to correspondence. Iknew the correspondence issue more, or was morefamiliar with it, because there was a brief period whenI myself would clear certain PQs, and I did soprimarily in order to give people an understanding ofthe importance that I placed on accuracy, clearEnglish, full answers and appropriate context, so that

Members were well served. I only did that for arelatively brief period, but in my box every night thereare letters for me to sign. Therefore, when I see thatit is 17 January and I am replying to a letter from 24October, I express my unhappiness, and then when Isee that the letter I am just about to finish signingrefers to Essex when it should refer to East Sussex,then I think, “It is going to take another 48 hours forsomeone who has already been through this to dealwith it”. So I was much more conscious of andreminded every day of some of the problems that wehad with correspondence, and the exchanges that wehad on correspondence were much more—what is theword?—protracted.I was not as aware of the detailed problems that wehad with PQs. I knew the situation was far fromperfect and, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish Ihad intervened in a more determined fashion at anearlier point.

Q170 Tom Greatrex: I presume other Ministers inyour Department will have been aware of that at thesame time.Michael Gove: I think they expressed theirfrustrations both about correspondence and PQs toofficials within the Department, and, as the PermanentSecretary has laid out, there were efforts to deal withthe situation at each point. Again, with the benefit ofhindsight, none of those efforts was sufficient to thescale of the problem.Chris Wormald: Yes, and to reiterate the point I madeearlier, the Ministers will of course have seen thesame information that we did, so for a good chunkof this period what they were seeing was a steadilyimproving performance, and I do not think it is unfairfor a busy Minister in that situation to think, “Right,the medicine is working. We are on the right tracknow”. So I don’t think it is fair to say, certainly in thatperiod up until June 20113 when, as I say, from avery low base it was improving, that we could haveexpected Ministers to be saying, “But I still thinkthere is an underlying problem”.

Q171 Tom Greatrex: They would have been awarepresumably therefore that there was a problem tostart with?Chris Wormald: Absolutely. That was, as I say, well-known and my predecessor talked—

Q172 Tom Greatrex: You say it is well known, butwe have one of your former Ministers, Secretary ofState, making clear to us that he was never madeaware there was a problem with PQs—Michael Gove: It depends how—Tom Greatrex: In the speed of answering, possibly?Michael Gove: Yes, one of the things there is thateach Minister when they answer a PQ will be able tosee the date on which the PQ was put in, and willobviously know the date on which they are signing itoff. It may well be that any individual Minister ismore concerned with the accuracy of the answer, andit is entirely possible that they may not pay the samedegree of attention to the time. It is not the case thatthis information will be veiled or hidden, but it may3 Witness correction: this should read “June 2012”.




well be the case that for a busy Minister the mostimportant thing to do is to make sure that the answerthat he or she is giving out is full and fair, and I thinkin the brief period when I was looking at PQs, for methe most important thing was accuracy.

Q173 Tom Greatrex: All right. It seems remarkablethat you were aware almost from the start when youbecame Secretary of State, and one of your formerMinisters seemed to suggest that he was not awarethere was a problem with speed. It just gets to thispoint that the Chair was making about being unclearas to the accuracy of what is happening in yourDepartment. Can I ask the question I was supposed toask? When Hilary Spencer came before us inDecember, she made the point, “I have looked atdifferent options for reporting IT systems from otherGovernment Departments but it was not possible todo that.” Why is it not possible to use the PQ systemfrom another Department? There are plenty ofexamples where, if that was the issue, they areperforming much better than your Department.Michael Gove: Once the decision had been made toinvest in Capgemini and then to ask them to pursuea particular application, then that would be followedthrough. You are absolutely right. There are otherDepartments that have a better, and have had—almostall of them—a consistently better, approach to thismatter. There has to be a balance, I think, betweenbeing absolutely rigorous where a Department isfalling down—no Department is perfect—and whereit is strong. I will not bore the Committee by runningthrough all the areas where I think the Department isstrong and in some cases exceptionally strong, but Iwant to stress that because I know that there havebeen some suggestions that Ministers are critical ofthe performance of the civil service overall. Not at all.It is because so many of those areas are so good thatthis area stands out like a sore thumb, and the reasonwhy it irritates me, I suspect almost as much as itirritates everyone here, is that it gives a very pooraccount of what the Department is doing overall andit is a disservice to you because you are serving yourconstituents in holding the Department to account.Few things infuriate me more than things that aresloppily or poorly written; poor English is evidenceof poor thought and, therefore, a lack of care in asensitive matter. So I wanted to stress that for balance,to apologise again, before handing over to thePermanent Secretary on the specific point about IT.The specific IT problem arose, as I said, in 2009 whena previous set of Ministers, who wanted to do the rightthing and had a private office that also wanted to dothe right thing, over-engineered the process.Chris Wormald: Yes, and, as I said at the beginning,it is a specific question and we will get to the end ofmy technical expertise quite quickly in thisconversation. However, as it was explained to us,there were two problems with the system that weprocured in 2009. One was its over-specification,which basically meant they had too much data in it,and that eventually overloaded the system and causedit to crash. The second was it did not map well ontothe overall IT architecture of the Department, and thatwas one of the problems. It was the interface between

