Q111 Mr Bacon: Presumably if there had been a request for a direction that would be recorded.
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Q112 Mr Bacon: Indeed, Sir John Bourn would know that.
Sir David Normington: There was not a request for a direction. The advice was to go ahead and that was accepted, first by the Accounting Officer and then by the Home Secretary. However, the issues, all of which have been raised here, are very fully set out at that point. It was a very full submission with quite a lot of detail.
Q113 Mr Bacon: The thing that amazes me more than anything else is the point that the constituency Member raised, which is that you could spend so much money and yet have nothing to show for it. One can understand the land acquisition cost, which according to Figure 11 on page 19 is £3.2 million. You paid the money to the MoD; you now have the land; it is now your land. That is a drop in the ocean, however, or is a very small proportion of the total expenditure, and still to get nothing. I want to go through those figures in Figure 11. First of all, what is the current value of the site, either in your books or actually on the basis of a professional valuation?
Sir David Normington: I stand to be corrected but I do not think that we have had a recent professional valuation of the site. It is, as I say, showing on our books at £4.6 million.
Q114 Mr Bacon: I think Mr Griffiths may have asked you this, to which you perhaps said you did not know. How many acres?
Sir David Normington: I am afraid I do not know. I am sure we can find that out.3
Q115 Mr Bacon: That would be helpful to know. Presumably-I am not saying that it is going to be- were it to be building land for housing it would have a much higher value, would it, or is this based on the potential of that?
Sir David Normington: I do not know, and I had better not speculate.
Q116 Mr Bacon: Perhaps you could send us a note about what work has been done on the valuation.4 That would be helpful.
Sir David Normington: I will do, yes.
Q117 Mr Bacon: Perhaps I could go through the various items in Figure 11. First of all, civil servants' pay for the period. Most of the cost in Figure 11 is the £27.9 million for Bicester out of a total of £33.6 million. In other words, it is about 90% or more. Curiously, however, the civil servants' pay accounts for only £600,000 out of £1.8 million. That is less than a third. Why is that? What were the civil servants doing that caused that disparity?
Sir David Normington: Could I ask Lin Homer to pick that up?
Ms Homer: From looking at the documents, the bulk of the Civil Service time was spent in the project overall, and the project-specific work on Bicester had a smaller amount of direct Civil Service input, compared with-
Q118 Mr Bacon: What does "the project overall" mean?
Ms Homer: Looking at potentially having ten accommodation centres; looking at the possibility of using what the Refugee Council called "a core and cluster approach"; the development of the overall policy.
Q119 Mr Bacon: To get to a figure this precise, presumably you have costed it out on the basis of 'x' number of civil servant man/woman days.
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Q120 Mr Bacon: Can you send us the working for those, so that we can see how the £1.8 million is composed?5
Sir David Normington: We can do that, yes.
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3 Ev 14
4 Ev 14
5 Ev 15