Murnaghan 30.06.13: Interview with Francis Maude, Cabinet Office Minister
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s the Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude. A very good morning to you Mr Maude and let’s get straight in on those efficiencies. Now you’ve been looking for them for 3 years now, you found more, you were praised by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury for your relentless focus, is there any more to come or is that it now?
FRANCIS MAUDE: Yes, there’s more to come. I mean frankly even if Government was the most efficient organisation in the world there would be more to come. The best organisations find efficiency savings every single year because that’s just what you do. The best companies do this every year and so there is definitely more to come and we are nowhere near the most efficient organisation in the world. I mean last year alone, the year to March last year, we took out over £10 billion of efficiency savings and this is from the unglamorous part of running an organisation is getting out of properties we don’t need to be in. It’s by reducing our head count, it’s by reneogiating contracts with our biggest suppliers, it’s by moving services online so they are being done in a way that is convenient for the citizen for the user of the service as well as being much much cheaper for the tax payer so what we’ve done so far is identify over £5 billion of similar savings for 2015/16 but there’s more to come and that’s why we announced as part of the spending review that we’re going to be doing this on a continuing basis and yes there’s definitely more to come.
DM: I mean some of it sounds like you have missed a trick over the last 3 years. Some of it seemed to be the so called low hanging fruit didn’t it. I‘m thinking about pay progression, automatic increase in grading and therefore pay for some civil servants just because they got a year older. Surely you could have spotted that in 2010?
FM: Well we’ve been looking at these things and they are not without their controversy. This has been very entrenched across the public sector and of course in the civil service progression pay only applies to a minority of civil servants which is of course very unfair because at a time of a pay freeze you have had some civil servants who have seen absolutely no increase at all but others who, because they benefit from progression pay, have seen their pay increase year on year and that’s really unfair so in the name of fairness and equity between civil servants we need to get rid of that but also we need to be in a world, this is a very competitive world that we’re in, Britain needs to be able to win in that global race and we need to be rewarding people for what they do not just for serving the time.
DM: A lot of the public sector unions don’t see it that way. Have you brought them along with you on this and of course the extension of the pay freeze, are you prepared for more industrial trouble?
FM: Well we don’t expect them to greet everything we are doing with unalloyed enthusiasm, we are realistic but I think the best of the union leaders understand that we are in this very difficult position, we inherited this massive deficit and we want to be in a position where the people who work hard and get on can get the rewards for that and that means that for those civil servants, public servants who work incredibly hard, do amazing things well above and beyond the call of duty, that they are able to be recognised and frankly performance management hasn’t been as good as it should be and civil servants themselves will say this, they want to see under performance rigourously addressed and exceptional performance properly recognised and it hasn’t always been so.
DM: Maybe you should apply that to MPs. I want to ask a serious question on that because to really show you are all in in together, what about this proposed MP’s pay rise. You are going to have to forego that aren’t you?
FM: Well that doesn’t come within the Government’s ambit at all.
DM: I’m just talking about symbolically.
FM: That’s run by the Parliamentary Standards Authority. What we do have in our control is the pay of ministers and the first thing the Coalition Government did was to agree that we should all take a 5% pay cut from what our predecessors were getting and when there has been a modest increase in 1% increase in MPs pay, we have actually taken that off ministers’ pay so ministers’ pay is absolutely frozen for the whole of the Parliament. That is within our control and that’s what we’re doing. MPs’ pay is a matter actually not even for Parliament these days, it’s a matter for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority that was set up in the wake of the expenses scandal.
DM: But intellectually where do you stand on the argument Nadine Dorries notably has said that she is not going to take expenses any more, there should be just a flat fee, presumably larger for MPs and then the public would understand that expenses are not there for their benefit as many in the public believe now?