our PQ system and the rest of the Department’ssystems. Therefore, just to take a system and importit straight into the Department might be possible, butyou risk the second of those problems: that again itwill not integrate well with the overall system, and theproblems will replicate. Just to be clear what thoseproblems are. In an ideal system, what happens is youhave a system that tracks where the PQ is and isautomatically sending e-mail alerts to the people whoneed to do things at particular points. So the PQ istracked through the bespoke system, and then whatappears in your e-mail box is the automatic thing thatsays, “You are now late with this question. Dosomething about it”. So the integration between thatsystem and our overall IT system is quite an importantpart of the process, because it is much more difficultthan you would think just to import a system fromanother Department, because you risk those problems.Michael Gove: Very briefly, one of the features of thesystem that we inherited is that in effect, as thoughyou had a Google doc, you would have the documentaccessible to someone. Ideally, you should know whowas filling out the answer at any given time. When itcollapsed, we did not know. Theoretically, it couldhave worked even better. Cloud technology allows usto design a system which should—fingers crossed—be significantly better. I am no expert on this. I havebecome more knowledgeable over the last few weeks.The other thing is I am not doing my job if thissituation carries on in this way, and the Committee isabsolutely right to demand better performance. Verybriefly, just following on from Mr Nuttall’s point, wehave a long way to go, but if the Department ofHealth, similar in the scale of questions—the numberof questions—and the challenges that it has, can get97% of all their written PQs on time and 100% ofnamed-day PQs on time, then so should we. I can’ttell you how quickly we have to do it, but that has tobe the target.Chair: John, a very short question, because we aremaking such tedious progress.

Q174 John Hemming: I can provide advice on howto get information off the Parliamentary intranet if youwould like. Your parliamentary office—if they contactme, I can help.Michael Gove: They would be grateful.

Q175 Jenny Chapman: I couldn’t not take theopportunity to say that there are 450 very highly-skilled and capable staff in Darlington who would bevery happy to support you in this task. However—Chris Wormald: A point for another discussion.Jenny Chapman: It is, yes. But just again on theDepartment of Health, Chris, you said that there wasno Department who achieved 100%, but theDepartment of Health gets damn near at 99.6 onnamed-day questions, which is about as close toperfect as you can ask of anybody. You say, I expectquite correctly, you cannot just transplant an ITsystem from one Department to another, but I suspectthat is not just about IT—Chris Wormald: Absolutely.Jenny Chapman: It is also about the culture and theprocesses. Maybe they do not have an adviser looking




over every question when it comes in to see how theMP might like it responded to most appropriately, andthey may treat things on a more factual basis. I do notknow. Have you looked at the wider way that otherDepartments deal with this, not just IT?Chris Wormald: Yes, we have; we have looked at alot of the high-performing Departments, and what yousay is completely right. As we have said all the waythrough, IT is a contributory factor to this problem,but it is not the full explanation. All aspects of thisprocess were weak. Had the IT been better, then theproblem would not have been as bad and we wouldhave been able to identify it more quickly, and wewould have the management information that wouldallow us to spot more easily where in the systems theproblems were. But the problems, as you say, go widerthan that and the Departments who perform well doexactly as you say. It is as much in the culture of howthis work is done as it is in the technical process, andI think that was one of the problems with the originalIT system and how it was procured and specified. Aswith many of the problems the Government has hadwith IT contracting, which are well documented, partof the problem is when you think of them as an ITsolution rather than as a part of a process that involvesvarious human beings. You have to see it as an end-to-end thing. Certainly from how it was explained tous, it was very much, “Here is the IT system that willsolve the problem”, as opposed to the kind ofapproach that you are rightly pointing to, and I amsure that my hugely professional staff in Darlingtonwill be keen to assist, as you say.

