Interview: Jenny Willott

Jenny Willott, the Liberal Democrat spokeswoman on Cabinet Office matters, doesn’t have an answer to my initial question: what are her party’s plans for the civil service? The question is “kind of vague”, she says. It is – but her answer is also vague and, by the end of the interview, it is not clear that the Lib Dems have a clear set of plans for the civil service.

To be fair, it is difficult for opposition parties to be knowledgeable about the workings of government when they have had no recent experience of it. They can, and do, get to speak to senrio civil servants in the run-up to the election; and at other times can ask parliamentary questions about staff costs, departmental contracts, staff sickness and a multitude of other matters – although the information is not always forthcoming. But all this is nothing compared to actually being on the inside.

Although no overarching Lib Dem strategy emerges from the interview, Willott demonstrates her detailed understanding of the government’s operations – gained in part during her time on the Commons parliamentary administration select committee (PASC). Public sector pensions, in particular, have been one of her causes in the time that she has been an MP: she also serves on the work and pensions select committee, and her last frontbench role was as the party’s lead on work and pensions. She is one of the MPs who have asked a large number of questions about the costs of public sector pensions – an issue that has come to be a hot topic for many people: not long after we met, a CBI report described public sector pensions as “unsustainable” and called for a commission to investigate liabilities.

Wider pensions forum
Willott is also a proponent of an independent commission on public sector pensions – something along the lines of the Turner Commission on the state pension, she says. This commission, she adds, could attempt to establish the full liability of public sector pensions. “So much of it is massively political, so you get completely different ways of calculating what the liability is – some of which are possibly accurate, some of which are taking assumptions that are not really fair. I don’t think there is really an agreed amount,” she says.

The National Audit Office (NAO), similarly concerned about the lack of hard information within the debate that is raging over public sector pensions, recently published a report setting out the future costs of the four biggest unfunded public sector pensions – schemes for the army, the civil service, teachers and the NHS – on the basis of a variety of assumptions. It also questioned the assumption in the Treasury’s calculation that the size of the public sector workforce would not increase. Auditors are now producing a second report looking at the impact of reforms to public sector pensions, such as the closure of final salary pension schemes.

Willott says that while the NAO has usefully shed some light on the issue, an independent commission would be able to go further and help shape a consensus on the matter. “You have to have some form of cross-party consensus on the issue, because [pensions] have got such long-term implications that you can’t be chopping and changing every time the government changes,” she argues. Given the acrimonious current argument, it is difficult to imagine a consensus emerging; but she says it is entirely possible.

“Before the Turner Commission, people did not think they would be able to find a cross-party consensus on the state pension: things such as raising the retirement age were massively controversial. But now it is pretty much accepted by everybody,” she points out. “I think it is absolutely possible, but it has to be done carefully and it has to be backed up by evidence.”

Public sector pensions are indeed a highly political issue, and it might be argued that Willott has helped contribute to that climate. She has, for example, issued a press release entitled: ‘Top mandarins have £150m pension pot’, encouraging negative coverage. But Willott defends herself, arguing that it is her job as an opposition MP to look at what the government is doing, and ask the questions that need to be asked.

“You can’t ignore issues just because they’re difficult to deal with,” she says. “It needs to be looked at independently, but we haven’t had the opportunity to do that so far, so at the moment it is a political issue.”

Furthermore, Willott says she doesn’t herself believe that the pension liability is necessarily unaffordable, or that public sector pensions should be brought down to a level that is on a par with most private sector pensions. There may be resentment about the perceived gulf between private and public sector pension arrangements, “but that doesn’t mean we should automatically bring down all public sector schemes, close them down and copy [the private sector]”. In fact, she says, an independent commission may find the liability to “be far more affordable than we think it is”. Until the evidence is there, “it is really difficult to decide what needs to be done, if anything, about reform.”

Another area on which Willott is knowledgeable is the third sector; she worked at Barnado’s, Unicef and Victim Support in Wales before she became an MP, and is now responsible for third sector matters for the Lib Dems. She has high praise for the government’s creation of the Office of the Third Sector inside the Cabinet Office – “right at the heart of the government”, she says, it has boosted the profile of the sector within Whitehall – and the work the unit has done since it was set up in May 2006.

However, she says the Future Builders programme – designed to build up capacity and skills such as bidding for contracts – has not had as much success “as some of us would have liked”. This is not the fault of the third sector unit, she adds, but because “government policy is not joined up at all”.

Willott points to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as an example of where the message has not made it through to commissioners. “Welfare to Work; Flexible New Deal – all those prime contracts go to private sector contractors, because they are the only people able to bid competitively on the scale that DWP is seeking,” she says. The problem is both one of scale, she says – she describes departments as “massive, massive creatures”, in which it takes “a really, really long time for things to seep through to people who are making the decisions” – and one of leadership. “The political messages coming from the Office of the Third Sector are very, very clear. I’d lay no blame on them for these issues – but I’m not sure that the political message that comes from the top of DWP is the same.”

In fact, she argues, the message coming from the top of departments such as DWP is primarily about cost, not the social benefits that the third sector can provide – such as boosting community cohesion, which might feed into a Home Office target, for example. “I think they [the Office of the Third Sector] are quite frustrated as well; it is not their fault,” she adds.

Wider Whitehall economies
Willott seems on shakier ground when we get on to areas such as civil service skills or how the civil service is going to save money in the next few years.

On the question of job cuts – unions fear large-scale redundancies after the government made changes to the compensation deal that civil servants can expect if they are made redundant – Willott says these will be inevitable; but she does not think they are desirable, because of the negative impact that large-scale job cuts could have on unemployment figures, spending power and the economy. “There are ways to save money from the public sector finances which don’t involve job cuts”, she says.

