Abbreviated and uncorrected version of recent Public Administration Select Committee questioning of Coalition Guru Oliver Letwin.
Q260 <Paul Flynn:> Can I welcome you as one of the few coalition Ministers who has demonstrated in the past that you have a working brain? I hope that this does not become a major impediment to you in your job now. We have been told by one witness that one of the problems with strategy is the different timescales that Departments have. DFID works in Afghanistan on a 10-year horizon, the Ministry of Defence on a six-month one and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on a shorter period. One could add that the Government’s timescale is tomorrow’s Daily Mail headline. Do you accept this or are you planning your strategies beyond the life of this Parliament and possibly the next Parliament?
Mr Letwin: Let me take the last part of your question first, because it is quite a deep question and I want to go through it in reverse. The first point is, yes, we are doing things that we think will have their main effects in five, 10, 15 or 20 years from now. For example, our energy policy is not one that is designed to transform the scene tomorrow or next year, but over the course of decades. Similarly, our deficit reduction plans are going to lead, we hope, to Britain being in a better condition fiscally—I know they are controversial, but that is our hope—some years from now, not tomorrow or next week. There are many other examples: for example, our school reforms are very consciously an attempt to change schooling over decades, not over weeks or months. Of course, one might agree or disagree with them, but that is the timescale. So, my answer to your last question is, yes, we have adopted lots of policies where we are very conscious that they will have their effects only over quite a long period.
Q261 <Paul Flynn:> Let me just take one example from your reply. The nuclear policy changed in 2007 under the last Government. Next week we have the anniversary of Fukushima. A report has been done, which excluded any reconsideration of the cost of nuclear power. New nuclear is proving hugely costly, and no nuclear power station has ever been built on cost. There are huge sums to pay for clearing up the mess; it might need burying in Scotland. Is it sensible to proceed with that programme, without a reassessment of the cost post-Fukushima?
Mr Letwin: We think it is sensible to proceed in the way we are proceeding. If you will forgive me, let me go through the entire chain to make a point in relation to the Chairman’s earlier questions. Having adopted the principle of “a strong, sustainable and growing economy”, we were faced with the necessity to achieve simultaneously three important goals in energy policy: the lowest cost that we could achieve for the consumer and business; the greatest security of supply that we could achieve; and the lowest carbon emissions that we could achieve. Our assessment remains that it is difficult to achieve sufficient quantities of each of those three goals, which are often in contention with one another, without having a significant component of nuclear power. Therefore, we think it is sensible to proceed with negotiations with the providers of nuclear power.
As you engage in those negotiations, one of the things that will happen is that the price will disclose itself. That is what the negotiations will eventuate in, among other things: a price and a set of liabilities. At that stage, we will have to judge whether the price that we are being asked to bear as a nation, and the liabilities, if any, that the nation is being asked to take on, are ones that are worthwhile in the light of what nuclear power can deliver for security, for reduction of carbon and for the long term of our energy sector. That is a judgment that can only be made once the price has been disclosed in the contractual negotiations, and that is when we will engage in that review.
Q262 <Paul Flynn:> Lord Rees made the point to us that without a robust strategy the immediate will always “trump the important”—that 2000 years of scientific discovery and knowledge will be trumped by a tabloid headline. Is this happening in your Government?
Mr Letwin: I think there is always a danger of what Lord Rees describes and what you describe in a democracy, but I have to say that I think this Government have been peculiarly good at not allowing the day’s headlines to deflect them from long-term activity, whether you happen to agree with the activity or not.
Just today there is a great deal of publicity about our health reforms, and I suppose that a Government who wanted to get a good headline for a day might suddenly abandon their health reforms. We have not abandoned our health reforms. We are pursuing them.
Q259 <Robert Halfon:> With regard to the response you have given about strategy and the six strategic aims, how do you respond to the criticism from some that these six strategic aims are motherhood and apple pie? Any Government would say they want a “free and democratic society”, for example.
Mr Letwin: I think they are, very luckily, broadly shared in Britain today. Next to you sits a distinguished member of a different political party whom I suspect would also share these aims. I cannot speak for him, he can speak for himself.
<Paul Flynn:> We are great comrades.
Mr Letwin: I would guess there is a lot in common there. This is a very lucky feature about Britain. Do not let us take this for granted. There have been many countries at many times—actually, most of the world for most of its history—where those would not have been taken for granted or indeed agreed with by the people running the country; or at least, had they said they agreed with them, they would have been lying, because that was not what they were seeking to achieve.
Q263 <Paul Flynn:> Are you continuing the long tradition in the Civil Service of the unimportance of being right, and are you still promoting people on the basis of failure? I am thinking of the lady who just came from the Border Agency, where there was utter chaos, who had an extraordinary period involving an election scandal in Birmingham and has now been promoted as a result of her clearly troubled past. Is this a question, again, of what you do in the Civil Service, namely, move people sideways or promote them when there is an embarrassing situation?
Mr Letwin: One of the features of the British constitution, which I think is a good one and I suspect we might agree about, is that Ministers do not make decisions about the promotion or otherwise of particular civil servants. The reason for that, as you are very well aware, is to prevent civil servants from simply becoming creatures of politicians.
Q264 <Paul Flynn:> You were responsible for turning GOD into a trinity, recently, and the result of that is what is going on now. You must take responsibility somewhere.
Mr Letwin: Absolutely. Sorry. It has always been the case that at the very apex of the pyramid, when it comes to appointing the Cabinet Secretary and the head of the Civil Service, the Prime Minister of the day, there being no one else to do it, is indeed influential. Of course, I accept collective responsibility for the decision to run the Civil Service through a Cabinet Secretary, a head of the Civil Service and a head of the Cabinet Office in three separate roles. I may say that I think that they are working extraordinarily well together, and you may want to take evidence from them about that. That is at a different level from the one you are describing.