Q176 Nic Dakin: I am very heartened by theopenness with which you recognise the IT is not anexcuse. I want to focus on culture. We have aDepartment, Secretary of State, where you yourselfare in trouble with the Information Commissioner.Your performance is always eloquent and engaging.At questions this week you were somewhat cavalierin your attitude towards leaking to the press. We havehad a briefing against former Ministers this week. Sothere is a suggestion that maybe the culturalexplanation is that this is a Department that is a bitfree and easy around information, and that theproblems here are part of that cultural approach ratherthan about IT or anything else.Michael Gove: I think it is fair to look at the issuesthrough different prisms. I would separate them indifferent ways. Firstly, the leaking: I have been morespinned against than spinning in that respect, and Ihope I have developed a sense of equanimity when Iam on the receiving end, but as I outlined to theEducation Select Committee today, if anyone in theDepartment engages in leaking or briefing in a waythat is directed towards others, particularly those whohave been and are distinguished in public service, thatis unacceptable, and I hope I have made that clear.With the Information Commissioner, essentially therewas a complex relationship between a set of questionsbeing asked by an outside organisation, theDepartment and the Information Commissioner. It isa sui generis matter, and one again that I would behappy to discuss in greater detail if this or any otherCommittee wanted to. On the broader question about

accuracy with correspondence and PQs, it is asituation that we inherited and I think there have beenproblems in the Department that require to beaddressed.One further thing that I would say, which you aregenerous enough not to mention, is of course that therole of adviser has been raised. I should stress that MrFreedman is a member of the civil service and hisprincipal role is to make sure that there is coherence,so that we do not give answers where, becausedifferent parts of the Department have given slightlydifferent wordings to things, a hare is set runningabout policy change. Sometimes it is the case thatcontext will be provided—additional information—inorder to make an answer more intelligible. A majorityof Government Departments have advisers playing arole in clearing questions and that is certainly the casein the predecessor Department, in the DCSF, butadvisers cannot relinquish their responsibility to dothings rapidly and accurately as well. One of the areaswhere I will freely acknowledge that I had beeninsufficiently clear across the Department was thevital importance of making sure that we respecteveryone with whom we deal, Parliament most of all.

Q177 Nic Dakin: Given that latter point aboutadvisers, why has there been a reluctance to allowpolitical advisers to come and give evidence to thissession?Michael Gove: Essentially for two reasons: one, theperson who clears the PQs, all PQs, and therefore whois master of the process and can most illuminate it forthis Committee or anyone else’s benefit is MrFreedman; secondly, my interpretation, and it is openof course to critique, of the Osmotherly Rules is thatMinisters answer for special advisers and thatultimately when the Committee calls a Minister or inparticular a Secretary of State to speak, it is I who amresponsible for their actions, not they, and thereforeour special advisers do not ordinarily appear beforeSelect Committees. But again, if I am in error, Iapologise, and I would be happy to clarify matters.

Q178 Helen Goodman: Secretary of State, I was acivil servant in the Treasury for 17 years before wehad these complicated IT systems, and I do not thinkwe ever found ourselves in the situation in which yourDepartment has found itself. I feel this wholediscussion is becoming increasingly like aperformance of The Government Inspector, withludicrously long and overly complex questions andexplanations. One of the things that certainly did nothappen when I was an official was that every questionwent through a special adviser, and I wonder onreflection, given what you have said about ministerialresponsibility, if you do feel that sometimesMinisters—particularly perhaps junior Ministers—shuffle off their responsibilities on to special advisers?Michael Gove: I don’t.

Q179 Helen Goodman: You do not; good. In thatcase, can I ask you whether one very simple way ofcleaning up your process would not be not to pass allof these questions and answers through the specialadvisers?




Michael Gove: I will draw a distinction betweenspecial advisers who are free to operate in a politicalway for a variety of reasons and other people whohave a policy adviser role, some of whom may beappointed on a fixed-term contract and others ofwhom are members of the career civil service. In ourcase the overwhelming majority of questions that goto the advisers’ office are seen and passed by anofficial who is not a special adviser and not free tooperate in that way. The overwhelming majority ofGovernment Departments do have special advisers.There are other special advisers. The role ofGovernment Departments has changed. The volumeand frequency of questions is higher. The nature ofcommunication between Departments, Parliament andthe public has changed. One thing should not changeand that is the vital importance of respectingParliament, getting things right and being fast. So Iwould say that there is no necessary reason whypassing them through advisers or not passing themthrough advisers should either excuse or explain afailure to be fast and accurate. You can ensure thatthey are seen by everyone who needs to see them andstill answer on time. That is what we have to get right.

