Q91 Stephen Barclay: That slightly misses my point because we come back to the definitions and as I understand it there was no definition of major projects.
Ian Watmore: I think he has defined it in terms of risk.
Q92 Stephen Barclay: I am pleased to hear it. I understand there is a senior responsible owner in Communities and Local Government dealing with a project of £20 million. There is one person in the Ministry of Defence who is the senior responsible owner for six projects with a combined spend of £17.2 billion, which he does in addition to his day job: quite a feat. When I wrote to Sir Gus O'Donnell about whether you were benchmarking where we are now, because one would assume if you are doing a change programme you would benchmark the starting point in order to assess the changes you put in place, he wrote back to say, "No, we have no intention of doing so and we do not collate the data at the centre in terms of senior responsible owners." It just strikes me we have got a welcome announcement with the Major Projects Academy; as a Committee we have no sense of how much training, how many people, what grades they are. One would assume that there is some training at the moment, but anecdotally I am told it is very little, patchy at best. We know from the NAO that senior responsible owners often have a very wide range of responsibilities and skill sets. I just do not get a sense at the moment that anyone is benchmarking where we are now in order that we as a Committee in two years time can come back and assess whether the Academy is working, whether the grip on SROs is consistent across Departments. How are we going to get that visibility in two years time?
Ian Watmore: I think what we often confuse in these discussions is the difference between the senior responsible owner and the programme director. To me the senior responsible owner is the person who will live with the consequences of this thing, whatever this thing is. That is why I absolutely agree that universal credit have made Terry Moran the senior responsible owner because he is the guy that runs the network.
Q93 Stephen Barclay: Or Sir David Nicholson for the NHS IT programme. He is the senior responsible owner, but he does not actually chair the project board.
Ian Watmore: They are the people who live with consequences and I think that is what you would do in business. If you are going to fundamentally do something to a business the chief executive would be all over it like a rash. What I think we need to do more of, through John's ideas of academies, is build the right awareness in those leaders of the civil service and public service to know about programmes and projects, and what works and what does not. We also need to build a really strong cadre of people who do programme director roles, week in week out, for one programme after another. That is personally where we are very short.
Stephen Barclay: When will we get some numbers on that so that we as a Committee can see?
Ian Watmore: Of the major projects we are going through and benchmarking those now. We are now looking at what we have actually got on the books at the moment.
Q94 Mr Bacon: When will we know that? I am looking at Mr Pitchford's quote from a speech he gave last October, where he said "Nobody in the UK Government seems to know how many projects they have on the books, nor how much these are likely to cost. The current estimates range from somewhere between £300 billion to £600 billion," which leaves a little margin for error. It would be nice to get it honed down a bit more tightly.
Ian Watmore: He is Australian.
Mr Bacon: Yes, I know. He doesn't hold back does he? We like the cut of his jib.
Ian Watmore: We were learning a load of new project management terminology this morning.
Mr Bacon: Including some acronyms I am sure.
Ian Watmore: Like what is the difference between a "schmozzle" and a "doozy".
Q95 Mr Bacon: When are we going to get some numbers?
Ian Watmore: As I say, he is putting this portfolio together, and it aims to be before the summer recess. That will give us the project portfolio. We then have to go through each of those projects with the team and just assess the status and the readiness of each of the teams ready to do it. I am qualified to be an SRO, but I am not currently doing an SRO role in some sense. Other people will be doing it but you would say probably unqualified. We have got to find the right way to match the people to the jobs. That will only come out when we look at the combination of what we have got on the books and who we are putting through the Academy.
Q96 Stephen Barclay: What I am driving at is there is no sense, timescale wise, of when we as a Committee are going to get a sense of how many people are going to be trained, to what level, to what degree. Is it a week course, two weeks, it is an ongoing programme, what is it? There are lots of aspirations and very worthy intentions but in terms of the actual plan and when we are going to see it, it is very hard to get a sense of what that is. If we take the NHS IT programme, where as I understand it we are basically spending the same money to get half the delivery-in short that is the way I would sum it up- the senior responsible owner is Sir David Nicholson.
Ian Watmore: I think he is the accounting officer actually.
Chair: No.
Mr Bacon: He is the SRO as well. He has been the SRO since 2006.
Stephen Barclay: No, he is the senior responsible owner and yet as I understand it is Mr Flory who actually chairs the executive working group. You have got an SRO who is responsible, he is also responsible as the accounting officer, but he is not the person who is actually driving the programme. From the Public Accounts Committee, it is very difficult to see how that accountability is worked. I come back to the starting point, which is Sir Gus O'Donnell's response to my letter where, to be frank, I do not get a sense from the Cabinet Office that you are collating the data to be able to challenge Departments on the inconsistencies in definition and application between Departments. With respect, from your evidence today I do not any sense of an intention to collate that information, to benchmark it, and therefore to be able to challenge Departments.
Ian Watmore: I think I am probably misunderstanding what you are asking for then. It seems to me that if you wanted to know who are the SROs of our major projects we would be able to tell you that.
Q97 Stephen Barclay: The Ministry of Defence gave me three answers, all of which were different, when we asked them earlier this year. They actually had different dates, and different names for the projects. Even Departments themselves had trouble giving us that information.
