Michael Dugher questions Cabinet Ministers about cuts in public services

2 August 2010

Last week saw the first 'evidence session' of the Public Administration Select Committee. As well as taking important evidence from representatives of the main civil service trade unions, the Committee questioned two senior Conservative Ministers who attend the Cabinet.  

Michael Dugher MP used this as an opportunity to question the Ministers about the effects that immediate and large scale spending cuts will have on the provision of front line public services. Read highlights below: 

Michael Dugher:  You mentioned in your previous evidence to us the importance of protecting front-line services, and that is something that ministers also stated repeatedly during the election campaign.  Now, notwithstanding the fact that, I think, politicians of all parties tend to be afflicted with a bout of optimism prior to polling day, you must understand that the sheer scale and timing of the cuts that you are introducing will have a massive impact on front-line public services.  What impact assessment and other mechanisms are you putting in place to actually try and assess that prior to these cuts going ahead?

Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP, Minister for Government Policy: Well, a huge amount of work is being done in many dimensions to try to end up getting more for less.  It is not our ambition simply to maintain the quality of public services, but to improve them.

Michael Dugher:  But, if you are making – excuse me for interrupting – 25 per cent or maybe 30 per cent when people are looking at 40 per cent cuts, again, notwithstanding your admirable optimism, you must surely appreciate that you do not get more for less.  Do you not get less for less?

Mr Letwin:  No.  I understand that that is a view that some people take, but it is not one we share.  The ability to improve the outcomes depends on having a sufficiently imaginative and radical view about how we accommodate having less input in such a way as to deliver a better output, and I really believe we can do that.  Let us take, for example, because it is entirely in the public domain, the question of how we improve policing, a classic front-line service in Britain.  I think all our parliamentary colleagues would agree that it is not perfect at present and many people feel that they are not adequately policed at the moment, and the Home Secretary has made it perfectly clear that the effect of the public spending round will be to put some pressure on police numbers.

Michael Dugher:  You mean having less police?  That is what ‘putting pressure on police numbers’ means, does it not?  That is what is planned.

Mr Letwin:  That is exactly what it means, as she has said, but we are taking a series of steps which we believe will mean that the outcome is not the same level of policing, but better policing, even given those constraints, and that is by removing a huge pile of bureaucracy and paperwork, which is occupying police time which, therefore, does not end up by delivering service to people, and by changing completely the relationship between the police and those they are policing through crime maps, through ‘beat’ meetings and through the election of police commissioners, and we think we can completely change the relationships there in such a way that the police actually deliver what it is that local populations wish to have delivered because, instead of occupying their time looking upwards towards the Home Office and dealing with the bureaucracy deluging them from above, they are focused remorselessly on delivering what the locals want.  Now, that is just one example among many.  Whether we are right or not, time will tell, but we really passionately believe that we will end up with the best of policing in this country, notwithstanding spending less on it.

Rt Hon Francis Maude MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office: Can I just add a point on Mr Dugher’s question about more for less or whether it is just less for less.  The whole area of the online delivery of public services is one in whose progress we are in the infancy still, but I would just quote an example from your own Party’s time in office when the DVLA produced a system for renewing your car tax online.  This massively improved the quality of the public service in terms of convenience to the citizen and the transaction now gets done for literally a tenth of the cost.  The transaction costs £1 and the unit cost was about £1 before when it was paper-based and online it is 10p; much more for hugely less.

Michael Dugher:  So are you going to have online police officers or virtual policing?  I take your point, but that line of argument does not actually work with all public services.

Mr Letwin:  I think it is very important that you are listening to both what Francis is saying and what I am saying and that they are actually two parts of the same story.  In part, we hope to get more for less by being more efficient in the way we deliver things that are delivered, in many cases, on old-fashioned systems and, in part, by making structural reforms that alter incentives and relationships, and we are not in any way confusing those, neither am I trying to get Francis to share a vision of online policing which we do not believe, nor is he trying to get me to believe that we do not need structural reforms, which we do need.  What we are saying is that you need both efficiency of the back office massively and structural reform to get the services’ structure right.  If you do those two things together, you really can deliver more for less.

Mr Maude:  And the two meet and overlap.  In exactly what Oliver has been talking about, police reform and the whole thing about crime-mapping, it absolutely depends on the effective use of new technology, not massive, grand, new IT schemes, but relatively accessible technology to which people have ready access.

Chair:  Moving on, the big society.