Q180 Helen Goodman: Could you just tell theCommittee whether you think that your decision toagree with the Treasury to a 50% cut in youradministration resources is going to help you inachieving that objective?Michael Gove: Yes, is the short answer.

Q181 Helen Goodman: Could you say why that is?Michael Gove: I think because our Department willbe more efficient as a result of the DfE review, thereduction in administrative costs is part of the DfEreview process and the size of an organisation is noguarantee of its efficiency.

Q182 Helen Goodman: I accept that, but do you notthink that when the initial answers are being drafted—and obviously answers to questions are always factualbecause we are not allowed to ask other than factualquestions—then people having a certain level ofexpertise is in fact the most useful thing?Michael Gove: Sometimes facts are data that are heldin a variety of ways. Sometimes the Table Officeallows questions to be asked and what constitutes afact in the eyes of the Table Office and the eye of theperson asking it may, when it comes to theDepartment, require a degree of thought andconsideration. A specific point: the question asked bythe former Minister, Tim Loughton, perfectlyproperly, about visits to youth facilities/clubs/activities. What is a youth facility/club/activity? Thereis an element of ambiguity there, and there has to bean exercise of judgment. The most important thing,though, is that everyone in the process should get onwith it, and that we should have a managementinformation system that ensures that we know wherethe blockage is. One of the problems that we havewith the Department that we inherited—though many,many strengths—is that we did not have an effectivemanagement information system that meant if therewas a blockage or there were people in the system

who were not operating in the way that they should,that we could locate that and take steps to deal with it.Chris Wormald: I have one point on the DfE review;I might come back to adviser roles at some point aswell. One of the things the review identified, and wehave been public about, is that overall our decision-making processes in the Department are too slow andinvolve too many people. That is true across theboard, it is true when we are making policy, true whenwe are doing implementation, and it is true in thiscase. I do not think in this circumstance there wasanything at all between the numbers of civil servantsand the quality of the performance delivered. TheTreasury, of course, is an interesting case; it is quite asmall Department that delivers an enormous amount,frequently very swiftly. So I do not think that thenumbers you quote ought to affect this question at all.

Q183 Helen Goodman: The Secretary of State wasimplying that questions are getting trickier thanperhaps they were 20 years ago. I wonder whether hethinks that the question I asked him in the autumn—which newspaper and other media proprietors, editors,and senior executives he had met in the previousmonths—was a particularly tricky question.Michael Gove: No.

Q184 Helen Goodman: Why did it take six weeksto answer?Michael Gove: In order to make sure that we were notinadvertently misleading you or the House because asocial event that either I or my wife, as workingjournalist, might have attended might have involvedmeeting someone who was a newspaper executive andthe conversation might have been beyond simply afleeting one. So it requires a check of my diary heldin the private office, my constituency diary, and cross-checking a variety of events in order to be accurate,because the Prime Minister has issued, as I haveissued, these lists and then we have subsequentlychecked and discovered something had been omitted,and people say, “Ah ha, this was a secret meeting thatyou were preventing us from knowing about”.Helen Goodman: I would find that answer slightlymore convincing if the final sentence of the answer Ieventually got had not read, “This does not includemedia executives who may have been in attendanceat lunches or events also attended by the Secretaryof State”.Michael Gove: My wife is a working journalist andsometimes occasionally invites some of her colleaguesto dinner at our house; probably more of an ordeal forthem than anything else, but we needed to be accurateabout that. Sometimes it would be the case that all myprivate office knows is that I am having dinner athome; on a couple of those occasions there have beenexecutives from the BBC and indeed from NewsInternational who have been there because they havebeen former colleagues of mine or current colleaguesof my wife. So there is a difference between, as I didlast night, bumping into the current editor of the TimesLiterary Supplement who was at a Shakespeareschools festival, a former editor of The Times,someone I used to work with, 30-second conversationnot worth recording, and a dinner at home with a




Times or BBC executive, including people who areparents of children at the school that my children goto. There is a distinction. We try to exercise ourjudgment in such a way, given some of the exchangesbetween the Leader of the Opposition and the PrimeMinister about conversations with senior mediafigures at suppers and parties and so on. I want to erron the side of transparency.Helen Goodman: I am very grateful to you. I am notsure that your answer to my question did includecountry suppers. If there have indeed also been somecountry suppers and you would like to add asupplement to the answer that I received after sixweeks on 10 December, I would be very grateful.Chair: I am sure the Minister will try to be as helpfulas possible. Jacob, last but not least, in this initialskirmish.

