UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To
be published as HC 310-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
LIAISON COMMITTEE
THE PRIME
MINISTER
Tuesday 3 February 2004
RT HON MR TONY BLAIR MP
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 153
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Liaison Committee
on Tuesday 3 February 2004
Members present
Mr Alan Williams, in the Chair
Mr Peter Ainsworth
Donald Anderson
Tony Baldry
Mr A J Beith
Sir Stuart Bell
Andrew Bennett
Jean Corston
Mr John Denham
Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody
Mr Bruce George
Dr Ian Gibson
Mr David Hinchliffe
Mr Jimmy Hood
Mr Michael Jack
Mr Robert Key
Sir Archy Kirkwood
Mr Edward Leigh
Mr David Lepper
Mr John McFall
Mr Michael Mates
Mr Martin O'Neill
Mr Peter Pike
Mr Barry Sheerman
Mr David Tredinnick
Mr Andrew Turner
Tony Wright
Sir George Young
________________
Witness:
Rt Hon Mr Tony Blair, a
Member of the House, Prime Minister, examined.
Q1 Chairman:
Welcome Prime Minister, may I welcome you to the Committee on your
fourth visit to the Liaison Committee.
I will remind the public and the press that we have told you of the
three themes that we intend to cover during the course of two and a half hours,
but you have no knowledge of the questions, nor do I, which are going to be
asked. We inevitably will start with
Hutton, then we hope to move on to domestic issues and we hope to finish with
an examination of the present direction of the road to democracy in Iraq, but
before I throw it open to the Committee for questioning, can I raise one point
that is important in House of Commons and in parliamentary accountability terms
which has arisen as a result of Hutton.
I think all the chairmen here will confirm that they were genuinely
astonished, but also delighted, at the volume of information and the level of
witnesses that were provided to Hutton and then immediately put on the
website. They were also deeply envious
because none of them could have hoped to get a fraction of that
information. I do not know whether you
are aware that the rules that currently govern the access to information for
committees were laid down 20 years ago, not in consultation, but laid down by
the Government of the day, and they have never been revised, so could I ask you
one business question at the start. In
view of the clear disparity in the treatment between Hutton and the select
committees, would you be willing now to initiate on the Government's side, and
we are trying to start on our own side, a review of the rules relating to the
availability of witnesses and evidence to select committees?
Mr Blair: Yes, I am very happy indeed
to do that and to look at what lessons we can learn from how the Hutton Inquiry
was conducted. It was a remarkable
operation in terms of the openness and the amount of information given. I certainly think it is worth looking, in
the light of that, though I cannot make any promise as to what the conclusion
will be, but it is certainly worth looking, in the light of that, at what
information we can make available to select committees in the future.
Chairman: That would be very helpful
and my officials will liaise with your officials and hopefully we will be able
to look at these rules considerably.
Thank you very much for that. We
are operating slightly differently. We
have broken it down into small groups who are going to lead on particular
subjects and on the Hutton questioning, George Young will lead that with his
colleagues alongside him. Can I ask of
Members questioning and even you, Prime Minister, for brevity in questions and
brevity in answers.
Q2 Sir
George Young: Well, we have some machinery of government issues which we think
arise out of the Hutton Report, but before I go on to those, can I ask whether
you have been surprised by the rather negative public and press reaction to the
Hutton Report?
Mr Blair: No, not greatly. Certainly so far as that part of the media
that was against the decision to go to war was concerned, I do not think they
were ever really going to accept it.
Q3 Sir
George Young: But you did not hope that it might raise your reputation in the
public's opinion, whereas all the surveys I have seen show that your reputation
has deteriorated since publication of the Report?
Mr Blair: I think we should wait and
see, George, what view the public comes to after a more settled period, but
there obviously was also, and we will be debating this in the House of Commons
tomorrow, a very large disparity frankly between the evidence as presented to
the Hutton Inquiry and the evidence as reported at the time and I think that
inevitably coloured some of the public perception because some of the evidence
as actually given to the Inquiry bore little or no relationship to some of the
evidence actually reported at least in part to the media.
Q4 Sir
George Young: Can we go on to the machinery of government. The Hutton Inquiry shone a torch into the
inner wiring of your administration and much of it could be described as a
rather informal style. How do people
know what is decided at the key meetings which you attend if, in the words of
Lord Hutton, the records of some key meetings are often "very sparse" and "of
no relevance"? Have you tightened up
the audit trail in Number 10 since Hutton?
Mr Blair: No, we of course take
minutes of meetings where they are either formal or official meetings or there
are action points that need to be minuted out of them, but I do not think our
practice is any different in circumstances where, for example, there is an
agreement that someone will go out and do something from the meeting and then
go out and do it.
Q5 Sir
George Young: But we have discovered that there were only three written records
for up to seven meetings a day over a two-week period during Hutton. Is that really right?
Mr Blair: Well, it depends what sort
of meetings they are, and if they are informal meetings where someone is tasked
then to go and do something and they go and do it, there is no need to have a
minute of it. The purpose of the minute
is obviously to make sure not just that there is a record of the meeting, but
if there is action to be taken that needs to be minuted out, then that action
is minuted out. However, I can assure
you, for example, because we have roughly, I think, twice the number of Cabinet
committees operating under this Government than under the previous
administration when you were in government and actually of those Cabinet
meetings, of course all of them are minuted and minuted very formally.
Q6 Sir
George Young: Will you implement the recommendations of the Hammond Report?
Mr Blair: In what regard?
Q7 Sir
George Young: That was after the Hinduja Inquiry which recommended that records
should be taken of important discussions involving ministers.
Mr Blair: Well, of course it is
important that we do that where it is necessary to do so and we do and, as I
say, if you actually look at the amount of work that is carried on by the
Government through Cabinet committees or Cabinet sub-committees, it is actually
probably more considerable and more extensive than it has ever been. I may have got this figure slightly wrong,
but I think there are something in the region of more than double the number of
Cabinet committees and each one of these of course is extensively minuted and
that is because there will be action points that people have to be told about
following the course of that meeting,
but if you have an informal meeting, as we did on the 7th or 8th
July in relation to the Hutton Report, and people know exactly what it is they
are supposed to do, there is no need to have a minute.
Q8 Sir
George Young: So Hutton was unfair when he said that the records were often very
sparse and of no relevance?
Mr Blair: No, he was simply making a
statement of fact, I think, in response to a letter from the Conservative
spokesman.
Q9 Sir
George Young: Can we go on to last July.
As this row escalated and two great institutions,, the Government and
the BBC, were seen to be at war, did no one at Number 10 say, "This is just
getting absurd. It is getting out of
control"? Where was Lord Goodman or
William Whitelaw? Where was the calming
influence which tried to damp it down instead of Alastair Campbell going around
the television studios and ramping it up?
Mr Blair: First of all, I think it is
important that we understand that Lord Hutton went into all of these issues in
very, very, very great detail. Now, I
do, with a certain amount of wry amusement, draw attention to the difference
between Lord Hutton, as he was perceived prior to last Wednesday, as the
exemplar of impartiality, good judgment and wisdom, and Lord Hutton, as he has
subsequently become in certain parts, and I stress when I say "certain" parts",
of the media. The fact is that Lord
Hutton went into all of these issues in great detail and what he found was what
he was bound to find, which was that there was an allegation made against the
Government not of passing seriousness, but a fundamental question about the
integrity, not just of the Prime Minister, but of the intelligence, that that
allegation was not withdrawn, indeed it was repeated, and that it should have
been withdrawn. What he finds quite
rightly is that it was not unreasonable for the Government to say, when an allegation is made of such
seriousness that turns out to be utterly false, as it was, that it is right
that the BBC or whoever else it is that makes such an accusation withdraws it,
and that really was all we ever wanted to have happen. If you track the correspondence right
through this, that is the issue that was at stake and I think it is not
unreasonable in circumstances where you are the Prime Minister and you are
accused on an issue of war or peace of falsifying intelligence and that
accusation is totally without foundation, that the people making the accusation
either stand it up or stand it down.
Q10 Sir
George Young: On intelligence, which you mentioned, I want to ask one more
question on that and then bring in colleagues.
On this issue of intelligence, are there not some crucial issues that
need resolving at the interface between intelligence on the one hand and presentation
on the other where the world of the spinner meets the world of the spook, and
are there not real difficulties when political advisers get involved in
intelligence matters and when intelligence personnel start becoming advocates
for a course of action instead of just dispassionate analysts? I wonder whether you think that Lord Hutton
had the last word on this crucial interface between the two worlds?
Mr Blair: Lord Hutton made a very
specific finding that the allegation that the dossier was so-called "sexed up"
or that intelligence was falsified, that that allegation was wrong. I may just point this out because I think it
is important for the public to understand this. Lord Hutton came to that view, but so did the Intelligence and
Security Committee come to that view and actually the Foreign Affairs Committee
came to the same view about the essential allegation that was made by Mr
Gilligan. I think there are issues
which is why Jack Straw will make a statement on this later today and I hope we
can secure an agreement about this amongst all the political parties. I think there are issues to do with
intelligence, to do with intelligence-gathering, evaluation and use by
government, which we can look at, but the issue of good faith was determined by
the Hutton Inquiry and I really think it is incumbent on people to accept the
verdict of that Inquiry. It was an
immensely thorough piece of work. If
people, as I say, actually read the judgment, it goes through in painstaking
detail all the allegations made and each one of them it knocks down, and it
knocks them down for the very good reason that there never was anything to
sustain this idea that the Joint Intelligence Committee was put under improper
pressure; they never were.
Q11 Mr
Beith: I do not think the issue of good faith is an issue between us at
all, so let's have a look at some of the things which the Intelligence and
Security Committee said. One of them
rather relates to what George was asking about a moment ago which is where
pieces of paper go to and whether they are seen by people who need to see
them. Scientists in defence
intelligence entered some specific reservations. As you pointed out in the House, those reservations were not seen
by the Chairman of the JIC. Have you
made arrangements now such that a civil servant in this area, particularly
someone in so sensitive a field, if he wishes to minute dissent, can be sure
that that minute will be seen by the appropriate person, such as the Chairman
of the JIC?
Mr Blair: Well, what I would say about
that, Alan, is that the minute, as I understand it, and I am thinking back to
the evidence that was given to the Hutton Inquiry, the minute was actually seen
by the Head of Defence Intelligence and he took the view, because he had seen
the actual intelligence, and I think the individuals concerned had not, that he
overruled their concern. Now, I think
he is entitled to do that. That is the
normal way that it proceeds, so it is not correct that the concern was not
registered at all; it was registered, it was examined by the Head of Defence
Intelligence and he considered that the concern, which was not incidentally
that the 45-minute claim should not be in the dossier, it was about how it was
phrased in the dossier, he took the view that that concern was
unjustified. Now, I think that is a
perfectly proper process and we can have an argument about whether he made the
right decision or not, but I think the process should surely be one in which
those within the particular units make their concerns known within the unit and
the unit then resolves the matter one way or another. It would have been open obviously to the Chief of Defence
Intelligence to have taken it to the Joint Intelligence Committee, but he chose
not to do so.
Q12 Mr
Beith: So, contrary to the impression that the Committee was given where
it considered this matter, there is no procedure for the expert to go beyond
his line manager and say to the person who is presenting the intelligence to
you, "There is something not quite right about this"?
Mr Blair: Well, I think it obviously
depends what the nature of the concern is.
I suppose that must be correct.
Q13 Mr
Beith: Well, is there a procedure or is there not?
Mr Blair: Well, there is a procedure
in the sense that the defence intelligence people run their own unit and they
will then decide whether something is sufficiently serious to be brought to the
Joint Intelligence Committee or not, but I think it would be odd if we went
beyond that and said that the Defence Intelligence Unit should not decide
themselves whether they think something is sufficiently serious to be brought
to the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Q14 Mr
Beith: Well, I think we will have to return at some point in another
forum to the fact that a procedure we thought existed and we were told merely
had not operated satisfactorily just does not in fact exist. There is no way past your line manager even
when you have a fairly serious concern?
Mr Blair: Let me not correct anything
that was given to the Intelligence and Security Committee. If you were told about the procedures there
by the Defence Intelligence people, I am sure those are the proper
procedures. All I am saying is that in
this particular instance, my understanding was that the Chief of Defence
Intelligence looked into this matter, decided that the concern was not
justified and, therefore, did not bring it to the Joint Intelligence
Committee. I simply emphasise two
things about this because this is very important actually and it is the very
first question that George put to me a moment or two ago. The first is that none of this was ever
brought to the Joint Intelligence Committee, let alone Downing Street, and,
secondly, their concern was not that the dossier as a whole was not a reasonable
and accurate piece of work. When people
talk about the difference between the way this matter was reported in parts of
the media and the actual evidence to Lord Hutton, you would have thought the
day after their evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, that actually they had said
that the whole of the dossier was an inaccurate and bad piece of work. They did not say that at all.
Q15 Mr
Beith: No, but it was five paragraphs long, and I am not going to read it
to the Committee now because I want to turn to another subject in the ISC
Report which is what intelligence said, and we now know it said, about the
risks of al-Qaeda getting access to weapons of mass destruction. There was intelligence which has been
reported in the ISC Report that such an eventuality was most likely if the
regime was about to collapse or if invasion took place. Was there any particular reason why that
strand of intelligence did not feature in the dossier or in the public
statements?
Mr Blair: Well, this, I think, came in
certainly after the September dossier.
I am not exactly sure of where it was in relation to what was published
in February. I think all the way
through we were saying, "Well, of course we accept that there was a risk that
as the regime came under attack, it was possible with the regime disintegrating
that some of the weapons might fall into the wrong hands", and it was precisely
for that reason that we were taking contingency plans against it, but I would
have to say that that, in my view, did not bear at all on whether it was right
to take the military action. It would
be a most odd thing if we said that we are not going to take military action
with a regime that constitutes this threat because of the possibility that when
we took the action the weapons may fall into the wrong hands. That would be a very odd way of proceeding,
I think.
Q16 Mr
Beith: When you explained your view on that to the Intelligence and
Security Committee, you are quoted in the published document and you said that
this is a judgment call and time will tell whether it is true or not true. Looking at it now, is it not surely the case
that al-Qaeda's opportunities to make trouble in Iraq are much greater
following the collapse of the regime than they were before?