Ian Watmore: The Ministry of Defence needs its own-
Mr Bacon: The NHS IT programme: Mr Barclay is right, Sir David Nicholson has been the SRO since 2006, but in the preceding five years there were six SROs. There cannot have been six people who were going to live with the consequences in quite that way.
Ian Watmore: I think there is a lot of evidence in the past that we have put people into the role of SRO who either are not the right person because of their job; they may be the policy person who is pushing something out but not actually the operational person who is going to live with the consequences. Or if they are the right person for the job role, they do not have the skills and the experience to help them, to back them up. I would agree with that. What we are trying to do is understand what we have actually got on the books today and do we have the right people in those roles. We are happy to share that information with you when we have compiled it.
Q98 Austin Mitchell: I have got three statesmanlike questions which might round it off. On property, estates, I see that you are establishing a Government Property Unit that is going to pilot property vehicles in central London. Pilot indicates that they might be low flying aircraft rather than buses full of civil servants driven round central London. You may tell us what those are, but how are you going to exercise effective management or produce economies from the estates when a large section of them-PFI hospitals and the Treasury's PFI deed on all its offices-are untouchable? There is nothing you can do about them. You are going to have to continue to pay a high kind of Danegeld or City-geld on them and the services. So much for changing a light bulb. There is nothing you can do about a large section of property. That was the brief question.
Ian Watmore: It is fair, and the pilot of central London is basically saying, "Can we get the people who need to be in central London to work with this place and with Ministers into many fewer buildings", partly for savings purposes and partly for collaboration and co-location. We find if people are in the same building they are more likely to work together. I solve more problems with the Treasury by being in the same building, by walking down the corridor and just talking to the person and getting it fixed, than would have happened if we were in different buildings with emails and meetings.
Q99 Austin Mitchell: You cannot evacuate PFI buildings because you have got to continue to pay the rent.
Ian Watmore: Indeed, the Treasury building is of course a PFI building as you well know and we are living in it. We have three sorts of building in London centrally: we have the PFI estate that includes places like the Treasury and Marsham Street where the Home Office is. We have normal leasehold buildings that we just lease off a property like where DCMS are, and we have buildings where we own the freehold like the Admiralty Arch of the Cabinet Office. What we are trying to do collectively, and in particular what the GPU are trying to do, is work out which of those do we want to keep long term, where do we want to aggregate the people so that they cluster up into a smaller space, and then it is like one of those series of moves where A has to move in order for B to come in, for C and so on. We are trying to get that logistical move planned now. For example, we in the Cabinet Office have vacated the Arch. My guess would be we are most likely to want to dispose of that building because it is not very good office space and it is an attractive building and we might be able to get something for it. We are also in the process of vacating 22 Whitehall, which we own the freehold of, but which is good office space. If we vacate that, we would expect another Government Department to come in there and thus free up their more expensive lease space. Then we have a problem of how do we divest that on the current property market, which of course is tricky. When they talk about the London property pilot, it is plotting all those moves. We have also got another one in Bristol that is slightly different where we are looking at whether we can aggregate all of Government Departments that happen to be in Bristol into one place, or one or two places, where we happen to believe there is some particular property opportunities to exploit at the moment. Each city we are doing slightly differently. We have taken London this way, Bristol that way, and then we will probably move round the country and do Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle etc.
Q100 Austin Mitchell: Second question. I have just been reading Macmillan's diaries; that is not Ian McMillan the Yorkshire poet, but Harold Macmillan, the last Prime Minister to think at all strategically. The amazing thing is he did think a lot. He had memoranda composed on the competitiveness of British industry, on the future of British foreign policy, should we enter what was then called the Common Market. Fascinating memoranda, but he never employed any consultants. The only people he consulted were the senior civil servants, the mandarins. No Prime Minister since has done that and what we do now is haul in consultants at enormous expense. Now we have made recommendations on that. For instance, that too many contracts are based on time spent rather than fixed price contracts and that we should build up the skills of the public service so that we have no need to hire consultants in. What will you be doing about that?
Ian Watmore: I think I have already said we have put our foot on the neck of it really and we have reduced the expenditure by 70% year on year. Part of the reason for doing that is cost, but also part of it is because I believe, and I think most civil service leaders believe, we have got fantastic people in the civil service who actually have a lot more skill and capability than anybody gives them credit for and we should use them. We often use the consultancy resource not because we have to, for skills reasons; we do it because either people want to hide behind somebody else's recommendation rather than make the tough decision themselves, or because the resources are available in the system but they are locked up and you cannot access them quickly enough. So you access the pool of resource you can get that quickly. That is why I think we ought to trust our people more, have them more flexibly deployed and move them around to where the problem is. That is the sustainable way of reducing the dependency on consultancy. We will never eliminate it because they have a valuable role to play in certain situations. But we ought to be able to keep it way down on past levels. As far as politicians are concerned, it is rare for politicians directly to hire consultants. They usually bring in a special advisor groups to advise them directly. The consultancy is usually hired by the system, i.e. by the civil service or the wider public service. I think we can stop it in the ways that I have said provided that we get people to trust their own people more.