Q185 Jacob Rees-Mogg: I must say I have greatsympathy for you being expected to record every timeyou meet your wife, which seems an unreasonablyonerous request from Parliament. In the letter youkindly sent jointly with the Permanent Secretary thereis a bullet point: “A risk assessment model of triagedeveloped with advisers and Ministers to identify andfocus early on tricky cases.” What would you describeas a tricky case?Michael Gove: One where if we answered in aslipshod or inaccurate fashion, people would quiterightly feel that they had been let down, or where thequestion of which information should be included wasnot at first sight obvious. The aim would be to givethose civil servants who are involved in the draftingprocess clear instructions.

Q186 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Could this to some extentbe politically tricky, or is it purely factually tricky?Michael Gove: I hope factually tricky. I think one ofthe things that I have learned is that it is always,always worse to delay bad news. Get it out as quicklyas possible, and if someone asks a question that isgoing to lead to an answer that you may consider tobe politically inconvenient, if those are the facts, getthem out.

Q187 Jacob Rees-Mogg: If I may bring MrFreedman in—as you have sat here very patiently, andwe certainly want to hear your thoughts—whenquestions come to you for approval, because you arecareer civil servant you can only look at them from afactual point of view; you cannot give any politicaladvice?Sam Freedman: Yes, absolutely.

Q188 Jacob Rees-Mogg: The special advisers wholook at parliamentary questions are purely the civilservice?Sam Freedman: I look at all of the parliamentaryquestions that come in and clear the vast majority ofthem without any changes. If I have changes theywould be purely factual or because I thought a policystatement did not reflect Department policy properly.Then if I think that I need to make special advisersaware that a particular question has come through and

it might be newsworthy, I might show it to them, butthat would happen extremely rarely.

Q189 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Quickly as well? Becauseyou would be near to them and would just be ableto show it to them quickly and say, “This may benewsworthy”, so it would not be a cause for delay.Sam Freedman: No, the vast majority of questionspass through our office very quickly.

Q190 Jacob Rees-Mogg: The second point I want togo on to also relates to the letter. Delays occur at everypoint along the line, within the multitudes of demandson people. PQs have sometimes slipped down prioritylists, including in private office as well as elsewhere.I want to come back to the issue of ministerialresponsibility, because there seem to be about 20questions to your Department every sitting day, andthere are quite a lot of Ministers—I am not exactlysure how many but it is about three questions perMinister per day. Does it not seem reasonable toexpect Ministers to take control of this process ratherthan expecting it to be in the hands of civil servants,to make sure that they are completely on top of thequestions as they come in, and then ensuring that theyget rapid answers?Michael Gove: Yes.

Q191 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Is that what is now goingto happen? Because when we were speaking to theParliamentary Under-Secretary she said that she didnot know which questions were hers until the answercame to her. Should that not be reversed so thateveryone knows which question he or she has at thebeginning of the process?Michael Gove: Yes.

Q192 Chair: Secretary of State, there are eightpeople, we are informed, now working in the PQ-answering Department. Is it only PQs that they dealwith, or is that in the ministerial correspondence?Chris Wormald: That is the total staffing of ourparliamentary branch, so they deal with all ourparliamentary business, whether it is PQs or debatesor Select Committee appearances.Chair: And letters?Chris Wormald: There is a separate correspondenceunit that deals with all letters to the Parliament.Chair: They do not do letters; they do speech writing.Chris Wormald: No.Chair: Beyond PQs, what do they do?Chris Wormald: They are the main interface with thisplace. They are the people who commission work forthe rest of the Department on things like debates, oralPQs—the full range of our parliamentary business.But their job is to commission and manage the work-flow rather than—