Mr Blair: Well, I think that I would
have to disagree because it is correct that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups
are in Iraq now and trying to kill as many innocent people as they possibly
can, but I think that if we were to have let Saddam remain in office, in power,
if he was in power today, with what we know incidentally, that irrespective of
the issue to do with weapons being found, the evidence is absolutely clear from
the Iraq Survey Group that he was developing programmes certainly for weapons
of mass destruction and had every intention of making sure that those programmes
were developed still further if he was given the chance to do so, I think that
would constitute a far greater threat in terms of al-Qaeda than the threat to
cause terrorism at the moment in Iraq, terrible though that is, because we know
what they are up to and we can get after them and defeat them. The whole reason why we took this action in
Iraq was because the risk posed by an unstable state with weapons of mass
destruction capability and the risk that at some point, not necessarily
immediately, but at some point in the future, that then gets into the hands of
those who are terrorists with terrorist intent ----
Q17 Donald
Anderson: Prime Minister, that is some way ahead surely, but it was clear on
the evidence of David Kay to the Senate Committee that the inspection process
of the UN inspectors had been remarkably successful. In short, the containment policy of President Clinton, which you
had rejected, was working. Do you admit
you were wrong?
Mr Blair: I do not accept that is,
Donald, if I can say this with respect, a proper description of what David Kay
actually said.
Q18 Donald
Anderson: Let me quote what he says.
He says in effect that all the consensus of those who were the weapons
inspectors was that they had achieved a great deal. I think somewhere I have the quote.
Mr Blair: I think what he actually
says is that he pays tribute to their work and he says that they did achieve a
great deal, but I actually have his quotes here and I thought I would bring
them in because I thought you ----
Q19 Donald
Anderson: Let me give you the quote.
"It turned out that we were better than we thought we were in terms of
the Iraqis feared that we had capabilities.
The UN inspection process achieved quite a bit".
Mr Blair: Yes, I do not dispute that,
but that is not to say ----
Q20 Donald
Anderson: That is, they had contained the weapons programme of Saddam
Hussein and you were saying that the containment process had failed.
Mr Blair: With respect, it is a
different thing to say that they had achieved quite a bit than for him to say
that the containment programme was working.
If I could actually quote to you, he says this in fact in respect of the
question put to him by Senator Warner: "Senator Warner, I think the world is
far safer with the disappearance and removal of Saddam Hussein. I have said I actually think this may be one
of these cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought. I think when we have the complete record,
you are going to discover that after 1988 it became a regime that was totally
corrupt, individuals were out for their own protection and in a world where we
know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood at some point in the future of a
seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that a far more dangerous country
than even we anticipated".
Q21 Donald
Anderson: But that was surely some time in the future. He was saying that you had said consistently
that the containment policy of your friend President Clinton had failed and,
therefore, there needed to be a change of policy.
Mr Blair: Exactly and if I can then
read what he also says, and incidentally this may be of help to the Committee
and I hope it will be of help to Parliament tomorrow, that I have asked the
permission of Senator Warner to put in the Library of the House of Commons the
full evidence of David Kay to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I really
ask people and I ask our media particularly to read the whole of that evidence
because the idea that this is a man saying that weapons of mass destruction and
Saddam Hussein were a load of boloney and nothing really existed, he is saying
precisely the opposite of that. If I
could just read this because it is important, and he says this ----
Q22 Donald
Anderson: But briefly.
Mr Blair: Well, I just think it is
important that we deal with the point.
"In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of
the Iraq Survey Group, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of Resolution
1441. Resolution 1441 requires that
Iraq report all its activities, one last chance to come clean about what it
had. We have discovered hundreds of
cases based both on documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis"
----
Q23 Donald
Anderson: But it is not concluding that he was an imminent threat.
Mr Blair: Well, I have not got this
exact quote, and I will look it up, but he does in fact go on to say that he
does perceive it as a threat. The point
I am telling you, and, with respect, I think this is clear, what is true about
David Kay's evidence, and this is something I have to accept and it is one of
the reasons why I think we now need a further inquiry, it is true, David Kay is
saying, that we have not found large stockpiles of actual weapons. What is untrue is to say that he is saying
that there was no weapons of mass destruction programme or capability and that
Saddam was not a threat.
Q24 Donald
Anderson: Let's turn on to weapons of mass destruction. Wolfovitz said, "We settled on one issue of
weapons of mass destruction". Do you
regret now in that respect that you placed your case wholly on that one issue
of weapons of mass destruction?
Mr Blair: No, I do not regret it and
neither do I regret the action that we took ----
Q25 Donald
Anderson: It is a pretty flimsy foundation, is it not?
Mr Blair: I am afraid I really do not
agree with that, Donald, and I think that people who want to see what the true
situation is should look at the whole of what David Kay has said to the Senate
Intelligence Committee. What he details
are breach upon breach of the United Nations Resolutions. It is true, as I say, I have just accepted
the fact, I have to accept, that David Kay has said that he has not found large
stockpiles of weapons ----
Q26 Donald
Anderson: Nor the prospects of.
Mr Blair: ---- and he says that in his
view he does not believe that that will happen, but what he goes on to say,
however, is that he has found ample evidence both of breaches of UN
resolutions, of weapons of mass destruction programmes and capability, and he
goes on to say that he actually believes that Iraq was possibly a more dangerous
place than we had thought, that the conflict was justified and that if we had
refused to go to conflict, then the security of the world would be put at
risk. I think it is as well that all of
his evidence is taken, not simply one part of it.
Q27 Donald
Anderson: The intelligence community are effectively technicians in that
they provide you with the technical assessments and it is for the politicians
to make the judgments on that raw material.
Are you confident that you asked the right questions?
Mr Blair: Yes, I am confident I asked
the right questions. Perhaps I can just
say this: that after the announcement that will be made to Parliament later
today by Jack Straw, we will then have what is effectively the fourth inquiry
into this. We have had the Foreign
Affairs Committee, which you chaired obviously, we have had the Intelligence
and Security Committee, we have had Lord Hutton's inquiry, and I think it is
right, as a result of what David Kay has said and the fact that the Iraq Survey
Group now probably will not report in the very near term its final report, that
we have a look at the intelligence that we received and whether it was accurate
or not. I think that is important. Of course the political judgments that are
in the end made by the politicians, that is right, but I do simply say that
whatever is discovered as a result of that inquiry, I do not accept that it was
wrong to remove Saddam Hussein or the world is not a better and safer place
without him.
Q28 Donald
Anderson: That is a different argument.
Can I finally, Prime Minister, put this to you: when Dame Pauline
Neville Jones appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee, she said that
there are no groundrules regarding links between the press and the intelligence
agencies. We, as a Committee,
recommended that this should be reviewed.
In the light of what has happened, are you prepared to review the rules
of engagement, the contact rules, between the intelligence agencies and
journalists?
Mr Blair: Well, I certainly think that
we need to look at issues to do with presentation and I think ----
Q29 Donald
Anderson: Not presentation, contacts.
Mr Blair: I do not quite know what is
the difference between us. You mean
contacts in what sense?
Q30 Donald
Anderson: Contacts between journalists and the members of the intelligence
services.
Mr Blair: Well, it depends what those
contacts are obviously. What should not
happen in any set of circumstances is that members of the intelligence services
give classified information that they should not give to people. That must be right.
Q31 Donald
Anderson: But even informal contacts you are prepared to countenance?
Mr Blair: I think it depends on the
situation. There are rules
already. People are given authorisation
to speak to journalists in certain circumstances, but I think it is important
that we remember we are talking about intelligence for the country and I do not
think we should do anything that puts the basic security of the intelligence
work that we do at risk. Is that not
what you mean?
Q32 Donald
Anderson: The lesson to be learned from the contact between Mr Gilligan and
in this case a member of the Ministry of Defence, but surely there must be some
case for groundrules, as Dame Pauline Neville Jones suggested?
Mr Blair: Well, I think there is. Again I am sure that what the Ministry of
Defence or any of the security people would say is that there are
groundrules. You do not have contact
unless it is authorised.
Q33 Donald
Anderson: And the former Chairman of the JIC said there were none.
Mr Blair: As I say, I do not know
whether you have a set of formal guidelines.
I am not sure that that exists, but what should surely not happen is
that somebody makes an unauthorised contact with a journalist and starts
talking about intelligence. That cannot
be right. The one thing I want to say
about this which I feel very, very strongly about is that I think our
intelligence services in this country do a fantastic job for this country. I think they are good people, I think they
are dedicated public servants and they do an immensely difficult job. Intelligence is not some absolute science,
as we all know, but let's be under no doubt about this at all, that we cannot
have a situation where we simply treat intelligence or security advice that is
given in a way where we just throw it open to whoever wants to pick it up. You have got to have some very, very clear
boundaries on this and the basic rule, as far as I am aware, and I am sure
people are going to look into the issue of whether you need some more formal
guidelines, but the basic rule surely has got to be this: that you do not make
contact with a journalist unless it is properly authorised and when you are
dealing with intelligence, that must be surely the right thing in the interests
of the country.
Q34 Tony
Wright: On the question of journalists, Prime Minister, the world of
journalism has been shocked and outraged at Lord Hutton's suggestion that they
should endeavour to tell the truth and that they should not gratuitously impugn
the integrity of individuals. Do you
agree with the editor of The Financial
Times who wrote on Saturday, "Let this dreadful misadventure serve as a
wake-up call for journalists"?
Mr Blair: Let me choose my words
diplomatically. I hope that people read
Lord Hutton's Report and realise that there is a world of difference between
the freedom of the press and its independence and broadcasting something that
is completely untrue and refusing to retract it. Those are two totally different things and, to be fair to parts
of our media, I think that they are concerned about some of the issues to do
with the Hutton Report and you can see that there is a healthy debate at least
in one part of journalism about that.
Incidentally, I have no doubt at all that government itself has got all
sorts of lessons to learn as well, but that is another matter.
Q35 Tony
Wright: But if the offending BBC report had simply said that there were
people inside the intelligence and defence community who had concerns about
aspects of the dossier, or that Number 10 was seeking to play a role in the
construction of the dossier, both of which we now know to be true, presumably
there would be nothing at all for the Government to object to?
Mr Blair: Of course if what had been
broadcast was true. Incidentally, we
never made any secret of the fact that we were involved in how the dossier was
presented. Of course it was a
statement to Parliament. I was making
the statement to Parliament, so it would be, in my view, rather bizarre if we
were not involved in it at all. What we
never did, however, was interfere with the intelligence judgments of the
intelligence community. Yes, you are
absolutely right, that obviously if that had been broadcast, then it would have
been perfectly justified.
Q36 Tony
Wright: If we just move to the intelligence judgment, when we met you here
last July, you said, and I quote you now, "I stand entirely by the intelligence
we put in the September dossier. I do
not believe that our intelligence will be shown to be wrong at all. I think it will be shown to be right". Do you stand by those assertions now?
Mr Blair: I have to take account of
what David Kay has said in the last few days.
He was the Head of the Iraq Survey Group and I said all the way through,
"Let us wait for this Survey Group". It
is not a question, as it were, of changing our position; it is a question of
recognising the fact that though there has been ample evidence of weapons of
mass destruction programmes and capability, the actual weapons have not been
found as yet in Iraq and the view of the Head of the Iraq Survey Group is that
he does not believe that the intelligence in relation to the stockpiles of
weapons was correct. Now, that is
exactly what we need to look into. I
think it is sensible for me to say I have to take account of that. I said let us wait for the Survey
Group. The Survey Group has come up
with certain findings. All I ask, again
as I said earlier, is that people do not clip one part of what he is saying and
not take the rest of what he is saying because the rest of what he is saying is
ample justification for the decision to go to war.
Q37 Tony
Wright: This matters because the legal basis for war that you were quite
clear in advancing was the fact of weapons of mass destruction. Last July you told us, "The truth is that to
take action we had to have the proper legal basis and that was through the
weapons of mass destruction issue. I
accept entirely the legal basis for action was through weapons of mass
destruction." In the absence of weapons
of mass destruction what happened to the legal basis for war?
Mr Blair: The legal basis is the
breach of the UN Resolutions, that is the whole issue to do with weapons of
mass destruction. If Saddam was
continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction capability in breach of UN
Resolutions then there is no doubt at all of the legal justification.
Q38 Mr
Beith: But the UN Resolutions were based on your having persuaded other
countries in the UN of the reliability of our intelligence.
Mr Blair: It was not simply that, with
respect, the question was whether there had been a breach of the UN Resolutions
and the UN Resolutions were to do with the development of weapons of mass
destruction and also to do with making full declarations to the UN inspectors,
they were also to do with weapons of mass destruction programmes and they were
to do with weapons of mass destruction capability. I have been honest enough to come along and say - and this is the
reason for having a fresh inquiry - that I have to accept that Dr Kay, the head
of the Iraq Survey Group, has said he has not found large stockpiles of
weapons, I have admitted that, but the critics must also admit the rest of what
he has said, which is that he has also said he has found evidence of weapons of
mass destruction programmes, capability, Saddam's intention to develop those
weapons and the breaches of the UN Resolution that that entails. So the legal basis of the action, with
respect, if Dr Kay is right, is entirely secure because if you go through the
UN Resolutions ‑ and I have not got 1441 and 687 in front of me ‑
there is a whole series of things that he was supposed to do and as Dr Kay
says, the breaches of the UN Resolutions he has probably breached eight or ten
times.
Q39 Tony
Wright: Let us just try this another way because this gets a bit
confusing, does it not?
Mr Blair: I think it is simple.
Q40 Tony
Wright: If the UN inspections had been allowed to continue, remember all
the arguments about it, and if no weapons of mass destruction had been found,
indeed if they had come back and said there are not any, would we still have
gone to war?
Mr Blair: We most certainly would have
gone to war if the UN inspectors had come back and said, "There are breaches of
the UN Resolution, documents have not been declared to us that should have been
declared, sites have not been declared to us that should have been declared, we
have evidence from Iraqi scientists saying that they were still developing
weapons of mass destruction programmes."
As Dr Kay says, they have had evidence on Iraq's nuclear weapons
programme that we did not even know about.
Dr Kay may be wrong, of course, but if Dr Kay is right then there is no
question whatever but that the war was justified. I accept there is also an issue to do with intelligence because
our view was that there were still large stockpiles of those weapons. If they do not find that then that means
that that part of the intelligence was wrong and that the rest of the
intelligence was plainly right. It is
important evidence which is why I would like the whole of his evidence to be
put in the House of Commons' Library, so that people can study it. What he actually says and I will try and dig
out the stuff for you, Donald ‑‑‑
Q41 Donald
Anderson: I have read every word of the transcript.
Mr Blair: He is not saying that the
policy of containment was working. On
the contrary, what he says is that he believes the UN inspectors would not have
been able to find everything that was going on in Iraq because the Iraqis were
refusing to co‑operate.
Q42 Sir
George Young: Prime Minister, you said to Donald Anderson a few moments ago that
we need another inquiry and you explained that this was because of Dr Kay and
Hutton. Last weekend, after Lord Hutton
had reported and after Dr Kay had given evidence, ministers were saying there
was no need for another inquiry. Is not
the reason why we are going to have another inquiry the initiative taken by
President Bush over the weekend which may have taken you slightly by surprise?