FM: Well this is an argument that’s been going on as long as there have been MPs and you can argue it every single way. I’m just going to say it’s not in my control, it’s in the control of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, it isn’t even in the control of MPs themselves and what we do control, which is ministers’ pay, we are controlling rigorously and we are controlling and we are cutting back on the cost of running the Government and that’s what people are entitled to expect a serious purposeful Government to do that inherited a real crisis and we are going to carry on doing that and we are going to do it relentlessly.
DM: You talked about procurement earlier Mr Maude, would you like to get in on other departments, especially the big procureless, if I can say the word, Philip Hammond at the MOD said he would welcome your lazer like vision in there. What about the NHS?
FM: The NHS of course under our approach we take the view that it’s localist, we should given indpendence to the NHS providers. There is no doubt there is much more to do to make procurement in the NHS much better and much more efficient and I am working with Jeremy Hunt to see how we can take that forward but the arrangement we have reached with the Ministry of Defence, which is the biggest procurer in central Government, is of some historic importance and I would like to pay huge tribute to both Philip Hammond and his senior team, his permanent secretary who has done a fantastic job on this and also to Sir Jeremy Heywood who is the Cabinet Secretary who was charged by the Prime Minister to pull together a lot of this who has done terrific groundbreaking innovative work here and as a result we are going to be able to drive some real savings, hard savings out of the MOD’s budget which will help to protect the front line, the Armed Services, who we owe such a huge amount to.
DM: Can I just ask you the intellectual question, I mean flowing out from that because the argument goes and it goes for so many areas that have been cut by this Coalition Government that you can get more for less that it’s almost a virtue yet when it comes to the NHS you are telling us you can only get more for more.
FM: No we’re not saying that, we’re saying that we need to be getting more, making the money go much further because the demands on the NHS are increasing all the time, there are medical advances all the time, there are treatments which are available, people living longer which is obviously a very good thing. It means the costs of medical treatment are rising all the time and while the budget is increasing, it’s only increasing by a very small amount and the demands on the NHS are rising much faster so we absolutely do need to continue to drive efficiency out of the NHS. Procurement is one such way but we should also be looking at the kind of back office costs of NHS providers to ensure we are actually getting, the money is being used where it’s needed which is actually in the medical treatment, the care of patients.
DM: Last question to Mr Maude on Europe. We’ve got the private members EU Referendum, James Wharton’s Bill coming up very soon which will effectively enshrine in law if it’s passed the need for a Referendum after the next General Election, now Labour seem to be talking about this and some saying well perhaps have one before the General Election or six months after. Do you support the Wharton approach?
FM: Yes I do. I think that’s absolutely the right approach. We are the only party that’s committed to having an in out Referendum of the major parties and frankly Labour’s public position is very clear. They say they are against giving the people of Britain a choice. We think that’s wrong and all we can rely on with Labour is what they say publicly and they have been really clear about it. They have been very contemptuous of this approach that we’ve taken saying we want there to be a different relationship that Britain has with the European Union, we want to renegotiate it, make it less intrusive, have a better relationship that’s sustainable and then ask the British people if they are willing to go along with that. That’s the right approach, that’s trusting people. Labour’s approach has been really contemptuous of that and for them to try and, by whispering here and whispering there, try and get the best of both worlds, if that’s what they say, say it, but actually we are going to rely and the public will rely on what they have said publicly which is to treat our proposal with contempt and the British people will look at that and say there’s one party that we can trust to give us a choice on whether we stay in the European Union and that’s the Conservative Party.
DM: Okay and I bet you can see this one coming if there were a Referendum now, which way would you vote?
FM: Well there isn’t a Referendum now. I want the arrangements to change. I want our relationship to change. There is absolutely no doubt that the European Union has become far too intrusive, has become.. this process of this ratchet of ever more integration absolutely has to stop. Ideally we want a change in the relationship which will have a looser arrangement for all members but the one thing that is absolutely certain is we have to have a looser relationship for Britain.
DM: Okay Mr Maude, thank you very much indeed. Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude there.
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