Q193 Chair: What do they do for debates, though? Iam struggling. If they do not write speeches—Michael Gove: A case in point might be, for the sakeof argument, that prior to oral questions, it might bethat there is an oral question in an area that is part ofthe Department that has not received manyparliamentary questions recently, and where there may




be new officials. For example, there might be aparliamentary question about school transport. Theywould contact the transport team who are experts inthat policy area and say—for the sake of argument—“The Minister will need to have information, not justabout the general policy area but also about transportin Dorset, given that it is a Member from that countywho is asking the question, and parliamentary answersfor oral questions need to be typed in this way”, andso on. They will provide that support for people whomay be deep experts in transport policy but are notfamiliar with the demands of Parliament. Again, oneof the things that I think most GovernmentDepartments appreciate is how important Parliamentis and how important for Ministers. But the rules ofthis place can sometimes seem arcane to people in thecivil service, therefore, part of the responsibility forMinisters, for the private offices, and for theparliamentary team, is to reinforce how important it isto get that procedure right. Similarly, if there were anurgent question it would be the parliamentary teamthat would be in contact with the Speaker’s Office toexplain why we thought it was appropriate to acceptor appropriate to reject. They would then explain tothe policy team the briefing required and the formatrequired.

Q194 Chair: I suppose what I am driving at is thateight people are an awful lot of people to deal with20 questions a day; it is two-and-a-half questions perperson. I am just not sure that is a demandingworkload, and this note you very kindly gave us acopy of that went around to all your team—some ofits prose was almost Churchillian. This is not adifficult thing we are asking for. It is not difficult. TheDepartment of Transport was struggling last May;they are now up to 95%. You talk about triage; itmakes it sound a bit like a hospital. There is this greatrallying cry, “We have beaten them on the beaches,we have beaten them everywhere else, we can dothis”. This is not difficult; why are you making it sodifficult? I do not understand. What is the culture thatmakes this such a challenge? “The board has faith inthe Department’s ability to make this change, we havedone it before on ministerial correspondence and it isno more daunting a challenge than the policychallenges teams rise to and overcome every day.Director Generals will identify directorate leave tojoin the project board and drive the work at local levelwhile the Permanent Secretary and the managementcommittee will oversee progress.” This is a bit Yes,Minister-ish. It is almost comical, and I do not wantto sound rude, but really this is such a simple thing todo; can we just crack on with it and not talk too muchabout IT systems, and just do it?Chris Wormald: Yes; I am sorry, this bit I do notaccept at all. This Committee has rightly said that theydo not think we have been doing well enough on thisand that we have not got the message over to theDepartment about the seriousness of the issue. Inorder to get over to the Department the seriousnessof the issue we jointly felt that sort of message wasappropriate to send around all 3,700 civil servants inthe Department. In terms of the specific thing youraised about triage, it was exactly because of some of

the points raised by this Committee. We currentlyhave a process where every single PQ at the end ofits process goes through the advisers in the way thatwe have described. In line with some of thesuggestions made by this Committee, what we arelooking to do is to significantly reduce the number ofPQs that go through the advisers by spotting the onesthat we need to be interested in on the way. So wecan’t be in the position where we both are trying torespond to the valid points made by this Committeein terms of what we then tell the Department to do,but without being allowed to tell the Department whatthose things are. That is a bit tricky.

Q195 Chair: Clearly nobody has a sense of irony orhumour within the Department. It is just very amusingthat you have to write in such flowing terms asopposed to calling in your eight people who haveresponsibility for parliamentary questions and saying,“Pull your finger out; get it sorted”.Chris Wormald: Sorry, I want to be clear because, asthe Secretary of State said at the beginning, it is veryimportant we do not blame the individual civilservants who work on the parliamentary business.Answers are drafted all over the Department by thepeople who are experts in that area. So it is not aquestion of those eight individuals working harder orworking better; it is a question of everyone in theDepartment who has a responsibility in the process.You want the answers to be drafted by the people whoare actually expert in the question. All those peoplehave responsibilities, alongside all their otherresponsibilities, and so do the people in parliamentary,so do advisers, so do Ministers, and so do I and myboard. To get that culture across it is necessary to tellpeople what it is they should be doing. I can see thatyou do not like our language.Chair: No, I would just use slightly differentlanguage; it is not that difficult.Chris Wormald: But the message, I would havethought, was very much in line with what theCommittee was asking for.

Q196 Jacob Rees-Mogg: Could you just tell me veryquickly what on earth these eight people are doing?They are not writing the answers, eight of them, for20 questions a day; they are just putting the answersinto parliamentary language. I would have thought theMinisters could do that in three seconds.Michael Gove: They are closer to being air trafficcontrollers, in that they direct. I can sense youprobably would not want to fly into that country. Butto be fair, it is their responsibility to chase progresswith parliamentary questions but also to ensure thatMinisters are prepared in all of the essentiallyprocedural ways in which we interact with Parliament.

Q197 Jacob Rees-Mogg: But Ministers should knowthe procedures of the House anyway. Come on,Secretary of State, you must have known these sincelong before you arrived.Michael Gove: There are some things with which Iwas and am familiar. There are other areas where it isundoubtedly the case that the expertise of the civilservice helps me. Then there are sometimes some




tasks, for example, drafting a response to theSpeakers’ Office in respect of UQs and so on.Jacob Rees-Mogg: But eight of them, it just seems—Chris Wormald: I ought to say, this is a model thatexists all over Whitehall, in every single Departmentof which I am aware that has a parliamentary branch.Chair: But their model is effective.Chris Wormald: I am sorry, I will come back to that.Ours is currently larger because we have staffed it upto deal with exactly the problems that this Committeeis dealing with. We are doing a lot of things by hand,recording on spreadsheets, sending things by e-mail,that most Departments that have a working IT systemhave now done automatically. So we do have alarge—

Q198 Jacob Rees-Mogg: You have so many peopleyou could pluck the feathers from a goose to write outthese answers with a quill pen and still have time leftover by the end of the day.Michael Gove: That might encourage a greater degreeof concision and precision in their writing.

Q199 Chair: I think we have reached an area of greatconcern. Members of Parliament have very busyprivate offices; we have three people and we getdozens of letters and e-mails every day, most of whichare responded to within a week or at most two weeks.It just does not sound plausible that you have eightpeople who are responsible for parliamentaryquestions and your performance is so poor. Then weare hearing you are not going to get a new IT systemuntil the autumn. This is just not difficult stuff, as mycolleague Jacob says, and I think we just need moresense of urgency, less of this, “We operate in a noblame culture” and just more urgency, “This is goingto be done and when we come and see you in October,as I am sure we will want you to, we are going to beup at about 90% to 95%”.Chris Wormald: I am sorry, we have not at any pointsaid that we operate in a no-blame culture, and Ithink—Chair: Well, you kind of do.Chris Wormald: No, the challenge we have setourselves is how will we improve this performanceacross the Department, which I think is the challengethat this Committee set us. All I am seeking to explainis that it is a challenge that does go across the wholeDepartment and has to affect every team in it.Michael Gove: I am now going to make an offer,which I have not cross-checked with the PermanentSecretary beforehand, so he may kick me; I am surehe will not. The Education Select CommitteeMembers asked if they could come into theDepartment and have a look around, and we aredelighted for them to do so. If it would assist theCommittee to see how parliamentary questions arehandled—any member, or all of the Committee—cansee what happens as they come in and so on, then ofcourse that would be open. We have nothing to hideand everything to gain from your developing a properunderstanding so that you can question us moreeffectively in the future and hold us to account.Chair: A very generous offer, and we will take itinto consideration.

Q200 Tom Greatrex: We will try to ask a couple ofquestions effectively prior to that visit. Mr Freedman,when Hilary Spencer gave her evidence back inDecember she talked us through the process ofallocation. Can I just understand in terms of your rolethat you would get the questions probably a day or soafter they come in routinely? How long does it takeyou to then clear them? Do you look at them all, everysingle one?Sam Freedman: I look at every single one, and I tryto do it the same day. I try to do it within a few hours;obviously, I am in a lot of meetings and so on, sonearly all of them I look at the same day. OccasionallyI will slip into a second day if I have been away fromthe office. I never go beyond a second day.

Q201 Tom Greatrex: Do you then have interactionwith special advisers, distinct from other advisers, onthe questions at that point or before then?Sam Freedman: Very, very rarely; a couple, but lessthan 1%.

Q202 Tom Greatrex: So, the questions as draftanswers before they are finally signed off: do theygo to special advisers after they have been throughyour office?Sam Freedman: No, I sit in an office with the specialadvisers. They come to me, I look at them, I makesome changes, most of them are fine, and they thengo out to ministerial offices.

Q203 Tom Greatrex: So special advisers do not havea role?Sam Freedman: Special advisers have no role in theprocess. As I say, occasionally I would show one ofthem to them if I thought they would be interested init, but in most weeks they would not look at any.