Mr Blair: First of all, it did not
take us by surprise. We have been
working very closely with the Americans on this. I actually said a moment or two ago it was two things. It was the evidence of Dr Kay, which I have
now had an opportunity to study in detail, but it was also that I thought that
the Iraq Survey Group would actually make its final report pretty shortly. I cannot be sure of that now. It is up to the Iraq Survey Group, but it is
possible it will take more months than we thought, in which case I think people
would find it unsatisfactory if we simply said we are not going to look at the
intelligence at all for what could be quite a long period of time.
Q43 Sir
Stuart Bell: Can I quote to you the chilling words of Dr David Kay which really
chilled me, "Right up to the very end the Iraqis were trying to produce the
deadly poison ricin". That must have a
very chilling sound in Washington today where ricin has been found in
Congress. I would like to come back to
the point that Donald Anderson made about political‑making
judgments. You will recall in your
reading, I am sure, that Winston Churchill advised Joseph Stalin in 1941, on
the basis of British intelligence, that he was about to be attacked by
Germany. Churchill could not tell
Stalin that this information came from codes that were broken, he said it was
from agents. Stalin took not a blind
bit of notice of that. Can one imagine
a situation where the Prime Minister of our country, any Prime Minister for
that matter, acting with our closest ally, upon the clearest intelligence reports,
which are even justified by what Dr Kay said, if he did not act in the British
national interest, in the interests of the British people, would we not be
sitting here today accusing you of the grossest dereliction of duty?
Mr Blair: I would simply say to people
right from the very outset that had we failed to act on the intelligence that
we received I think it would have been a gross dereliction of duty. I think the evidence given by the Iraq
Survey Group is ample proof of the intentions of Saddam Hussein and the
breaches of a UN Resolution justifies this.
There is another big point as well and I think it is at the heart of the
difficulty about this because let us be quite clear, we have had the Foreign
Affairs Committee, we have had the Intelligence and Security Committee, we have
had Lord Hutton's inquiry, we will now have a fresh inquiry into the
intelligence, but I have got no doubt at all that if this fresh inquiry into
the intelligence does not yield the result that some people want they will then
call for another inquiry and they will call for these inquiries until they get
the result they want, which is that the war was not justified. I would simply say to you people that this
threat of the interaction of unstable, chaotic steps with weapons of mass
destruction and terrorism is the security threat of the 21st Century and if we
were not prepared to deal with it in relation to Iraq, with all the history of
UN Resolutions, with the history of using weapons of mass destruction, we would
never be making the progress we are today with Iran, with North Korea, with
Libya, with other countries where we are gradually being able to deal with this
issue. We have a long way to go but I
have no doubt whatsoever that we did the right thing. I think there are issues to do with intelligence that we need to
look at and that is not just the intelligence agencies, the Government as well
incidentally, but I hope that people realise we will not get to a situation
where some people accept this was the right thing to do. They will carry on
arguing right the way through. I
believe it was the right thing to do. I
think that if we had not acted in respect of Iraq we would not have a hope of dealing
with this issue and this is an issue that goes right to our security as a
country in the world.
Q44 Tony
Wright: If there is no point in having this inquiry because the argument
will go on some might say why are we having it? We are busy putting in place a Franks‑style inquiry at the
moment. When Franks reported, the
Leader of the Opposition, Jim Callaghan, called it "a bucket of
whitewash". Where have we heard
that? The arguments are going to go on,
are they not?
Mr Blair: They are, Tony. I suppose this always repeats itself with
different parties in different positions depending on the opposition and who is
in government. Even so, I think it is
still important that we do it because I am sure there will be a certain number
of people who will object if they listen to what a report like that says. There has never been a Government that has
been more open about its inner workings than we were with the Hutton
Inquiry. We gave more evidence to it
and we disclosed more of what went on in Government than anyone has ever done. I am now prepared to have a fresh inquiry
into the intelligence and I am doing it because I do not believe we have
anything whatsoever to hide. I think we
should be proud of what we did as a country.
I think we did the right thing in getting rid of Saddam. I think we have done the right thing, not
just because Iraq was a dangerous place under Saddam but also because the rest
of the world needs to know that this issue is going to be tackled with firmness
and that is what we are doing and it is what President Bush is doing as well. I hope we can do some of this in the House
of Commons tomorrow. I think it is
important we have a genuine debate about whether I am right about the nature of
this security threat because I think underneath all this is a feeling in
certain quarters that this is all exaggerated, "So what if you get these
unstable states, does it really matter?
The terrorists are too disorganised anyway to take advantage of their
weapons." I believe this is a big
threat. I think the real problem
underneath all of this ‑ and this is why a lot of people do not agree
with the decision to go to war in Iraq even though, to be fair, they hated
Saddam Hussein ‑ is a doubt about the nature of this security threat and
that is in the end the debate we have to have in the country.
Q45 Tony
Baldry: Prime Minister, do you think that if parliamentary colleagues had
known then what they know now you would ever have had the support of the House
of Commons to go to war?
Mr Blair: Yes, absolutely, because
what we would have had is a fresh UN Resolution. If what Dr Kay said was right and I have gone through some of the
rest of his evidence, he has made the point that in respect of the stockpiles
of WMD he believes the intelligence was wrong, that is something to be looked
into. He says, however, in other
respects the intelligence under‑stated the picture. For example, what we know from the Iraq
Survey Group but we did not know before the war started is that they were
developing ballistic missiles of up to 1,000 kilometres in range when the
permitted range was 150 kilometres. Why on earth would they be doing that
unless they had aggressive intent?
Q46 Tony
Baldry: Prime Minister, you abandoned the United Nations. You came to the
House and you said to the House that the only reason we were going to war was
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be used within
45 minutes. If you really do believe
that if colleagues had known then what they know now they would still have
supported you in the division lobbies then I think you are more out of touch
than you really know.
Mr Blair: I am sorry you say that,
Tony. Are you saying to me that if the
UN inspectors had come up with what Dr Kay has found in the Iraq Survey Group
and said "Here are ten breaches of the UN Resolution" we would not have any
difficulty in the UN Security Council?
The whole problem that we had was when Dr Blix and the inspectors went
to Iraq they could not find out what was happening. The Iraq Survey Group has found, as they say, clear breaches of
the UN Resolutions. So we would have
been in a stronger position than we were.
What we could not do was point to any clear evidence of a breach of the
UN Resolution other than what we were saying, which has turned out to be
accurate, that the Iraqis were not fully disclosing the situation.
Q47 Mr
Pike: Prime Minister, I asked you before we went to war, on the issue of
weapons of mass destruction, if you felt that we should give more time to the
inspectors and Bush did not, who would take that decision. With hindsight, is it not a fact that at the
end of the day it was Bush that took the decision we could not allow the
inspectors more time?
Mr Blair: No. I think the one thing that emerges very
clearly from the Survey Group report is that you could have had the inspectors
there for a long time, but it is very hard if a regime does not co‑operate
with the UN inspectors. Let me give you
two examples. When South Africa shut
down its nuclear weapons programme there was the full co‑operation of the
South African government and it was relatively easy for the inspectors to do
it. Now, with Libya, I will not go into
details of this at this stage but I think people will be interested in them
when they emerge later, people are working very closely with the Libyan
authorities. The Libyan authorities are,
as far as we can make out, co‑operating fully and disclosing
everything. It is then easy to do. If a regime refuses to co‑operate and
the inspectors are necessarily, which is what was happening, chasing after this
site or that site, they could not be sure, they could not speak to the
scientists properly. Just remember, at
the time the inspectors were in they were unable to interview the scientists in
anything remotely approaching proper conditions. At first the scientists had to have a so‑called "friend" in
the room which was hardly tempting them to be very open and then there had to
be tape recordings that were then taken back to the Iraqi authorities. As I think Dr Kay says, the inspectors could
have stayed in a long time and not found anything and that is the way it
is. In the end we had to come to a
decision. I think I remember saying
this at the time of the debate. I do
not have the quote in front of me but I will dig it out. The issue at the time was is Saddam Hussein
co‑operating fully or not. The
evidence that has been presented subsequently indicates that he was not co‑operating
at all never mind fully. Dr Kay says in
his evidence that the Iraqi scientists they have now interviewed were told not
to tell the UN inspectors anything.
That is in itself a breach of the UN Resolutions. You are never going to shut down these
programmes unless you actually get the active co‑operation of the
authority in the country which is why UN Resolution 1441 called upon Saddam
Hussein to co‑operate "fully and unambiguously" with the UN inspectors.
Q48 Dr
Gibson: Prime Minister, I am interested in the evidence subsequently that
we have got from the scientists who have been picked up in Iraq, one of whom I
taught who was called "Dr Germ" and I am very interested to know, since they
have been caught, if they have divulged anything about the weapons programme
and emphasised your beliefs?
Mr Blair: I am only going on what Dr
Kay and the Iraq Survey Group have said.
They have said that at least some of the Iraq scientists have divulged
to them that they were still working on
programmes, retaining capabilities, teams of scientists were still working
together in order to develop weapons of mass destruction when the inspectors were
gone. I do not know about the particular
person you are talking about, but I think the evidence is very clear.
Q49 Chairman:
You
have referred rather tantalisingly to a statement that Jack is going to make
later today. Would you like to tell us,
insofar as you can at this stage, what it will cover? If there is to be an inquiry, will it be in‑house or out‑of‑house?
Mr Blair: We are still hoping to get
the agreement of the Liberal Democrats to this. We have the agreement of the Conservatives to the way that we
should proceed.
Q50 Chairman:
What
is the area of dispute?
Mr Blair: The area of dispute is
essentially ‑ and I think I can say this because the Liberal Democrats
wrote to me about it yesterday ‑ that the inquiry should go into the
political judgment that led us to war.
I honestly think the political judgment has got to be in the end a
matter for Government and Parliament.
You cannot subcontract that to a committee and I do not believe the
Committee would want to look into that.
What we should have is a proper inquiry into the intelligence, not just
about the intelligence services but Government and any discrepancies that there
are between what is there and what has been found by the Iraq Survey
Group. It should not be a rerun of the
Hutton Inquiry. We have dealt with the
so‑called "sexing up" of the dossier through three inquiries now, we do
not need another inquiry into that. In
my view we do not need an inquiry into the political decision to go to war,
that is a matter for Parliament, Government and the country in the end, but it
is important we learn the intelligence lessons both insofar as they concern the
intelligence services and Government and what I want to do is to try and do
that in a consensual way. I should make
one thing very clear and that is, I personally would have been very happy for
the Intelligence and Security Committee to have done there inquiry, I think
they could have done it extremely well, but I have gone for that option because
I wanted to proceed by consensus and because others said the Franks Committee style
is a better way of doing it.
Q51 Mr
Beith: Is not the interaction of ministers and the intelligence community
absolutely crucial to an understanding of this?
Mr Blair: Sure. There is no doubt that the inquiry would be
able to look into how the intelligence is gathered and used by Government and I
think that is entirely sensible.
Q52 Mr
Beith: And how the Government influences the way intelligence is
presented to it.
Mr Blair: Not going back into all the
issues of the Hutton Inquiry because I think that would be unreasonable, but
certainly how intelligence is gathered, evaluated, used by Government and any
discrepancies obviously between that and what has been found by the Iraq Survey
Group, all of that is entirely sensible to do and I think we can learn those
lessons not just in respect of Iraq, I think we should also look at
intelligence more generally in respect of weapons of mass destruction because
if this is the new threat we have to look at how we gather intelligence and
evaluate it and use it and there will be important lessons to learn from that,
but we must not rerun the Hutton Inquiry because I think that would be
completely absurd. We must not either -
I say this with respect to the Lib Dems - end up having an inquiry into whether
the war was right or wrong. That is
something we have to decide. We are the
politicians and we have to decide that.
Q53 Chairman:
Going back to my original point, is it to be an in‑house
inquiry and, if it is in‑house, how do you envisage its composition in a
manner that will convince the public that it is consensual and impartial?
Mr Blair: I hope that the details of
this can be announced by Jack later to Parliament, but I believe it would be
sensible to have a political input and my view of that is that it is best ‑
and I think this already is effectively consensual ‑ to take the leading
members of the ISC from each of the main parties and have them on it and then
we need three other people, we should do it the same as the Franks Committee,
who are people of repute and experience and who can do the job properly. I think it is better that Jack announces all
the details of that later today, if that is alright. I am perfectly happy to do it now, but I think we need the final
agreement of the parties before we can be sure we have got the agreement of all
the committees.
Q54 Mr
Leigh: I am sure you would accept that it is in your interest in drawing
a line under this that this inquiry, whilst not of course going into the policy
issues, is as comprehensive as possible and does not just focus narrowly on
what intelligence was available, which is an imprecise science anyway. We want to look, as you have confirmed, at a
relationship between the intelligence community and ministers. We do not want to spend the rest of the
century speculating on the subconscious state of civil servants' minds, we want
to know their conscious relationship with your Government.
Mr Blair: Yes, but I do make the
point, as I have made to everyone, that we should not go over the same ground
as the Hutton Inquiry, but of course the way that intelligence is gathered, the
way that it is evaluated and used by Government should be part of what the
Committee look into. We can do that
without casting aspersions on people's good faith or honesty, that has been gone
into in detail by the Hutton Inquiry.
We can do it on the basis of what are the lessons we can learn for the
good of our country in the future given that this is a serious threat. I am perfectly happy that this should be
done. I would point out that this is
now the fourth inquiry into these issues and I also point out, as I have said
before, believe me, it will not satisfy those who are opposed to the original
decision.
Mr Turner: Could I say to the Prime
Minister that there are many of your colleagues in the House that really do not
want a further inquiry. We can predict
the outcome. It will move from the
"cover up" to the "whitewash" and as far as we are concerned our Government has
been completely open. We are proud of
the way that you have conducted yourself throughout this period and as far as
we are concerned you should effectively draw a line under it. Let history judge as to what your motives
were and how you conducted yourself and let us get on, as you are doing
admirably, with running this country.
Chairman: Prime Minister, anything you
can say would only undermine what Dennis has just said on your behalf! I think that makes it the appropriate time
to go to an area of more domestic bliss perhaps. We are going to look next at the area of how policy is made which
is somewhat sensitive post tuition fees and foundation hospitals and then we
will look into delivery and sustainability and John Denham will lead on
this.
Q55 Mr
Denham: Prime Minister, I hope we can bring some of the openness about the
machinery of Government that we had to Hutton to bear on how the Government
came so close last week to losing a vote on an education policy, a priority
policy. Can I start by asking where the
policy first came from? Was it the case
that the Secretary of State for Education, who I think would have been Estelle
Morris, came to you and said, "I have studied this, Prime Minister, and I'm
convinced we need variable fees," or did the policy emerge in a different way?
Mr Blair: After the last Election I
found there was considerable concern amongst people at large at the payment of
up‑front fees and about the whole issue to do with tuition fees and it
was also the case that the universities themselves were saying that their
financial situation was bleak and difficult unless there was a fundamental
change in the way that the university system was funded. There were discussions that took place in
Government first when Estelle was Secretary of State and afterwards when
Charles Clarke was Secretary of State and that resulted in a White Paper a year
ago.
Q56 Mr
Denham: The DfES would have received the same messages from the
universities as you were hearing. Did
the initiative to introduce variable fees come from the Department for
Education and Science or from Number 10?
Mr Blair: I announced in my conference
speech that the whole question of raising the issue to do with university
finance was one of the issues we needed to look at, so in that sense it
originated with me saying this is an issue we have to tackle, but I think the
Department were well aware that it needed to be tackled and in any event, we
were receiving very strong representations from the university sector.
Q57 Mr
Denham: Having taken that initiative, what process did you put in train to
develop a policy for variable fees?
Mr Blair: We held a series of meetings
inside the Cabinet where we looked at all the various options and we eventually
came to a set of conclusions, we published them in a White Paper a year ago and
then we had a debate following on from there.
I have said that within the Labour Party itself I think we are going to
handle this differently, but I do not think you can do much more than have a
White Paper virtually a year before you have a Bill.
Q58 Mr
Denham: In the past in some policy areas like the rehabilitation of
offenders the Performance and Innovation Unit has been commissioned to publish
a very detailed and evidence‑based assessment of what the best policy
would be. Why was the decision taken
not to commission any report of that sort to inform the White Paper?
Mr Blair: You do not always do
that. Obviously you have to take a
decision as to whether that is necessary or not. I think part of the issue here was that no one disputed that the
universities faced a funding crisis. So
you did not need a study to tell you that that was a fact that everybody
accepted. You then have a number of
different ways you can raise the money.
I am always a bit bemused when I read of the 40 different options we
had, I never came across that. There
were basically only two, you either got more money out of the taxpayer or the
student pays more.
Q59 Mr
Denham: Can we focus on the question of the variability element which was
one of the controversial areas rather than the raising of extra money. You decided not to have a PIU‑type
report. Before you published in the
White Paper the policy on variable fees what studies were made of the likely
impact of variable fees on the income of different types of universities,
Oxbridge, Russell Group, modern universities?
Mr Blair: I think there were detailed
discussions with a lot of the universities about this and in the end the
alternatives were really these, either you bumped the fee up for everybody and
had a uniform flat rate fee at ,2,500 or you decided to have it slightly higher but make it
variable. The reason we went for
variable was because a lot of the universities said to us, "For goodness sake,
don't saddle us with a uniform fee because we don't want to charge the same fee
for all courses."
Q60 Mr
Denham: I voted for the policy, Prime
Minister, so I do not need to be ‑‑‑
Mr Blair: No, I am just saying that is ‑‑‑
Q61 Mr
Denham: --- I am very keen to know what
information was available to you and others before the White Paper was actually
published, and it sounds as though there was no study that said: "On average,
this is going to bring this amount of extra income to modern universities, this
amount of income to Oxbridge, and this amount of income to the Russell Group
universities"; would that be right?
Mr Blair: I cannot go back exactly on all the papers that were presented to
us but I am sure the Department did a very clear analysis of what money was
needed and how it would come and what the different impact on different
universities would be.
Q62 Mr
Denham: That has never been published; why?
Mr Blair: I think in the White Paper we published everything that we needed
to publish. It is not a very
complicated piece of work this, John.
In the end there were basically two simple decisions: one, is it from
the taxpayer or is it graduate repayment; two, if it is graduate repayment, is
it flat rate or is it variable, and all I am saying on variability is there
were some people who obviously wanted a flat rate fee but a large number of the
universities said to us, "Don't constrain us in this way; you will make it
inflexible."
Q63 Mr
Denham: In the debates that led up to last
Tuesday there were many different elements that were controversial in the
House, including the distribution of resources to universities, but no information
was published about how that would work.
Can I ask about a second issue, many other countries have a variable
fees system. What studies were
commissioned by Number 10 or the DfES about the impact of variable fees on
access by students from poorer backgrounds to the most prestigious
universities?
Mr Blair: We certainly did get the information in because I recall seeing
it. The Department presented us with
the information on what happens in other countries because this is a debate
going on right around the world. Let me
not be overly defensive about it, though.
I accept in retrospect, that it would have been better had we published
a lot more information about the nature of the problem than we actually
did. I accept that and one of the
things that I have tried to initiate, both internally in the Labour Party and
then externally, is to try to put more public information out on a policy issue
like this. The only thing I say to you
is that my experience of these things is that you can put out an awful lot of
information, and indeed the Select Committee did a report I think back in June,
but until the Bill comes before the House, people do not really focus on
it. Sometimes I have had people saying
to me, "Why didn't you tell us all this
about the universities", and all the rest of it going back a year, when
actually we did but people were not terribly interested in it. Having said that, I do accept that there are
changes we can make that would be better for the future.
Q64 Mr
Sheerman: Prime Minister, you have always
believed, I know, in both a pragmatic approach to problems but also an evidence‑based
approach to policy. What is in a sense
worrying about what you have just said is that it seems to gloss over that role
of real policy scrutiny in Number 10.
You have a lot of people employed in there to give you advice on policy
but what seems to have emerged on a number of issues in which the Government
has run into problems, like top‑up fees and variable fees, is that either
your policy people are not doing the work and getting the credit for it or they
are just not publishing it. In terms of
scrutiny, as you said, our select committee looked closely at the Higher
Education White Paper. What we were
astonished about later on is that Government ministers said that the foundation
of this policy rested with Professor Barr in the London School of Economics.
Given that you have a Policy Unit why was it not much more closely involved in
trawling over possibilities, potentials, pitfalls?
Mr Blair: First of all, it is important to emphasise that if the Number 10
Policy Unit attempted to make the entirety of the policy I think the Department
might have something to say about that,
and actually I have one person in Number 10 working on education, or one and a
half because he covers other things too.
It is not actually the case that it should all come out of Number 10
because the Department in the end are the people that take it forward. I am slightly mystified in respect of this
in relation to tuition fees. What we
came out with in the end - alright, it was a very close vote in the House of
Commons but I have to say that most informed opinion came down pretty much in
favour of the proposals we had - so when people say the policy was not worked
out, actually it was worked out; the trouble was people did not agree with all
aspects of it, which is one of the things you get used to in politics.
Q65 Mr
Sheerman: Prime Minister, we are really
after what happens in the policy‑making process. The fascination in some senses is if you
take a different major policy change that really took everyone by surprise and
that was when you abolished the office of Lord Chancellor, that seemed to come
out of the air. Yes, there had been an
IPPR report on the possibility of changing the role and it had been a long‑term
interest of the Labour Party. You have
here both a former Home Affairs Minister and a former Home Affairs Shadow
Minister, and suddenly an issue we thought was dormant bounces out as a piece
of public policy with your imprint on it.
How did that occur?
Mr Blair: It occurred partly because of the reshuffle. Here is the problem, let me just tell you
from the Government perspective: actually after we made the announcement on the
Lord Chancellor we then had a long process of consultation as to whether this
is right and we have a very elongated procedure happening in the House of Lords
whereby people are deciding do they want a Supreme Court, do they not want a
Supreme Court, do they want a separate speaker in the House of Lords or
not. What happens in Government is that
at some point, in order to consult on something, you have got to announce
it. You either announce it or you do
not. I agree that because of the
reshuffle there were particular circumstances there and I think probably in
retrospect we could have done that better; I would accept that. On the other hand, I have to say that I
think that the change was absolutely right and we have for the first time got
the person in charge of the courts actually sitting in the Department with his
office in the Department doing the job that he should be doing as a Secretary
of State. Derry Irvine did a fantastic
job as Lord Chancellor but it is an inhibition on him being able to do the job
of running the courts properly that he has to spend such a long time in the
House of Lords.
Q66 Mr
Denham: Can I just follow that up, Prime
Minister, and ask this question: when the announcement was made about the
abolition of the post, did you have in Number 10 a document entitled How to Abolish the Post of Lord Chancellor
or something similar that had been drawn up by officials, at your request, to
say "These are the stages that we need to go through"?
Mr Blair: We had advice from officials, yes, this is what you need to do.
Q67 Mr
Beith: Which officials, officials in the
Lord Chancellor's Department?
Mr Blair: Yes absolutely, including the Cabinet Secretary and also the
Permanent Secretary in the Lord Chancellor's Department whom we consulted about
this before we took the final decision.
Unusually in these circumstances, because it was mixed in with the
reshuffle, we did do that, but I think in retrospect with this ‑ and this
is why I said a moment or two ago it would have been better probably had we
published a paper, had we taken a step back, separated the reshuffle very
clearly from the departmental changes and then presented it at the very outset
as it indeed then became, because what it then became was not in fact a
decision that was rubber stamped and forced through, it actually became a consultation
with papers being published and then a debate in the House of Lords. I think we could have in retrospect ‑
this is entirely my responsibility ‑ done it better.
Q68 Mr
Sheerman: Prime Minister, that is the point,
we want to know where was the spark? Was
it a long‑term commitment of yours personally and you were waiting for an
opportunity, and the reshuffle gave you that opportunity, because there was no
real evidence of enormous new pressure building up for change, was there, at
that time?
Mr Blair: There was, in my mind. Let
me explain to you - and I entirely accept it was my responsibility for the
policy that there was - I believe there are many problems with the criminal
justice system, but the real and fundamental problem is the inability to join up
properly the police system, the probation system, the courts system and the
Crown Prosecution Service. I think one
major inhibition on that was the inability of the courts to have a Secretary of
State who was really focused on the core business of that Department and to
have in the end a Secretary of State in charge of the courts who also had
formal duties in the House of Lords that would occupy a large number of hours a
week was a serious inhibition on the job being done properly. As I say, I have just accepted that we could
have done it better and done it differently and of course we should learn the
lessons of that, but actually I think as far as the policy was concerned the
policy was right.
Q69 Mr
Sheerman: What sort of process do you have
in Number 10 at your command that says, "Look, here we introduced higher
education changes in a certain way. It
ran into certain resistance and problems.
Let's analyse that and compare that with the Lord Chancellor decision
and then take foundation hospitals and track where the original idea has come
from," because if you do have a policy that you prefer evidence‑based
policy then in a sense you have got to defend the fact that these decisions
were made on evidence.
Mr Blair: Yes, but I think they are completely different issues.
Q70 Mr
Sheerman: They are but that is the richness
of comparing the three.
Mr Blair: I do not accept the same process at all. In relation to tuition fees there is an issue about whether it
would have been better to put a whole lot more information out about the nature
of the problem before we receive it.
All I would say to you about that, however, is we did put out a White
Paper a year before we introduced the Bill and we had your Select Committee Report
in between. In relation to foundation
hospitals I do not actually accept there was a problem at all in respect to
that and I will happily come back to that.
In respect to the Lord Chancellor's Office, that is a different issue. What it would have been better to have done,
since we were not imposing the change that day, would have been to have stated
very, very clearly right at the outset these changes will only come into effect
once we have gone through a consultation process. Actually that was the policy.
That is why we had consultation papers.
The Lord Chancellor has still not changed, now, today. Right, there is a process that will have to
be gone through. We did not make that
clear at the beginning but that is a completely different issue.
Mr Ainsworth: It was not clear, Prime Minister, at the time that you knew that
process had to be gone through. What we have still not got at is where this
idea really came from? Whose idea was
it?
Q71 Dr
Gibson: Two over here please!
Mr Blair: Another welcome innovation ‑ a tea break!
Mr Ainsworth: Was this something Charlie Falconer dreamed up in the middle of the
night?
Chairman: It is courtesy of the
Chairman of the Catering Committee, I think.
He deserves recognition for that!
Q72 Mrs
Dunwoody: Prime Minister, could we have the
tea in first and then the milk!
Mr Blair: I always put the milk in first.
Q73 Mr
Denham: If we could pursue the point that
Nick was making. Is not actually the
common feature of fees, foundation hospitals and the abolition of the post of
Lord Chancellor that pretty firm ideas were produced from more or less nowhere
which the Government then had to amend as you did on tuition fees, on
foundation hospitals, and which you may be doing on the Lord Chancellor at a
later stage, so rather than separating the three is there not actually an issue
that something, however good the intrinsic merits of the policy, must go to the
way that policy is brought forward into the public domain, the evidence that is
available and the discussion that takes place around it?
Mr Blair: I would like to be able to agree with you because generally I like
to be able to agree with you, John, and I read your article the other day in
the paper and I think there was a lot of truth in it. I have got to tell you that my experience of this stuff is that
process and debates about process become a substitute often for people making
up their minds on the policy. I do not
disagree, I have already admitted there was an issue to do with tuition fees
where I think we could have proceeded better.
I suppose if governments are being honest they can always do things
better, and they should always be looking to try and do things better. I think it was completely different from the
Lord Chancellor situation where, I accept, people got the impression ‑
actually wrongly but it is our fault they did get the impression - that this
was suddenly going to be "today you have one system, tomorrow you will have
another". On foundation hospitals, I do
not really accept there was a problem with the process either. That grew out of pressure from hospitals
saying to us ‑-- and you have got your views, Mr Hinchliffe, but in the
end the fact is you disagree with the policy, which I totally understand. You can have any number of processes but in
the end what you have to have is a policy decision. I do not think where we got to on tuition fees was a wrong
place. Neither do I actually think we
changed the whole basis of the policy as we went along. For example, we were always going to have
greater support for poorer students.
The precise nature of that support, yes, was still a matter of debate
but that is listening to people, and that is a perfectly good process if you
like. Foundation hospitals is something
different. I never, frankly, understood
what the fuss about foundation hospitals was but, anyway, I am probably about
to have that point illuminated for me!
Q74 Mr
Hinchliffe: If I could respond to some of
the points you have made. I think the
issue I raised last time you were at the Committee was that as a Labour Party
Member for the best part of 40 years I have been used to processes of
engagement in policy development and, as an MP, engagement in debates around
Green Papers and White Papers and scrutiny of legislation. What was very apparent, regardless of my
personal views on the foundation concept, was that when that measure came
before the House it was, frankly, full of holes. Alan Milburn - and I have a very high regard for Alan as a
Secretary of State, I may have disagreed with him sometimes on policy issues
but I have a high regard for his abilities ‑ was unable to explain key
parts of that measure because those key parts were not thought through. And that is the concern I have got about the
way in which, increasingly, we are being bounced into policy. The delayed discharges issue was another one
where all the evidence that the Select Committee took, including from the
Department of Health, left us with a view that nobody really supported that
measure as a way forward on the issue of problems with people not being
discharged from hospital. My concern is
what lessons have been learned from the foundation hospitals vote with a 17
majority and the vote last week with five, because surely there must have been
some very serious messages coming through to Number 10 about the feelings of
vast numbers of Labour MPs?