These, she goes on to explain, include a number of Lib Dem manifesto promises such as scrapping the identity card and biometric passport schemes – saving “a huge amount of public money” – and not replacing Trident with a similar system. She also says that “the first port of call is to look at efficiency”, arguing that “there are lots of ways in which the public sector currently wastes money” – although her example of an unnamed Cabinet Office tender which was abandoned some way through the process because the terms and conditions were discovered to be incorrect sounds like an unfortunate, but isolated, incident.

Another example of how money is wasted seems more plausible: IT programmes which have to be scrapped “because the guys in the IT department weren’t brought in early enough to say what was possible”. Essentially: policymakers must listen to those with delivery experience. Willott says ministers must take much of the responsibility for those times when a policy decision is made with little reference to the people who will have to deliver it, and without testing whether the concept is workable.

She says the work and pensions select committee’s investigation into the IT disaster at the Child Support Agency was informative here. “We need to involve all the actors at a much earlier stage when a policy is being developed so that, rather than announcing a policy and then trying to make [delivery] fit, we make sure that a basic conversation has been had with IT, HR and the like, looking at how something could be delivered.” That way, she adds, the public would have more confidence that an announcement is likely to produce results, rather than discovering that ultimately “it doesn’t work and it is a massively expensive disaster”.

Another big waste of money, says Willott – as have many other people on various occasions – is reorganisations of Whitehall. PASC published a critical report on the phenomenon, and recommended that machinery of government changes should be considered by Parliament – a recommendation that was rejected by the government. Using classic diplomatic language, Willott says government’s response was a “disappointment”, and that she got the impression that the views of civil servants such as cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell, who had to face the committee after the Cabinet Office had published its official response, are closer to PASC’s than the government’s.

She points out that a later NAO report calculated the costs of Whitehall reorganisations between May 2005 and June 2009 as £200m per year. This is “significantly higher than had previously been estimated,” points out Willott. “It just backs up the argument that a prime minister being able to decide that he wants to merge this department or that because he wants to put his mate in a job – whatever the reason is – needs some oversight.” The costs of work such as harmonising staff terms and conditions have to be considered, she adds: “I’m fairly sure Gordon Brown did not think of the implications of that”.

Localism: the Lib Dem angle
Rather than rearranging the seating in Whitehall, Willott takes the view that power needs to be taken away from Whitehall and Westminster and devolved as far as possible into neighbourhoods and local authorities. That makes it easier to coordinate public services, because strategic and planning work is then done at a local level, she argues, and will make it easier for Whitehall to concentrate on those things that do need to be delivered from the centre. “A lot of the decision-making [at the centre] would be slimmed down, so it makes it a bit easier to operate,” she says.

This is, of course, an old Lib Dem idea – one pursued since the turn of the last century, points out Willott – but it has, in recent years, been adopted by both the Conservatives and Labour. Yet stated support for ideas such as Total Place – a programme to reduce ring-fenced budgets, give councils more power and reduce duplicated spending – does not necessarily translate into action, Willott says. “I’m fairly sure that the Tories are really in favour [of localism] at the moment because they control vast numbers of local authorities and they don’t control Whitehall,” she says. “I suspect that might change [if they are elected].”

However, she adds, local authorities – including Conservative councils – have done a lot of work on the localism agenda, and influential bodies such as the Local Government Association and the Improvement and Development Agency (IDEA) have put their full weight behind the idea. “There are quite a lot of powerful people in local government who would be shouting extremely loudly if it doesn’t happen,” says Willott; the Tories “would have a lot of Conservative leaders of councils who might be very, very upset”. So she is optimistic about the potential for localism: “The power hasn’t necessarily shifted as much as I would like to see, but the structures are more in place [for councils] to take on additional responsibility, so it makes it harder not to follow through.”

Like a lot of MPs working in opposition, Willott knows her stuff where she has experience of working on an issue, but she can be hazy on the finer details of the workings of the civil service, such as where real money could be saved in public administration. Cancelling unpopular projects such as identity cards is a one-off win, like an asset sale – but it is not clear what happens after that.

MPs inundated with constituency work, and without recent hands-on experience of the civil service’s successes and failures, often struggle to build well-informed plans; and this may explain why it is difficult to discern a defined Lib Dem strategy for the civil service. The reality, however, is that – despite their recent uplift in the polls – the Lib Dems are set to be denied a majority by the vagaries of our political system. If the government falls, civil servants are more likely to face a Conservative-led administration – and they (see p1, p7) have done a lot more research into planning for the reshaping of our civil service.

CV: Jenny Willott
Educated at Wimbledon High School and 
Uppingham School
1995 Works as a researcher and proposal writer for Adithi charity in India
1996 Graduates with a BA in Classics from St Mary’s College, Durham
1997 Awarded MSc in Economic Development 
from the LSE
1997 Employed as the head of Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik’s office
1998 Elected councillor for the London Borough 
of Merton
2000 Employed as researcher for Lib Dem group at the National Assembly for Wales
2001 Becomes a project administrator at children’s charity Barnado’s
2001 Appointed head of advocacy, Unicef
2003 Appointed head of Victim Support Wales
2005 Elected MP for Cardiff Central 
2006 Appointed spokeswoman for youth affairs
2006 Appointed Lib Dem whip, then promoted to deputy chief whip
2008 Made the Lib Dems’ lead on justice issues
2008 Takes on the Lib Dem frontbench work and pensions brief 
2009 Becomes the Lib Dems’ lead on issues overseen by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster