Q91 Jackie Doyle-Price: In terms of the Secretary of State, to what extent does he escalate to Ministers where they have poor capability? Ultimately, I get the impression that officials hide behind the fact that these are major policy commitments. When the Ministers have made something a priority and you come in and say, "Hang on, this is going awry," it is very easy for them to take less notice than they should if they think their Minister is standing behind them. So to what extent is this being properly escalated throughout the machinery of Government?
David Pitchford: I am not completely privy to what goes on in the halls of power, but my overall experience is that we have had terrific support at Secretary of State and ministerial levels in relation to what we do. Certainly, some of the reports that we compile and deliver are difficult to swallow, but I have never had anyone who has said, "We won't accept this." Again, this is a process that is about progressing towards, rather than being able to achieve it immediately. There is a cultural element in that there weren't creatures like us two years ago, so it is taking some adjustment. I have to admit that, because it is the same in Australia.
Q92 Jackie Doyle-Price: It's a big task you are taking on. This is major cultural change. In terms of the academy, how is that resourced? Is that work being done from within your team or elsewhere?
David Pitchford: It's a joint venture between us and the university. I have got a team of four within my operation that does this, and they have got a bigger team; obviously, if you include the faculty, they have got a much bigger team. It is a well-worked joint venture. I couldn't be happier with the output, to be honest. They have got a terrific manager, a young woman who has risen above her station enormously to get this in place and who should be congratulated on that. The way that the university has embraced it is something to behold as well. We were lucky enough to have come up with a thing that had never been done anywhere before, so it has been great for the Government, in my view, but also great for the university.
Q93 Jackie Doyle-Price: The previous witness raised a point that rang alarm bells in my mind. Managing big projects is as much of a challenge for the private sector as for the public sector. Quite often, they get it wrong as well. Having invested the time and energy in training people in these sorts of skill, how are we going to be able to hold on to them?
David Pitchford: That is a very fair question. My response is to revert back to the two new pillars that I have talked to you about. If we train these people and put them back into the same situation they are in now, where they cannot effectively manage or make the changes that they have been trained to make and are not allowed to govern their projects to advantage the Government, we will start to lose them, so we need to get an operating environment in which they can operate effectively.
The other thing that we were doing at the academy was to give them the other thing that is crucial to the retention of SROs: confidence that they have the skills to do this in a very difficult environment. What is currently happening as part of our churn is that people get put into situations where projects are so difficult that they do not have the capability. It is what Mr Barclay was saying before: they do not have the capability because they have not come from the background. What we will give them is the capability, and therefore the confidence to stay on and have a go. What that means is that they will start to enjoy that involvement.
There are people right across the civil service who are not here for the money. We have to give the people who are not here for the money a real reason to stay: that is, being supported, appreciated and rewarded. I am not talking about money; I am talking about-
Q94 Jackie Doyle-Price: Recognition.
David Pitchford: Yes. That's it.
Q95 Mr Bacon: Mr Pitchford, the thrust of what you are saying is extremely welcome. When we were in Washington last week, we met the Project Management Institute, who have been coming over here and knocking on the doors of members of this Committee for two or three years. They have chapters in many countries. They are a professional services organisation with individual members. They are a membership organisation, and they promote their own accreditation. They have a set of tools and techniques-you might almost call it a theology, a way of doing things-and they produce some impressive, persuasive-looking stats on the percentage of projects that go right and do not go off the rails when their members are used. They did not quite get to the point of trying to persuade us all to join, I am glad to say.
To take two different examples, in the area of financial management, I started asking how many people with financial qualifications are principal finance officers, or what we now call finance directors, 10 years ago. It was about 23%; it is now 91% and rising. The aim is to get to 100%). We would expect somebody to be a chartered public accountant in order to be a finance director. Somebody running an estates division ought to be a chartered surveyor. Often they are not yet, but they should be, and we know what that is. It is very clear what professional qualification is expected in order for someone to do this work. The civil service White Paper talks about the lack of skills in various areas, such as "leading and managing change, commercial, financial, programme and project management, digital skills" and "skills in managing risk". I could mention legal. We know what we would expect; you need to be a qualified lawyer. In your view, is there such a thing-we know that the PMI would say there is-as a qualified project manager? Are you planning that the academy shall do its own accreditation on an ongoing basis, including re-evaluation, revisiting and continuous performance improvement, or are you looking at organisations such as the PMI so that you end up with a cadre of genuinely professionally qualified project managers across government? Which approach are you going to take to get there? Is that important?