Mr Blair: You should always reflect on the lessons that can be learned, I do
not disagree with that at all, and that is why I have initiated within the
Labour Party ‑ let us distinguish the Labour Party from the government process
‑ the idea of the "big conversation" and so on and the consultation that
will give us proposals that we can then debate at party conference this
year. I think there are real issues to
do with that. I do think in the end it
comes down to whether you agree with the policy or not. This notion that foundation hospitals came
out of ether from Downing Street is wrong.
It did not, it actually originated, I think the first speech Alan
Milburn made on it was in January 2002 and it was made because hospitals were
coming to us - the best hospitals - and saying, "Look, we go through too much
bureaucracy in being able to do this and do that which we need to do; give us
the freedom to operate differently." It
is true then the policy was amended to try and take account of the concerns
that people were raising with us, but the basic essence of the policy is to
devolve more power downwards to the foundation hospitals and I guess in the end
some people think the policy is right and some people think it is wrong.
Q75 Mr
Hinchliffe: I think it is wrong ‑‑‑
Mr Blair: Yes!
Q76 Mr
Hinchliffe: But I also think that perhaps
one of the issues that you should be addressing ‑ and I would be
interested in your thoughts ‑ is the way in which the disengagement of
members of our Party and the disengagement of MPs from the development of the
policy is a factor in your majority dropping to five last week and 17 recently.
Mr Blair: It certainly is from my position.
Q77 Mr
Hinchliffe: So what do you do about it?
Mr Blair: You have got to look at how you bring people into the policy‑making
process more fully, in the Labour Party, and that is precisely what we are
trying to do. You will still get to a
point, David, is all I am saying, where people have a choice whether to vote
for the policy or not. I do not ignore
these problems of process and I think I have been reasonably open in saying
that in certain of these areas we could have done it differently and better,
but I do sometimes think that we can have endless debates about process when
actually there is an issue to be decided about policy. I do not think myself that in the end the
reason why we came so close on foundation hospitals and tuition fees was
ultimately about process. I think it is
to do with this issue of is the Government trying to create a so‑called
"marketisation" of public services? Are
we trying to create a market in higher education, are we trying to create a
market in health, and people were worried about the implications of that. I think underneath those policies and the
voting against them was that concern. I
think in the end we would be better off debating that issue than we would be
debating ‑‑‑ the process questions, I agree, are important
but in the end that is the heart of the policy worry. For people like yourself, because we discussed it individually at
the time, that was your worry, that we were going to create two tiers in the
hospital system. The worry in the
universities is that we were going to create two tiers of universities. I think that is the heart of the debate
actually and sometimes process can be a substitute for a true policy debate.
Q78 Mr
Hinchliffe: Does it not matter to you that
on the one occasion that the Labour Party formally discussed this policy of
foundation hospitals, the conference voted against that policy? Is that not a factor in determining how we
go forward on this one?
Mr Blair: It was complicated by the fact, and, forgive me, I think I am right
in this, that the constituency parties voted for it. This is interesting for all of the rest of you! The constituency parties voted in favour.
Mr Hinchliffe: I am not so sure you are correct on that one. The people behind me disagree but I am not
sure you are correct.
Sir Stuart Bell: This is not a Labour Party debate, it is a Prime Minister ‑‑‑
Q79 Mr
Denham: If I can bring you away from Party
considerations. I am referring again to
process, which is about the relationship between Number 10 and
departments. To your knowledge, are
there ever circumstances in which Number 10 officials would give instructions
to departmental officials about policy or the implementation of policy without
going through departmental ministers?
Mr Blair: Do you mean the ministers would have nothing to do with it?
Q80 Mr
Denham: Yes.
Mr Blair: No.
Q81 Mr
Denham: Yes, the bilateral relationships
between Number 10 officials and departmental officials which did not bring
ministers into the loop?
Mr Blair: No, the relationship with secretaries of state on any issue which
is remotely contentious is such that if they think that Number 10 has an issue
with the department they would pick up the phone and say so or write me a
letter and say so. The idea that you
sit there and Number 10 gives instructions ---
I do not know because I was not in government before 1997 and I have
never held any other office than Prime Minister, but I do not ‑‑‑
Q82 Mrs
Dunwoody: It is a pretty good way to start,
it cuts out a lot of the boring bits!
Mr Blair: I was going to say it was not an entirely conventional career path
therefore, but I suspect these issues about Number 10 and departments have gone
on since time immemorial and departments will get upset with Number 10 from
time to time because they think it is being overbearing, and at other times the
relationship works perfectly well. All
I can do is go on the memoirs of others, but it seems that this is pretty much
routine. I do not think the issue is
the relationship between Number 10 and the departments. As I say, I think there will always be a
certain tension there. That is why I am
not disputing the process thing, I am just trying to contextualise it. I think there is an issue about how you
involve, if I may say to you, rank and file Members of Parliament and all the
rest of it. I will just tell you one
other thing though: it is very difficult to have a completely open policy
debate in the sense that if you have an idea you go and discuss it because what
I find about any idea that goes anywhere near the great public domain is that
what was an idea suddenly becomes a hard and fast policy by the next morning
and then what you are faced with is people shouting the house down because you
have come to the wrong decision.
Q83 Mr
Mates: Prime Minister, perhaps nowhere is it
more starkly shown the central thrust of policy than in Northern Ireland matters. Let me say this is not a criticism. Most people think it is wholly admirable
that you took up where John Major left off and you have taken a very close
personal interest and devoted a lot of time in what was possibly the most
difficult problem on your agenda when you came to office. But it does have effects on oversight and
accountability. If I could give you an
example. Last summer the decision was
taken to give prisoners in Northern Ireland separate recognition as
paramilitaries and to separate them.
This was taken against the advice of the Governor of the Prisons,
against the advice of Prison Service headquarters and against the consensus
that was reached within Northern Ireland Office. Again this may not be a
criticism, but what was happening was at the same time you and the people
concerned within Number 10 were dealing with the Taoiseach and others about a
whole range of problems, about whether you could get the show back on the road
with the Assembly, about whether you could hold elections or not, and in the
middle of this came this little irritant which could have blown up into
something. One has the feeling that
somebody said in Number 10, "For goodness sake, don't let's have a row over
prisons now. Ignore that advice and do
it." Again, that is not a criticism,
that may have been the right thing to say but if you are doing what I am trying
to do in select committee to find out how all this came about, you cannot do
this without speaking to the people who were involved very closely in that. As the Minister told us when I asked very
directly what the involvement was of course ‑ and it is well‑known
and again no criticism ‑ it was Jonathan Powell, who has probably
invested more time and effort in this whole problem since you have been in Number
10 than anybody else. However, you have
laid down a rule that those sort of people cannot appear in front of select
committees. If we are going to have
what may be quite the right way to centralise an issue like this it does leave
an accountability gap. Would you be
prepared to look at that again? I did
not ask Jonathan Powell to come because I knew perfectly well that the answer
would be no.
Mr Blair: Certainly of course I will look into that. In relation to that particular issue I
cannot honestly recall exactly what the Number 10 input was. I can certainly find that out and write to
you about it. My recollection of it
actually was that it was a political decision with the Northern Ireland Office
as well as certainly with Number 10 but I will write to you.
Q84 Mr
Mates: It would have been extraordinary,
would it not, for a Secretary of State and a Minister to have taken a decision
contrary to all the advice they had had, and it has been made quite clear that
all the advice was to the contrary. On
the whole, Secretaries of State do not do that, unless there is a pressure from
somewhere, which may have been perfectly properly, I am not trying to say it
critically, I am trying to say there is a gap in accountability and oversight
as long as Number 10 is not allowed to come and explain itself when it has been
deeply involved in a decision.
Mr Blair: I totally understand. All I
am saying, Michael, is I am not exactly sure how that decision was taken, but I
will find that out because in Northern Ireland occasionally, for the reasons
you have just given, people will overrule the advice of officials. I do not think I personally had much to do
that and therefore I would quite surprised if Jonathan was simply acting off
his own bat on it, but I will look into that.
I just do not know is the answer.
On the point of process that you raised there, let me explain what the
difficulty and the worry is and why governments have up to now not done
this. And things can change; the very
fact I am here is an indication that things can change. The worry is that you end up with people in
Number 10 being constantly ‑‑‑ Number 10, one way or another,
is involved with practically all the decisions of government and if you are not
careful people in Number 10 would be constantly thrust before committees.
Sometimes this can be quite a difficult thing for people who are officials or
special advisers rather than politicians dealing with such situations. It may be that you can simply make exemptions
as you go but I think the worry has always been, and I will just state it - and
I said right at the very outset I want to have a look at how we can do things
differently in light of what happened in respect of Hutton - but the worry has
always been that, if you were to --- and
I know it is a tired old excuse in the sense of opening the floodgates
but there is something in the fact that you do not want Number 10 constantly to
have people thrust in front of committees where politicians should really be
standing. The problem is the Prime Minister
goes to the Liaison Committee now but does not go to all the individual
committees. I guess the danger is you
end up with the situation that becomes impossible. However, it is worth looking at.
Q85 Mr
Mates: That is a very encouraging
remark. May I just finish by saying
that no‑one is better able to take care of himself on the subject of
Northern Ireland than Jonathan Powell so you need have no fear on that account.
Mr Blair: It is not whether I have any fear, it is how he looks at the
prospect of appearing in front of a number of committees.
Q86 Mr
Ainsworth: Can I ask you, Prime Minister,
about the role of Number 10 in the whole question of sustainable
development. Is Number 10 playing its
parts in that agenda?
Mr Blair: Yes, in two ways. First of all,
in the discussions that we have about so‑called "liveability" at a local
level, but then most particularly in relation to issues to do with sustainable
development at an international level, like Kyoto.
Q87 Mr
Ainsworth: I still want to look at the process
here rather than the policies because I was very struck, and you would have
presumably seen this, by the remarks made by your Chief Scientific Adviser
shortly after Christmas in which he said that "climate change is the most
severe problem that we are facing today, more serious than the threat of
terrorism." Do you agree with that?
Mr Blair: Looking very long term, if I look at when my children are my age,
yes, I think it is the key issue that faces us. In the short term, frankly, terrorism and the issues we have been
talking about earlier are of critical urgency.
I think you can get into a rather cerebral debate about which is more
important than the other, but I certainly agree, I think that sustainable
development and the issue of climate change is of fundamental importance to the
long‑term security and stability of the world.
Q88 Mr
Ainsworth: I think many people were pleased
when your Government signed up to a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050
but were perplexed by the announcement of a dramatic increase in aviation
capacity. I am just wondering how you
square the concern that obviously is being expressed about climate change with
a policy which is developing at a rapid rate the fastest‑growing source
of climate change gas.
Mr Blair: It is difficult because potentially the two are in conflict with
each other. What we are looking at for
our G8 chairmanship next year is an initiative that helps us investigate the
full extent of the scientific and technological possibilities of reducing the
damage that aviation fuel does. It is
just not feasible to say that we are going to cut the number of journeys that
people make.
Q89 Mr
Ainsworth: But it is not a question of
cutting, is it? It is a question of
massively increasing. That is what the
Department of Transport is doing. I
just wonder the extent to which the Department of Transport is joined up to
other parts of Government that are working rather hard to achieve a better
environment.
Mr Blair: It is joined up but there is a very clear policy issue, is there
not, because, for example, on the runways there is no doubt that we need them
unless we are going significantly to reduce the number of journeys that are
predicted for the future that people are going to make, and I so not see how we
do that. Therefore, I think we have got
to come at this from another route, which is to look at the science and
technology in relation to the fuel issue whilst at the same time pursuing a
whole lot of other methods that can actually reduce climate change emissions. I think there is every possibility of doing
that, both in relation to cars and in relation to aviation fuel but it is going
to require a heavy investment for the future.
Q90 Mr
Ainsworth: Do you believe that the
structures are there in government to enable this to be done?
Mr Blair: Oh yes, there is no doubt at all about it. Let me tell you that a major part of the
discussion before the White Paper on aviation was published with Defra and with
the other relevant government departments and a major component of that
discussion for the aviation White Paper was, how is this going to be consistent
with our Kyoto obligations? There was
debate about that and we could have gone even further, frankly. I suppose a lot of people in the transport
industry would have preferred us to go even further than we did in the aviation
White Paper but we came to the view that it would be irresponsible not to
accept, given the dramatic increase in the number of people using flights, that
we were going to need extra capacity and that we were not, at least in the
short term, going to be able to obviate the need for that.
Q91 Mr
Sheerman: But, Prime Minister, on a future
occasion will you come back to this committee and talk more about this
joined-up nature of government? We are
looking at skills right across the piste
in the Select Committee on Education and Skills at the moment. It runs across at least five departments
and, even in the early stages of the inquiry, what is worrying is the lack of
joined-upness in terms of the overall approach to skills. What is the mechanism for making sure that
five departments actually work together to secure the national advantage in
terms of producing a skilled population?
Mr Blair: This is a big issue for government, as to how you make sure that
departments join themselves up and do not end up in different silos with their
own interests that do not come together in the common interest. That is absolutely right. The way of doing that is through the Cabinet
committees that will look at these issues.
I learnt some very important lessons when we came to deal with street
crime, for example, where we brought the government departments together. A lot of the criminal justice legislation
has come out of the lessons we learnt through that. In asylum and immigration now there is a committee that I
chair. We have a stocktake at least
once a month that goes through all those issues. Skills is a perfect example of where you need not just the
Department of Education but also the Department of Trade and Industry, the
Treasury and so on, and that is what we do.
Q92 Mr
Hinchliffe: I wanted in a sense to endorse
Barry's point about the issue of joined-up government and the structures
because this certainly, from the health perspective, especially on public
health, is increasingly an issue that we need to address. We are currently looking at obesity and am
sure you are well aware of the Chief Medical Officer's warnings about the quite
frightening scenario of looking at youngsters in future life. Last year, at the same time as we had got
the CMO giving his warnings, we had the DfES giving its blessing to a campaign
by Walker's Crisps where children swapped tokens on crisp packets for school
equipment. One school collected 10,400
crisp packets in exchange for 63 books.
The DCMS endorsed the Cadbury's "Get Active" campaign and the Food
Commission has calculated that in that campaign, in order to obtain a free
basketball worth around £10, some £71 would need to be spent on 170 chocolate
bars. A child would have to play basketball
for 90 hours to expend the 40,000 calories and two kilograms of fat from that
amount of chocolate. There seems to be
some inconsistency between departments.
I accept this is not an easy one, but how can you iron out that kind of
contradiction in government?
Mr Blair: It is a problem, but it is not a problem for this government. I guess all governments have faced the same
problem, which is that a lot of these issues, particularly these new issues, if
I can describe it like that, and public health is a classic example, depend on
more than one department working together. The only way you can do it is to
bring it together in a Cabinet committee and look at it. The process by which we are drawing up the
departmental plans that we are going to be publishing in the middle of the year
from the main delivery departments is to a greater degree now involving the
other departments. For example, on the
issue of drugs, again I chair a stocktake every so often of this, but the
ministers are now coming together and the health and education and law and
order ministers are sitting down together to work this out. That is of essential importance. You will still get examples of apparent conflict
but it is a very big question. I think
one of the major issues for us as a government, and what I say to the Civil
Service is that this would be true whatever government is in power, is how you
reorganise the skill set of the Civil Service and reorganise some of these
departments so that the focus goes away from the traditional Civil Service
role, which is very much to do with policy advice, protection of ministers and
so on, to delivery, project management and a whole set of different skills that
require people to work across different silos and that require them to manage the
delivery of projects in a way that a lot of the Civil Service is not used to
doing. If you look around the different
parts of the world precisely the same debate is going on in virtually every
country I know.
Q93 Mrs
Dunwoody: I will bring you back, Prime Minister,
to something you have said. You said,
"You can have any number of policy options that you like but eventually you
have to take a policy decision".
Frankly, what concerns me is who takes that final decision. Is it the elected members who constitute the
Cabinet or is it the policy makers in Number 10 who are answerable directly to
you?
Mr Blair: It is the Cabinet that will take a final decision.
Q94 Mrs
Dunwoody: I will give you an example. During the weekend somebody flies the idea
that Number 10 thinks it would be a good idea to put hit men into operating
companies in the train system who will then decide why they are not doing their
job properly and how they ought to be pulled together. A lot of us would bash heads cheerfully in
the operating companies, but who took that decision, where will it come from,
where will there be any clear indication of what the department (which you
referred to, interestingly, as a silo) of trained civil servants dealing with
transport questions will decide? Who
will override the final decision? Will
it be elected members who are answerable to the House of Commons, or will it be
policy units in Number 10 who are capable of making it very clear, as we have
already heard this morning more than once, that they are going to override the
decisions that have been taken elsewhere?
Mr Blair: First of all, I did not mean to suggest that departments are really
silos. I merely said in relation to
joined-up government that there is a danger that departments focus themselves
on their own silos without working across government.
Q95 Mrs
Dunwoody: I was listening to you, Prime Minister. It is always a mistake!
Mr Blair: Thank you. Perhaps I can go
now. I do not actually accept that in
relation to any of the policies we have just been talking about Number 10
overrode the departments. Foundation
hospitals very much originated with the Department of Health. First of all, Gwyneth, as to what appears in
the press, believe me, if I could know the provenance of every single thing
that appears in the press I would be a different and happier man. I do not.
I have never heard of the policy of putting hit men into operating
companies. I do not say that there is
not somebody burrowing away in Number 10 who might have such a thought in their
mind, but on the question of where would the final decision be taken in
relation to any such policy: in the Department of Transport. The way it works is not that these people in
the policy unit phone up the department and say, "You will do this". It does not work like that, it really does
not, and on the whole it is a far better and more co-operative relationship
than most people think.
Q96 Mrs
Dunwoody: I think we would still like to
know exactly how many people there are in the policy divisions, how they operate,
at what point do they impact on the work of the departments. I am delighted that you suggest that many
more of them can come before select committees. They will be most warmly welcome.
Mr Blair: Mmm, yes.
Q97 Mrs
Dunwoody: But I still come back to it. We have got a dozen different examples in
transport where it has been thought - and the trouble is that this is always
anecdotal - that a department has spent a long time evolving a policy; it gets
to a certain level, there is an interjection from Number 10 from the policy
unit and somehow what comes out at the other end is considerably
different. You are assuring me that it
will all be fed into the Cabinet system and it will be the Cabinet system, it
will be Cabinet ministers, it will be junior ministers who will decide that all
the way up the tiers?
Mr Blair: If you come to any major policy decision in the end the Cabinet
will take it. In relation to all the
issues that we have been talking about we have a full discussion but I do not
know on what transport issues we have suddenly come in and overridden the
Department of Transport. Frankly, part
of the job of Prime Minister will be from time to time to say, "I do not agree
with this".
Q98 Mrs
Dunwoody: Sure, from time to time.
Mr Blair: That is the job.
Q99 Mrs
Dunwoody: Yes, from time to time.
Mr Blair: What I find about being Prime Minister is that in the end the buck
does actually stop with you, so if you see a policy being developed in a
department that you think is not very sensible it is wise to say so.
Q100 Mrs Dunwoody: My problem,
of course, is that I am very old, unlike you, and I remember some previous
Labour Governments and what happened was that when things were fed in at a
junior level there could be discussion not just with elected ministers but that
would filter out into Parliament - I am talking about Parliament generally -
and therefore there would not be this problem of the evolution of policies
which appear to be evolving not from the natural political debate within
parties or within the structure of government.
We now have a situation where policies appear to be taken in a parallel
line. Are you assuring me that is not
the case and that it is elected ministers in charge of departments who will
have an input at every level and will therefore be able to discuss with their
colleagues how policies are evolved?
Mr Blair: Yes, I would be really surprised if any Secretary of State
appearing in front of me said that, contrary to what they wished, Number 10 had
come in and overridden them.
Q101 Mrs Dunwoody: Oh, I would
be surprised if they said it, Prime Minister.
That was not what I was asking.
Mr Blair: I suppose so would I, but it is not the way it works. I do not accept, incidentally - and I should
just put this on record - that in relation to the policies we have been talking
about there has been no discussion about them.
As David and I were having a talk about Labour Party conference and
foundation hospitals, these things were debated in the Labour Party. People may have disagreed with it but that
is another matter. I have long since
come to the conclusion on this that you pays your money and you takes your
choice. You are either too strong
because you are interfering with everything or you are too weak. I suspect that Number 10 Downing Street has
had the same relationship with departments pretty much since time immemorial,
which is that as Prime Minister in the end you are responsible, you will of
course have an input; you have to drive the policy agenda, but it works in a
far more co-operative way than people think, and I can assure you with the
Cabinet ministers that they are absolutely up, if they think that Number 10
Downing Street is getting a particular issue wrong, to coming in and saying,
for example, "I just think that is a non-starter and you can forget it".
Q102 Mrs Dunwoody: So if
somebody had pointed out to you, for example, that the House of Lords could not
sit unless the Lord Chancellor was on the Woolsack and some decisions taken at
the time of the reshuffle, which appeared to suggest that we were not going to
have a Lord Chancellor from that moment on, were not exactly helpful?
Mr Blair: We did not actually say that in our press release but I agree that
we gave the impression that it was just about to come in. I am taking responsibility for that; that
was my fault and not anyone else's fault, but actually it was always
anticipated, and indeed I think we said at the time, that there would be
consultation papers on both issues.
Q103 Mr Hood: This time last
week things were getting a bit tetchy.
Eight hours from the vote there were reports going about that the
Government was ten votes down, eight votes down. Fifteen minutes before the vote they were five votes down. Fifteen minutes after the vote thankfully
they were five votes up. After we had
wiped our brows and got together the next day we said, "We have to stop this;
we have to talk to each other and be more inclusive", and everybody was saying,
"Yes, that is a good idea".
Unfortunately, nobody mentioned it to the Home Secretary because the Home
Secretary goes off to India and talks about new terrorist legislation, secret
codes, changes in burden of proof and none of us knows anything about it. Please tell me he is flying a kite, Prime
Minister.
Mr Blair: I think what he is doing is simply drawing attention to the fact
that there is a constant battle to get the right protections in this country
against terrorism and you have constantly to review your legislative
protections to make sure that they are adequate. The most difficult thing in this area is that people will make
the civil liberties argument to you right up until the point something happens
and then they will ask why on earth you did not act before.
Q104 Mr Hood: I am just trying
to make the point that maybe the Home Secretary, instead of going to India to
make his statement, might have wanted to make some comments to the Members of
Parliament in here and therein lies the difficulty. It is from this sort of situation that you get your foundation
hospitals problems, you get your tuition fees problems. We certainly do not seem to be learning the
lesson over this weekend.
Mr Blair: I am not sure exactly how the remarks came about but I think
sometimes when you are interviewed by people and they are asking you things you
make statements but I do not think the foundation hospitals or tuition fees
thing arose in that way.
Q105 Mr Ainsworth: The Home
Secretary's remarks were not cleared by Number 10?
Mr Blair: I was not aware of these specific remarks, obviously, but I was
aware of the fact that we keep under constant review our legislative
protection, which we have to do. There is a particular issue I just want to
draw attention to. There is a real
worry as to whether we have adequate protections still in this country against
this form of terrorism that we have with people potentially coming over here
and committing these terrorist acts, and that is the reason we changed the
legislation before. I think we have to
keep it under constant review and therefore I do not take any exception to what
the Home Secretary said and I do not think this is as definitive as saying ---
I honestly do not know because I have not seen the exact provenance of the
remarks, but I suspect that what he was doing was simply answering questions.
Q106 Andrew Bennett: Prime
Minister, can I take you on to some questions about local decision-making and
the quality of local democracy? First
of all, why should local people even stand for council these days?
Mr Blair: It is a good question. I
hope they do because I think local government performs an important task, but I
think there are issues to do with the standing of local government and how it
is organised that are fair issues to raise.
Q107 Andrew Bennett: You have
got all the hassle of the elections, delivering the leaflets and those sorts of
things. The evidence in somewhere like
Easington, which I think partly covers your constituency, is that last year 40
out of the 52 seats were not contested.
More recently in Greater Manchester the Labour Party has been trying to
improve the quality of candidates, and on the one hand you are trying to vet
people to see that they have got the skills and on the other you are begging
people to stand. It seems to me there
is a major problem in the country about getting enough people to stand for
local councils.
Mr Blair: I agree with that. I think
there are two long term questions on local government. One is the financing of local government and
the second is its organisation. I do
not want to say anything more; otherwise I will be accused of starting a policy
process without due consultation, but I think these are pretty obvious. All of us as politicians can realise that
there is a real problem getting people of calibre to come forward to stand for
local government, and I do not disagree.
It is easy in some ways to see why.
When I introduced the idea of mayors it was heavily criticised in
certain quarters but in a sense it was an attempt to try and make sense of the
fact that if you want people of calibre to come forward locally then you are
going to need to pay them properly, you are going to need to give them some
power, you need to have some public focus upon them. I think those two questions are well worth debating. The trouble
is that I do not even myself quite know what the answer to either of them is.
Q108 Mr Key: But, Prime
Minister, if you are interested in education these days you do not become a
councillor; you become a school governor with the tremendous responsibilities
that carries with it. If you are
interested in housing you do not become a councillor; you get involved in a
stock transfer organisation or a housing association. If you are interested in any number of aspects of local
government delivery you do not become a councillor any more because the
councillors are surely just overseeing the management of the process; they are
not actually taking policy decisions.
Mr Blair: I do not disagree that it is better that school governors have more
power and so on, but I think that local education authorities still have a role
to play and I think what local councillors do very often is make a big
difference to the way, for example, that an area is policed, to the way the
local environment looks and is cleaned, and in relation to things like social
care which is of immense importance to people.
I do not think it is true to say that that they do not have a role any
more but I think there are issues to do with it. The basic question is this,
surely. I am not speaking any longer as
Prime Minister in this respect. I am
just speaking as a Member of Parliament that has experience, the same as you
do, of local government and local authorities.
It is very difficult for somebody to give up their job and devote
themselves to local government when they will not get a proper salary, when the
conditions are very difficult and when the system of local government
organisation and finance is not conducive to the best system of local
government that we can have. That is
just my view; that is not a statement of policy from me. It is just my experience of how difficult it
is for people in local government to function.
Q109 Andrew Bennett: Why cannot
local councillors then ignore some of the government targets? If it is local democracy surely local people
should choose? Up in Easington I think
there are 120 government targets that local councillors have got to
follow. Should their local electorate
not be able to say, "Look: our priorities are different from those of the
Government. We do not want to follow
those", or, "Really, our local councillors now are just administrators"?
Mr Blair: There is a case for reducing the number of central government
targets and that is precisely what we have done already in the last spending
review and we will probably do it again in this spending review. On the other hand, there are times when
government is giving specific sums of money to local government for specific
purposes and it is important that we get some results for that. I think there are two quite separate issues
in relation to targets. The question is how many and how are they properly
directed on the one hand, but on the other hand how do you make sure that if
government is going significantly to increase the amount of investment going
into public services it gets value for money and results, because that is what
the public really expect if it is putting its money in.
Q110 Mr Key: Yes, but, Prime
Minister, at the moment local government spends an inordinate amount of time
and money on comprehensive assessments and performance assessments. My own council recently has spent £100,000
because it has had to go through a CPA and yet, at the end of the day, the
electors judge their council by the outputs of the council, not by how many
management targets they have reached.
Is that not a balance that you have got wrong?
Mr Blair: It is certainly a balance that is worth looking at; I accept that,
and that is one of the things we are doing in the course of this next spending
review. On the other hand, and again
this has always been an issue, has it not, the same thing arises over the issue
of capping and you remember all the discussions under the previous
government. We came to office and said,
"Right: this is an interference with local democracy. It is for local people to decide whether
they elect someone or not on the amount of council tax they raise", but
then you get to the stage where the public out there, perfectly understandably,
say, "Hang on a minute. We are fed
up with these large rises in council tax" and, whether we like it or not,
central government tends to get a lot of the blame for it. I think there is inevitably going to be a
balance there and I do not think it is wrong, nor do I think the best local
authorities feel it an inhibition for some assessment of their performance to
be made and some inspection of the local authority to see whether you can
streamline it, make it better, and we are looking at that across the
piste. I agree there are issues there.
Q111 Mr Key: But at the moment
there is enormous frustration in local government because they do not have any
freedom of manoeuvre in this. They have to reach their spending targets. They are told what they have got to do
statutorily; they have no discretion there.
They are given a budget which means that they cannot accept the
responsibility for proper planning of services because they have got to meet
the government targets. The only way
they can reach the delivery is to raise the local council tax, but if they do
that they are capped. Even the local
police and fire authorities are now facing capping across this country.