The management of the Civil Service is something that Ministers have not tried to intervene in or interfere with, I think rightly, because however imperfect it may be at any given time, politicians making decisions about the careers of specific civil servants will open up another set of problems.
Q265 <Paul Flynn:> A final brief question. Is it not true that Governments make cowards of all politicians, that the brave words of the Prime Minister when he was in opposition about how he was going take on lobbyists have now melted and become very weak policy, and that it was exactly the same with Labour? Labour, in fact, did not stand up when this Committee produced a report calling for major reforms on lobbyists. Is it not the case that when Governments change, it is not a change of philosophy or strategy, but a question of exchanging scripts?
Mr Letwin: Well, I think that is an excessively cynical view.
<Paul Flynn:> Oh, surely not.
Mr Letwin: Actually, the case you quote I do not think is a good one for arguing that, because there are two changes that we have made—sorry, one change we have made and one change we are about to make—that together will have a profound effect on lobbying. The change we have already made, which is little noticed but is there and you can go and look at it on a website, is that every meeting with a Government Minister is now transparent: you can see who has come to a meeting. The Lobbying Register will tell you, for any person you are looking up, who has come to see a particular Minister, who their clients are, so you can tell what is actually going on. Now, I think that that is a major step forward, and does live up to what the Prime Minister and others have said in opposition.
Q266 <Paul Flynn:> We notice a failing in enthusiasm for the Big Society, which has been referred to on this Committee as “a dead wheeze walking”.
<Robert Halfon:> Only by you.
Q267 <Paul Flynn:> Are you really telling us that, when the Big Society guru has fled the scene, when the Committee running it has not met for 11 months, when the Prime Minister can hardly say the three words “the Big Society” anymore, this is showing your courage in maintaining a policy that clearly has failed?
Mr Letwin: I think I disagree with every part of that.
<Paul Flynn:> That is disappointing.
Mr Letwin: I am sorry to disappoint you. First of all, the Prime Minister repeatedly uses the words. Secondly, as a matter of fact we have taken three kinds of action, and are continuing to take three kinds of action, immensely to strengthen the Big Society: first, we have taken a whole series of moves to reduce the impediments and bureaucratisation and regulation of it by implementing Lord Hodgson’s reforms, by changing a whole series of things including health and safety legislation effectively—
<Chair:> Forgive me, Minister.
Mr Letwin: Let me just quickly say this, because I do not want to have the one on the record without the response. We have taken, secondly, a whole series of moves to make it more financed, hence for example, Big Society Capital, and, thirdly, a whole series of moves to ensure that it is empowered through community assets, neighbourhood councils and many other things besides. I think it is an extraordinary example of persistence of policy. Again, you may not approve of it, but it is very clear where we were trying to aim and where we are continuing to go.
<Paul Flynn:> I wish you a long career.
Q268 <Paul Flynn:> 577 of our brave soldiers have died and 2,000 others live on, broken in body or mind, as a result of the strategy of going to Iraq on the basis of fear of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. We have remained in Helmand province and fought on, on the basis of a terrorist threat to the UK from the Taliban that did not exist. We might well go to war in Iran for fear of attacks by missiles that do not exist carrying nuclear weapons that do not exist. While there might well be an honourable case for peacekeeping in the world, in Kosovo, in Bosnia and in Sierra Leone, the core reason of our involvement in these invasions of other countries seems to be the belief that Britain should punch above its weight. Why?
Mr Letwin: I cannot really comment very much on the Iraq situation as I was not a part of the Government then, as you know. In the case of Afghanistan, which I have obviously been much involved in over the last two years on the National Security Council, I have to say that I do not recognise your description of it. It is not a threat from the Taliban to our security that is the issue; it is the threat that arises from a destabilised Afghanistan and, indeed, potentially instability in the AfPak region as a whole, and the ability of al-Qaeda to capitalise on that that does pose a direct threat to the UK. I cannot speak for why we went in in the first place, because I was not part of the Government who made that decision, but the reason for staying there, only for a period, as we hand over to—
<Paul Flynn:> To the Taliban.
Mr Letwin: —what we hope will be a reasonably stable regime, is precisely to try to create a degree of stability that does not allow al-Qaeda to capitalise on the situation and become much more able to intervene in our own domestic security. So that is the reason. Whether this is right or wrong is a different question. But if your question is what the motive is, it is not to show that Britain can punch above its weight; it is to try to protect our own country by trying to hand over to a more, rather than less, stable regime, given the circumstances in which we found ourselves at the beginning of this Parliament.
Q269 <Paul Flynn:> Do you believe the loved ones of the fallen and those who have been so badly damaged in the war will be consoled at the outcome, where, in Iraq, a cruel, oppressive Government has been replaced by a cruel, oppressive Government, and in Afghanistan the likelihood is that a Taliban regime will be replaced by a Taliban regime?
Mr Letwin: I do not accept your description of equivalence in Iraq. I think that the regime in Iraq is vastly preferable to its predecessor, but, as I say, that is not a decision in which I was myself involved. In the case of Afghanistan, I do not think that anyone would be comforted if they thought that it was just going to be the same thing as there was many years ago. Our hope, in building up the Afghan national security services—the army and the police—and in handing gradually over to them a situation that is stabilised, is that there will be thereafter a degree of stability in that country greater than there was before, where al‑Qaeda will not be able to run free, and where the situation vis-à-vis Pakistan will not be destabilised, and where, as a result, there will be less fear of terrorism being exported to our own country.
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