David Pitchford: Pretty much all of the second and a bit of the first, but the amalgam is important. We have started on the SROs and the project directors within the portfolio project management to get at particularly the ones that do not have capability and experience. The academy will be focusing on the top end. Remember: this is about teaching leadership, not about teaching project management skills. We are also encouraging Departments to start to isolate what skills they need within their Departments lower down the development chain and to start to educate those people through the APM, the PMI-there's another MPA. There is a whole range of providers in this space. We encourage Departments to use those providers to educate their feeder levels. I do not want to do that in the academy and certainly I do not want to do it in the MPA. I'm the head of profession for this, but mine is a sort of facilitation role to get Departments to start to train up people who might want to become involved or the Departments will need to have involved. Then, when they get to the stage where they show the potential to be project directors or they go into that sort of COO project director role, they need to be exposed to the academy. But the academy's teachings will be cascaded back down on to these people by the people who complete the academy training and come back into the Department. Provided that we get the operational constructs set, it will work that way. The other element of it that's important-I've forgotten; what is it?
Q96 Mr Bacon: I take it that by APM, you mean the association of project managers, which we have also had knocking on our door; certainly I have. In terms of the accreditation and what is recognised, are you saying that you would prefer to leave it to Departments and that the bodies that operate in this space need to compete in this ecosystem in order to provide an accreditation that is so valuable that it becomes the standard, rather than your ordaining from the centre what that standard shall be?
David Pitchford: That is pretty much it. The aim is to encourage Departments to an understanding that they need to train these people to a certain point before they insert them into the leadership academy.
Q97 Mr Bacon: But who decides what that point is? We would say very clearly, if you were going into the financial management area of a Department, "You need the CIPFA qualification and then you can do financial management." Just as we do in relation to the private sector, we expect people to be chartered accountants. But you are not saying, "There is one qualification that we expect people to have."
David Pitchford: No, I'm not, and the reason is that, like you, I have had them all knocking on my door and for the MPA to endorse one over the other would be very difficult-
Q98 Mr Bacon: Is that just because the profession of project management is not sufficiently well developed yet?
David Pitchford: Unlike the Royal College of Surgeons, where there is only one way to the qualification, there is any number of qualifications from any number of providers, including other business schools, so it is quite difficult to be so precise.
Chair: Meg, and then-
Mr Bacon: I have one more question. I wanted to ask Sharon White one question. Meg, were your questions on the same-
Meg Hillier: It was on figure 3. We had got as far as requirement 5, but had not done 6, 7 and 8.1 just don't want us to lose track of that.
Q99 Mr Bacon: Hold that thought. I just want to ask one quick question and then I'm done. I want to ask Sharon White about considerations of size and resources. Mr Pitchford is obviously going to have to deal with what he's got. He accepts that and is doing the best he can with very limited resources. This is really a question for the Treasury. If you are dealing with this £376,000 million-worth of projects, which is quite a lot of money on any day of the week, the £6 million that Mr Pitchford has at his disposal is, in comparison, utterly inconsequential. Whether it were £12 million or £18 million would make no difference to the Treasury in the grand scheme of things, but might make a huge difference to the effectiveness, efficiency and economy with which Mr Pitchford could operate and the number of car crashes prevented, as it were.
I am not expecting you to give us a definitive answer now as to what you are likely to do, but are you giving consideration to this point? The analogy would be that we are cutting the size of the Army, but we are increasing the size of the special forces. Mr Pitchford is the SAS. He's the last man standing, trying to sort this all out, with 4,000 of the other side coming over the hill. You do see my point.
Sharon White: I do.
Mr Bacon: Are you talking about this inside the Treasury, with a view to possibly re-scoping his capacity, because-
Chair: They are talking about cuts.
Q100 Mr Bacon: The NAO Report says very clearly-this is the agreed part of the report, so you believe this, too-that the authority "does not have sufficient resources to carry out its role in...central assurance...to best effect." Having watched so many car crashes over so many years, I want this authority-I have been a huge fan of it ever since its inception-to be able to carry out its role to best effect. The agreed Report says that, at the moment, it cannot. You must be concerned about that. What are you going to do about it?
Sharon White: May I say a couple of things? First, there is a boring Treasury point, which is obviously that the outlook on running costs for the civil service does not look great from anybody's perspective. Certainly, when it comes to how the Cabinet Office decides to allocate its resources internally, we will be very supportive of any resource allocation that allows us to generate future savings.