Mr Blair: That is not simply because they are meeting government
targets. Councils will always be
wanting to increase the amount of services that they provide and the money that
they spend on them, and there is, as you say, tension between central and local
government. Some of this comes into
being with the so-called ring-fencing.
Again, let me just explain the problem.
I am sure you know, Robert, from the Government's point of view that we
want the extra money we are giving to schools to go to schools. We have therefore been trying to work out a
system in which we effectively direct the local authority, "You have got
to pass that money on to the schools".
If we do not do that we get a whole lot of blow-back, perfectly
understandably, from schools saying, "Here you are announcing that we are
getting X percentage increase and we are not actually seeing this money",
so there is inevitably going to be something of a tension between central and
local government. Whether we have got
that balance right, I agree, is something we need to look at. It is like, for example, in education
generally at the moment: what we are looking at is the number of different
bodies that will ask for the same information from a particular school or local
education authority. There is much that
we can do in that area to make the system more efficient, and we should do it,
but I bet you will always have something of a tension between central
government saying, "Here is this money going to you. We need to know we are getting something for
it", and local government saying, "It is up to us".
Q112 Andrew Bennett: But
schools may well be a national issue.
If you take housing why should the Government be making it almost
impossible for local authorities to remain housing authorities? If you take a house, for example I see 5
Olive Grove. It was built as a council
property. If the council wants to
borrow money on the future rents from that property it cannot do it because the
Government will not let it. If it
transfers it to a stock transfer company they can immediately borrow the money
and do those repairs. Is that a level
at which the Government should be insisting that its policy carries rather than
the one that local people want?
Mr Blair: In respect of the inhibition on the council raising money, that
inhibition is not new. That inhibition
has always been there.
Q113 Andrew Bennett: It has
always been there, yes.
Mr Blair: What is different is that if the stock is transferred that company
has a freedom that the local authority has never had.
Q114 Andrew Bennett: But that
is not logical, is it? The house is
there, the rent is almost certainly going to come in for the next few years, so
why should the council or the stock transfer company not be able to borrow the
money?
Mr Blair: Again, there are issues there.
All I would say is that there has always been a reason why councils have
not been able to raise money in that way, and so it is not an innovation that
we have introduced; that has always been the case, and it is for Treasury
reasons, I guess. I am trying to think
of precisely what they may be and I am sure I will get there at some point, but
I think that they always worry that what they are going to do is have an
unlimited liability arising out of the councils as a result of that. We are in discussion with the Local
Government Association as to what further freedoms can be given local
authorities, and I think there is at least an idea that those local authorities
that are rated and performing well should have greater freedoms to spend money
as they wish.
Q115 Andrew Bennett: So you
would let them borrow the money on those properties?
Mr Blair: I do not know.
Q116 Mr Mates: PSBR.
Mr Blair: I am not going to rush into that.
There have been traditionally, I am sure, very sound Treasury reasons
why they have not.
Q117 Mr Key: Prime Minister,
whether it is Sedgefield or Salisbury people will be making up their mind how
to vote in local elections on the basis of the level of council tax. A recent ICM poll said that 39% of those who
had responded blame the Government for large increases in tax while only 24%
blame their council, which does not surprise me at all and I bet it does not
surprise you.
Mr Blair: No.
Q118 Mr Key: The real problem
here surely is that, if local democracy is to be restored, if people are going
to want to vote again in local council elections, local councils need to get
back their financial independence?
Mr Blair: As I say, Robert, I remember the same argument and I was probably
saying what you are saying to me now when you were in government and I was in
opposition. The fact is that, for the
very reason you have just given with the poll, it is very difficult for central
government to say, "Set whatever council tax you like. Local people will decide", because
actually what the local authority does, perfectly understandably - and,
incidentally, whatever its political complexion - is that it goes up and says,
"The reason I have had to raise the council tax is central
government", and it said it under you and it says it under us.
Q119 Mr Key: But is not part of
the problem here that we have not got the balance right between statutory
duties of local authorities and permitted powers? This is something which has really been raging for 20 years, I
suppose. If the local authorities, as
now, really are hidebound by statutory duties, and they have very little
discretion about what they would really like to do for their constituents -
they might like to spend much less than the Government thinks they ought to or
they might wish to spend much more - should we not be addressing that real
problem?
Mr Blair: I think that is a problem.
I think it is worth addressing and particularly in the context too of
how local government is financed. The
only thing, as you will again know, is that every government that I can
remember has come to a view that local government is not properly organised or
financed but it has found it damn difficult to come to the right solution as to
how it should be organised and financed.
However, there is a very worrying trend towards lower and lower
participation of the electorate in local government elections and also for
people coming forward and standing as local government candidates, and so this
is an issue that we should look at.
What the answer to it is I cannot give you a definitive answer on myself
even yet. What I do know though is that
if we do not change that then it will be very bad for local democracy and, what
is more, many of the key decisions that people complain about are actually still
local government decisions. All of us
know in our surgeries that a good proportion of the people that come and see us
are people who have got a local government problem rather than a central
government problem.
Q120 Andrew Bennett: What is going to happen in this balance of
funding review? Are we going to have a
proper, public debate in the country before the Government comes up with a
decision on it?
Mr Blair: I am sure we can have the
proper public debate. Government alone
does not run that debate; everyone can have it.
Q121 Andrew Bennett: What is going to happen about finding local
authorities some form of buoyant finance?
Mr Blair: We will try and come up with
the right solution.
Q122 Andrew Bennett: The Chancellor has got all the cards, has he
not? Every time he gets extra income
from Income Tax, from VAT, so each year the money that he can allocate goes up
automatically. Local councils, in
effect, get less each year because the Council Tax would bring in the same
amount of money and inflation makes it worth less.
Mr Blair: The reason why it is
important to look at the funding issue is that I think we all know after the
Poll Tax in came the Council Tax and the trouble with the Council Tax is that
the gearing is so difficult, so that even small amounts of money the local
authority want to raise ends up with a very large Council Tax increase. That is the problem. I do say again, the solution will not simply
be process-driven; the solution will be, I am afraid - again, you are going to
have to make your choice - you will either retain the Council Tax or you will
move back to some form of rates or you will go towards a local Income Tax
(which I personally do not favour) and you will find that all these things are
immensely difficult and you will find a massive campaign against whatever
proposal you come out with.
Mr Key: I know it is the fashion at
the moment to blame Michael Howard for introducing the Poll Tax (it was not,
actually, it was Michael Heseltine, and Michael Portillo and I took through the
legislation), but we introduced the Council Tax for precisely the reason that
we realised it did not matter what method of taxation you chose - whether it
was the old rates or the Poll Tax or the Council Tax or a local Income Tax -
what mattered was where the burden of tax fell and the proportion of tax paid
by the central taxpayer and the local taxpayer. That, surely, is the issue now.
So where do you instinctively feel this burden should fall? That was, in the end, what ended the Poll
Tax; it was the fact that it was supposed to come in much cheaper than it
actually did. Now we have got the same
problem with the Council Tax, that it is the burden of tax.
Mrs Dunwoody: It was unfair, of course.
Q123 Mr Key: The Treasury decides "We're going to load
more money on the local collection rather than the national collection". What is your instinct on this?
Mr Blair: I do not think I should give
free rein to my instincts, to be absolutely honest, in front of the Committee,
but I do not think that was quite the problem, actually. The problem was people felt the rating
system was unfair. The Poll Tax was
introduced, really, in order to put the burden back locally. Was it not?
Then what actually happened was people thought that system was
unfair. I thought Michael Heseltine
somewhat rescued the Conservative Party when the Poll Tax ----
Q124 Mr Key: That is what I meant. Yes, absolutely.
Mr Blair: Then it came to the Council
Tax as the alternative, but the problem with that, actually, was that, as I
recall, what central government had to do was put in a massive amount from
central government in order to sweeten the pill. The result of that was we actually ended up with a system in
which, far from putting all the burden locally, in a way central government
became the main funder and then what happened was the Council Tax - and this
was the gearing point, as I understand it - and what happens then is the local
authority has such a narrow band within which it can raise money that if it
wants to raise a reasonably small sum of money it has a large Council Tax rise
as a result. That is the
difficulty. If you are going to change
that system it will have to deal with the issues that arise out of that.
Q125 Andrew Bennett: There was a sleight of hand, was there not,
because the VAT went up from 15 to 17.5% so that the Government could pass that
money on to the local authorities, and in most years since then, actually, the
full 2.5% has not been passed on to local authorities. If central government is going to dictate on
things like education, as to what has to be done, why not simply hand the money
over directly to schools and cut out the local authority as the middleman?
Mr Blair: These are some of the issues
that the Government can look at, certainly as to how you make sure you get that
money direct through to schools. Of
course, that has implications also for the way that the overall system
works. We have not come to a view on
that yet, and it is important we look at all the elements. The one thing I am very, very keen to do,
however, for our secondary schools is to build on the success of the specialist
schools and the city academy model and make sure that the traditional
comprehensive becomes a far more specialised and independent form of secondary
state school.
Q126 Mr Key: In our constituencies we all know that, of course,
people consider matters of high politics, like the Hutton Report and so on, but
what is most likely to make them vote in a local election is a really local
issue; it might be a planning issue, it might be a road - it is those sorts of
issues. Yet we do not pay sufficient
attention to parish councils. For
example, in the Government's generally very good approach to local e-democracy,
there is no money available for parish councils to set up websites and networks
unless they actually get a grant from the next tier up. I think that is a very big problem that
should be addressed. Could I just turn
to the wider problem of the removal of policy-making powers from local authorities
to regional bodies? Increasingly, the
Regional Development Agencies and the Regional Assemblies - whether or not they
are going to be elected - are taking polices on transport, on a whole range of
things in planning, on sport and tourism, and that is going away from the local
authorities to the Regional Assemblies.
That, actually, makes people less inclined to vote in their local
council elections, because they know it will not make any difference
anyway. Do you not think we have got
that balance wrong too? We need to
ensure that there is more policy-making, otherwise we might as well do away
with much of local authority; it simply becomes a delivery mechanism; it cannot
decide on the policies appropriate for their local council areas.
Mr Blair: I think they still retain a
significant policy-making capability, but I the reason why I think more of
things like tourism or transport have been focused at a regional level is
because of the concern that was expressed to us, not least by individual local
authorities, that they needed a more collective effort at a regional level; that
some of these issues to do with transport, for example, did not make sense
unless looked at regionally rather than simply within the local authority area.
Q127 Andrew Bennett: Is it not crucial that we restore local
democracy to being an effective mechanism, otherwise it will not be something
on which national democracy can be built?
Mr Blair: I agree totally with that,
Andrew. I simply say the question is
how, and how in terms of organisation, and how in terms of funding?
Q128 Jean Corston: Prime Minister, to what degree do you think
that imposing national targets assists in the delivery of local services?
Mr Blair: I think provided they are
well-focused they do assist. Indeed, I
do not think the public would find it acceptable, when we are putting a very
large additional sum of money into public services, if we did not say we expect
results back.
Q129 Jean Corston: If you have national targets, can they not,
in some ways, de-motivate the staff and undermine the confidence of the public
in public service? For example, you can
have cancer targets, and you might have an area where there is a particular
cancer hot-spot, and whatever those people do locally they are not going to hit
your national target. What does that do
to people in that area who work in the health service and those people who use
the health service?
Mr Blair: Where we notice that there
is a particular difficulty in a particular area we work with them in order to
improve it. The money going into cancer
is a very good example. We do have
specific targets on how quickly people are seen which I think are important,
otherwise you are putting this money in and you are not seeing how it is
spent. This is a very difficult
thing. On waiting times and waiting
lists there have been government targets, and I totally understand that some
clinicians and people in the hospital system resent it but it has helped reduce
significantly waiting times and waiting times for patients. You have got to be careful, of course, and
you will always find circumstances where the target has a perverse impact, but
I think if you look at it overall it has been beneficial. I cannot imagine a situation where a
government was prepared to put in the sums of money we are putting, for
example, into the health service - a very substantial increase - without saying
"We actually want the time that the public are waiting to come down". The fact that you have now got an average
waiting time of well within three months is very important, I think, for
people.
Q130 Jean Corston: It is undoubtedly true that vast sums of
money are going into the health service and we are seeing results, but you
referred just now to the fact that there can be a perverse effect in some
areas. To what degree has any attention
been given as to what action can be taken, in those situations, where the
effect is perverse and there is not actually any local blame to be apportioned?
Mr Blair: As part of the Comprehensive
Spending Review we look specifically at the number of targets we have and
whether they are well-focused or do not have a perverse effect. It is important that we do that. However, there will be other situations
where, in general, the target is working well but in particular hospitals, for
example, or particular school areas it may have a perverse effect and we need
to modify that somewhat. Let me give
you an example: in primary schools we have two targets of importance. One is infants being taught in classes under
30 and the other is to reach literacy and numeracy attainment levels. In respect of literacy and numeracy, it is
true we have not quite met the target but we have very nearly met it, and there
has been a dramatic increase in the number of 11-year-olds passing their test
results. I think that target has had a
beneficial impact in giving people a goal to aim for in the education system,
both locally and nationally. In respect
of class sizes, again, it is important to reduce infant class sizes, but one
thing we have found, which is why we have given some flexibility to the system
now, is that sometimes schools would say "Look, actually, I prefer to have a
classroom assistant than to have another teacher in the class" and that might
mean that, strictly, the class size is somewhat over 30 but actually if we have
got a classroom assistant in there as well it matters less. So you need to introduce a bit of
flexibility into the system. However, I
think it would be very wrong if we got the idea that targets as a whole are a
bad idea; I think targets are absolutely right. I cannot think of any business that would put very large sums of
investment in without saying to their line management "I want results from
you", but I do think as time progresses there are lessons that you can learn
about how well the targets are focused, and dealing with any perverse
incentives there may be a result.
Q131 Mr Pike: One quick question, two points. One: you have identified the flaws with the
Council Tax position. We have now been
in government nearly seven years. The
problem with it is that it is becoming increasingly unacceptable to the people
who are paying the tax, so when do you envisage we are changing it? The second quick point is that for many
councils special programmes for both revenue and capital are more important
than their main core funding, and that is a good thing to deal with many local
problems, but on the revenue side, for example, if I can give one example of
where neighbourhood wardens become very acceptable: when the programme finishes
and they cannot be absorbed into the main core programme, do you not think
there is a very, very real problem for local authorities?
Mr Blair: On the first point, that is
what the review will decide. I cannot
tell you exactly when the results of that review will be published, but
obviously we will do it as soon as we can.
I think there are certainly a core set of questions about the funding of
local authorities that need to be answered.