Q204 Tom Greatrex: What type of thing do youthink they might be interested in?Sam Freedman: If I think, for instance, that we arepublishing some data that hasn’t been in the publicdomain before I would show it to them to say, “Well,I think this is going to come out, and you need to beaware this is going to come out”.

Q205 Chair: We are going to start wrapping up.Committee, if you have any burning questions getthem in in the next eight minutes. Sam, you are goingto be leaving the Department in February, and Iunderstand a young man called Henry Cook who is aspecial adviser is going to be taking a keener interestin this. Do you want to expand on that very briefly?Sam Freedman: Just to go back to something thatwas mentioned earlier, early on in the Parliament itreally was necessary for someone who had a fullunderstanding of this Government’s policy agenda tobe looking at all of the answers, because when a lotof new policy is being developed things change veryfast; people are not necessarily sure about things. Nowwe have reached the stage where it is not necessaryfor advisers to look at every answer, and as I leave Ithink the process will change so that, as the PermanentSecretary said, not everything will go to the advisers’office, and there will be a process.




Q206 Chair: Sam, I need to ask you a question. Asyou are aware there was an issue around a questionasked by Mr Loughton with regards to visits to youthprojects. There is concern in some quarters that thisinformation was made available to your office veryquickly, but because the information suggested thatthe Secretary of State has not visited any—perfectlygood reasons, I am not making judgment on that—perhaps a special adviser decided this was not a veryhelpful bit of information to put into the publicdomain, and that it was not helpful politically. Canyou assure me that did not happen?Sam Freedman: Yes. The main interest was taken bythe Secretary of State’s private office, who were tryingto collect the information. There were quite a lot ofdiscussions about what constituted a youth project andwhat diaries would need to be checked and so on andso forth. But it was not, “We cannot give out theinformation”; it was just a, “We are not sure how todefine this question”.

Q207 Helen Goodman: The Member for EastWorthing and Shoreham also put in a question askingwhat proportion of named-day questions from himselfhad been given a substantive answer within five dayssince September. The answer he got from ElizabethTruss was, “I will reply as soon as possible”. Is thisnot reaching the realms of absurdity now?Sam Freedman: Yes, obviously that should be easyto answer.Helen Goodman: Good.

Q208 Chair: Minister, I want to be perfectly clear;that is why you have junior Ministers who do otherthings. People have a responsibility to do other jobs.That was not an attack on you. I suppose the concernis that some of the Committee would say you have avery protective private office, of political specialadvisers who are protecting you in a way that perhapsyou would not want to be protected, and perhaps areinterfering in the process and interfering in, perhapsdelaying, the process of answering questions. Youwould not want that to happen on your behalf, wouldyou?

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Michael Gove: I certainly would not. Absolutely no.I know exactly what you mean. One of the principlesin the civil service overall is to protect the principal,but as I mentioned earlier, and your question gives mean opportune to restate, I would rather that people hadthe picture, warts and all.

Q209 John Hemming: Would you find it surprisingthat the six questions that have been outstanding forthe longest are all Opposition questions?Michael Gove: I would have to look at those sixquestions to offer a commentary on them.John Hemming: You cannot comment on it now.

Q210 Chair: Secretary of State, thank you forcoming to see us. Can I conclude by saying that I andthis Committee take parliamentary accountability veryseriously. We think it is absolutely fundamental to ahealthy democracy. So I hope when you go back tothe Department there is not a high-fives in the privateoffice, “Yes, you bested that Select Committee, we gotthrough that, phew”. I hope there really is adetermination to sort this out and to get to a levelwhere you can be proud of the performance of yourDepartment in delivering answers to parliamentaryquestions.Michael Gove: You quite rightly, when you weregoing through the message that the PermanentSecretary and I sent out, had your own critique of theway of doing it. The fact that it went out is, I hope,some evidence of our determination to meet thechallenge that you have rightly set. There will be otherways in which you will measure our performance andwe must do better.

Q211 Chair: Thank you very much for comingbefore us. Thank you very much, Mr Wormald. SamFreedman, that is probably an hour and a half of yourlife you are never going to get back again, but thankyou very much for your patience and good nature.Thank you very much.Michael Gove: I thank you, Mr Chairman, and theCommittee.

Documents

Monitoring written Parliamentary questions€¦ · Procedure Committee Monitoring written Parliamentary questions Seventh Report of Session 2012 13 Report, together with formal minutes