In respect of your second point, I agree with that, Peter. That is one of the things that, again, we
will look it in respect of the Comprehensive Spending Review, and it arises
particularly in relation to neighbourhood warden and community support officers
to those things that have actually worked extremely well on the local community
but on, say, the neighbourhood renewal funding and how you make sure that that
is maintained for the longer term and bound into the normal funding stream, if
you like. There are some difficult
questions that arise in relation to that, but we are on to the point.
Q132 Mr Leigh: Let me get back to the centre now, Prime
Minister. The fact is you have
committed £61 billion in extra government spending over the next three
years. Can we have any confidence this
will not be dribbled away in the kind of waste and incompetence we have seen in
Whitehall in previous years?
Mr Blair: I do not know why I feel
that you do not approach this with an entirely open mind. I simply point out to you that so far what
this investment has bought us are National Health Service waiting time lists
that are better in every respect than those we inherited, and cancer and
cardiac services that are probably the fastest-improving in Europe at the
moment - with cardiac deaths down by over 20% in the last few years. In teaching (I can certainly speak for my
own constituency and not others) there is barely a school I go into where you
cannot see the fruits of that investment in either new buildings or computers
or more teachers and so on.
Q133 Chairman: Prime Minister, the question is not about the
money that is getting there, it is the money that should be getting there and
is not. That is the question.
Mr Blair: And I am saying it is
getting there.
Q134 Mr Leigh: Prime Minister, as Chairman of PAC I am not
concerned with overall tax and spend policies - you make the policies. What I am concerned with is value to the
taxpayer. We in the PAC - Alan is on
this Committee - have a litany of waste: £400 million over-spend on the Libra
Project; £314 million under waste on nuclear facilities at Devonport; £500
million wasted on Nimrod; £3 billion on foot-and-mouth; £2 billion on benefit
fraud and £97 million on Individual Learning Accounts. You are in Whitehall, what processes are you
putting in place to get a grip on project management in Whitehall?
Mr Blair: First of all, let us be
quite clear, Edward, when we talk about the £61 billion (which is the question
you asked me) that is investment in public services, and what I was doing was
detailing the improvements in public services as a result of investment. I agree, all governments have issues to do
with waste and fraud and there will be an issue which comes up, like
foot-and-mouth disease, on which we have to spend a large sum of money; you had
to do it with BSE, we had to do it with foot-and-mouth, it is what happens in
government. Some of the issues to do
with benefit fraud, the same statistics could be given under the previous
government except rather more so ----
Q135 Mr Leigh: I am not making a party political point, I am
not interested in party politics. Fair
enough, Whitehall may have been as wasteful and incompetent under the last
Conservative Government as this one.
You talked earlier about project management, you put Peter Gershon in
the Office of Government Commerce, given this massive increase in public
spending - we have already seen £520 million having to be paid to agency nurses
in the NHS because they cannot recruit people quickly enough - we want you to
tell us about the processes in Whitehall to ensure that this massive increase
in public spending gets to our constituents, and is not wasted in backroom
functions in Whitehall. What are you
doing about it?
Mr Blair: I am trying to say there are
different issues that are raised by the points that you made. For example, you have just said this about
agency nurses. That is not an issue to
do with the efficiency of Whitehall; we are doing our very best to recruit
people in, but there is going to be a situation, because of the additional
investment, where it is necessary to have nurses in particular areas. I agree it would be better to have nurses
being trained and used in this country, that is why we are increasing the
number of nurse training places; that is how we are trying to deal with
that. I think that is a different
issue, if I may say so, from, for example, information technology projects
which have been a problem under the previous government and this
government. What are we doing about
it? We have got the Gershon review, as
you rightly say, but the other thing that we are doing is deliberately taking
people in from outside, from the private sector, to manage these projects and
manage them in a far better way across Whitehall. I should just say to you, however, that before we leap to the
notion that this is all to do with public sector inefficiency, if you compare
public sector and private sector information technology projects you find
problems in the private sector information technology ----
Q136 Mr Leigh: On IT, Prime Minister, you have got 100 IT
projects going through Whitehall. There
is £1 billion invested in these, virtually all these projects have enormous
problems. You have increased the number
of your civil servants to 512,000 over the last four years, which is an
increase of 11.5%. Can you convince
this Committee that those people are not being wasted in backroom functions but
are being delivered to the front line?
Mr Blair: First of all, let me correct
you on the figures actually. It is true
that in the two years before we came to power there was a drop in the number of
civil servants. There will be a drop,
actually, in the next couple of years, but in fact there are rather fewer civil
servants employed in the centre than there were, for example, in 1995.
Q137 Mr Leigh: They are just being shuffled across into
agencies. I am sorry, there is the same
number of civil servants. What you have
got to ensure is that these functions of central government are delivered in
servicing the public and not dribbled away in waste. I will ask you this question then: there has been a lot of talk
about punishing departments that fail to deliver. Would you give me examples of how you punished, or your
Chancellor has punished, departments that have failed to deliver in terms of
cutting their funding?
Mr Blair: For example, if we believe
that funding is not being used properly by a department, in respect of
anything, frankly, we can take action.
I was about to say to you that the reason why we increased the number of
civil servants in the Home Office was to deal with the asylum issue, and to
make sure that we reduced asylum numbers, which we have now done by over a
half. Sometimes these civil servants
come in for perfectly good reasons; they are not always there for reasons of
waste and inefficiency. However, I agree
the very reason we set up the Gershon review, which is the first time a government
has really done this, is precisely to see what greater savings we can
make. On information technology I would
say that the processes in government are considerably improved from what they
were a few years ago. I just tell you this also, and I think any private sector
leader would say the same, there are always problems with these big information
technology projects, and it is no different in government actually from the
private sector in relation to that, although we should always look at ways of improving
it and we are.
Q138 Mr Jack: Prime Minister, we are always interested to
know about how government is doing - following on Edward Leigh's line of
questioning. You said earlier in your
evidence to us "There has never been a government that has been more open than
we are on, in this case, the Hutton Inquiry".
However, when I asked you if you would place in the Library of the House
of Commons a copy of the audit report that went to your delivery cabinet on the
16 January, prepared by Michael Barber's unit, you turned round and
prayed-in-aid freedom of information and access to government information as
reasons why I, Members of Parliament and the public should not have this candid
report about how well your government was delivering its services. If it is so good, why did you not publish
it? Or was it so bad you could not put
it in the public domain?
Mr Blair: Or was it policy advice, in
which case you do not, and neither did the previous government? I do not think you are going to get the
situation where every single document in government has been published. I do say this: we are far more open than the
previous government in relation to all these things. I do not say that as a criticism of them, I say it merely to say
that we are the first government that has said "We will not publish policy
advice" - no government has ever said that.
Q139 Mr Jack: Prime Minister, there is a difference between
policy advice and the facts of how well you are doing against the myriad of
targets, Public Service Agreements and any other measures that you put
forward. Precedent was set, in fact, in
terms of the publication of information to ministers in the briefing that
ministers got against the 1996 Budget, where the facts that underpinned the
policies were put in the public domain.
If you bothered to have a press conference two days before this delivery
cabinet occurred and your spokesman was happy to tell the world this was
occurring, why were you not at least prepared to put into the public domain the
facts as to how you were doing and separate it from the advice about what you
needed to do to make it better?
Mr Blair: We do put the facts of what
we are doing.
Q140 Mr Jack: Why did you not on this occasion? You could have published the facts rather
than saying that for mechanisms of government and freedom of information you
could not have put that information into the public domain. Why not?
Mr Blair: Because the document you are
referring to was also policy advice to us, and we do not publish that. On the facts, all the facts that are in the
delivery unit we do put out regularly.
I am perfectly happy for the facts to be out because I think they are,
on the whole, rather good for us.
Q141 Mr Jack: Would you make a commitment now to separate
out the facts from the advice and publish the data on the departments on the
web? We are interested to know how well
you think your departments are doing against the targets which you and your
government have signed up. If you will
not have a proper disclosure about it, how can we make that judgment?
Mr Blair: We do disclose things
constantly. There is the publication of
information about, for example, health service waiting times or education
results or crime. For goodness sake,
you get things rolling out of government day in, day out, saying how we are
doing.
Q142 Mr Jack: Your spokesman, when he explained all this,
said the Prime Minister was taking the opportunity for a stock-take, with some
of the delivery departments, to look ahead to the challenges facing them and
discuss how they might be addressed.
That last point I freely admit is ministerial advice, but for the nation
to have a stock-take would be rather better than that rather anodyne report you
used to produce which was the annual report on government performance.
Mr Blair: We do not have that either.
Q143 Mr Jack: Let us have an openness on what is happening.
Mr Blair: The Government does publish
an immense amount of information. You
cannot really expect me to publish documents that are documents for Cabinet
stock-takes or any of the rest of it.
The Government has got to conduct a certain amount of its business in a
private way, but we disclose, really, far more information than people have
disclosed before.
Q144 Mr Jack: Let me ask you one final question: you are
very happy to have a model of the economy so people can put their numbers in
and make the same use of an economic model as the Treasury do. Why do you not publish information about how
you determine the tax rates for this country so that at least we might all have
a good example to compare expenditure with tax revenues? So far the Chancellor refuses to put into
the public domain the model that he uses to determine tax flows whereas he is
happy to put in the public domain the model that he works on for the economy as
a whole. Why the difference?
Mr Blair: I am sure there are very
good reasons for it.
Q145 Mr Jack: Could you tell us why?
Mr Blair: I am afraid I am going to
have to write to you on it, because I am sure those are his reasons. I do not think that information has ever
been published. Has it?
Q146 Sir George Young: Prime Minister, going back to Edward's
initial question about the £61 billion, does it depend which end of the
telescope you are looking at? If you
ask a health minister about resources for your health trust, he will say "You
have got a 9% cash increase in your trust for this year. What is the problem?" You then go to your director of finance and
he says "Yes, we have got a 9% cash increase, but 6% disappears like that -
National Insurance surcharge, nurses' pay, shorter working hours for doctors,
pharmaceutical price increases - which leaves 3%, of which half goes to paying
off a historic deficit, and of the remainder a lot of it is ring-fenced to a
government target, leaving virtually no growth for NHS services as a
whole." Should ministers not be
slightly more cautious about boasting about cash increases when, by the time
they have filtered through to the ground, a lot of the money has been
top-sliced?
Mr Blair: Except I think you have got
to be careful in that, George, because if you are talking, for example, about
additional pay for nurses or shorter hours for doctors, that is money, in my
view, well-spent.
Q147 Sir George Young: But it does not improve the output of the
NHS.
Mr Blair: I think better-paid nurses
and more nurses do actually improve the output. For example, we are now spending I think it is in the region of
£1.2 billion a year on the statin drugs.
You could say that is money that you cannot use for other things, but on
the other hand it is improving cardiac care for people in the country, meaning
that we are reducing the number of people dying. The point that you are making is actually really this point
(which I am afraid is, again, one of the lessons that you learn in government):
there is never enough money. All the
things we are asking money to be spent on for targets is also perfectly good
stuff; like saying that people should be seen rapidly in Accident &
Emergency departments; it is like saying that people should not wait too long for
their operations. I agree, on top of
that there are other things that hospitals want to do. I do not think that money is wasted.
Q148 Mr McFall: Prime Minister, with five minutes remaining I
think I can safely assume that you and I will have the last word. Tell me, why has there been the largest
increase in projected government borrowing in the last six months than in any
six month period in the last five years, including after September 11th?
Mr Blair: I think there has been a
slower growth rate in the British economy, as with other economies right round
the world, although we have weathered the downturn better than most
others. That has meant there has been a
reduced amount of revenue and reduced profitability in companies, but I think
the forward projection is pretty good.
I would simply point out that if we look at it in real terms, our
deficit is easily manageable and actually better than most other points in
downturns in the past.
Q149 Mr McFall: There has been much talk of black holes - for
example, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research is talking
about £16 billion and the IFS is talking about £13 billion; there has also been
talk of the Chancellor's golden rule getting near breaking point. Is this the time to be talking about tax rises
or spending cuts?
Mr Blair: No, because I think that the
golden rule will be met. All I say is
that I cannot remember a time - and I do not say this simply in deference to
Gordon or because it is our government, as it were - when the Treasury forecasts
have turned out on growth as well as those Treasury forecasts have in the past
few years. I remember there being many
times in the past, and this is no disrespect to anybody who was in office then,
often proving disastrously wrong, but actually they have got it pretty much
right. It is true that the borrowing
figures have been adjusted because of the downturn, but actually I think the
golden rule will be met and that is the prediction the Treasury are making and I
think it is also showed by a significant number, at least, of the commentators.
Q150 Mr McFall: Prime Minister, I was interested in your
Guardian speech last week on public services.
Could I ask you the general question: are higher user fees going to have
to make a major contribution to increasing funding for public services from now
on?
Mr Blair: No, in the sense that those
that are funded by general taxation, the schools and the National Health
Service, will continue to be so.
However, on the other hand, our tuition fee policy is an example. Congestion charging is another example. I think there is an issue for the long term
about how - not for those, as I say, core public services that have
traditionally been funded under general taxation but for other issues, like
skills - we look at issues to do with co-payment.
Q151 Mr McFall: What do you see as the priorities for the
forthcoming spending review?
Mr Blair: I think the priorities are
going to be about how we make the money that we are putting into the health
service and the schools give us greater consumer power and choice - parent,
pupil and patient power, as it were - within those services. The actual priorities will be very much
around the traditional areas, which will be health, education, law and order
and the local environment deliverability.
Q152 Mr McFall: On the productivity issue, how worried are
you by figures indicating that the cost of inflation in the public sector has
risen rapidly since 2001 and now stands at an annual rate of around 7.5% - well
ahead of the private sector?
Mr Blair: We do have concerns about
that. It is important we disaggregate
that often. I think it is a general
point, too, that it is important we make sure that the additional spending does
not all go into pay.
Q153 Mr McFall: Prime Minister, lastly, the Pre-Budget Report. The Treasury Committee came out with its
report and it has been asking for a debate in the House on the Pre-Budget
Report because of its significance.
Could you go back and chat to the Chancellor and with your tête-à-tête
come back to me and say that you will have this report in the House from now
on?
Mr Blair: I will certainly come back
and give you an answer!
Chairman: That is perfectly
timing. It is now 11.30. May I thank you, Prime Minister, for your
commitment on the review, although I have somewhat depressed expectations after
your reply to Michael Jack. Hutton will
now, of course, be removed to the Chamber, but you have understood the concern
on all sides about the sudden manifestation of policy with no known
origin. Can I tell you we look forward
to seeing you at the next session in July and remind Dennis Turner that now he
has created the precedent everyone will expect a cup of tea!
