FINAL TRANSCRIPTION
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PERMANANET SECRETARY SIR JON SHORTRIDGE
|
| LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much
for coming and thank you very much for coming early, at
some benefit to the Commission. Can I ask you formally
for the sake of the record to identify yourself. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: Jon Shortridge,
Permanent Secretary, National Assembly. |
| LORD RICHARD: What we ask our witnesses
to do is perhaps open up the topic for us for five or
ten minutes and then, if we may, we will ask you questions
following upon what you have said and on the paper that
you have been kind enough to submit. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: What I have
sought to do in my evidence is give you a Civil Service
and civil servant's perspective on the way in which the
devolution process has gone on so far. I am quite grateful
for that opportunity because I think the story I put into
my evidence is a story which is not fully known and understood
at the moment, because I have rare opportunities to explain
precisely what has happened and what it has felt like
to be making this transformation from what I have, (perhaps
unfairly but nonetheless) described as an offshore government
department - a government department semi-detached from
the main Whitehall machine; - and making the transformation
from that to an entirely new constitutional body, one
which never existed even on a shelf. When the Members
were elected none of us really knew for sure how it was
going to work and rightly so because essentially we created
a shell into which were transfused 60 elected members
and it was for them to decide how they wanted this organisation
to work. The governing legislation and the associated
standing orders actually gave them quite a lot of flexibility
to themselves determine how they wanted to work. It did
mean for us as officials that we could not be going in
from day one and saying this is how it is all going to
happen. We had to be tuning into this organisation, listening
very carefully, seeking to understand how Members were
going to be most comfortable with developing this organisation
for themselves. The story, in part, that I have told here
is a story of really very rapid evolutionary development.
I would not describe the Assembly as yet anywhere near
in a steady state but it has come a very long way in three
years. There is now a much clearer and better understanding
by both members and officials as to what their and our
roles and responsibilities are. But there are still some
quite fundamental difficulties with it, in my judgement.
From my own personal perspective the biggest difficulty
arises from the fact that the Assembly is a corporate
body. It is a corporate body which has decided to develop
itself insofar as it lawfully and statutorily can into
two bodies, And in a number of respects it operates pretty
well as two bodies. You can see why that development has
happened, although I would say there was not necessarily
an inevitability that it would develop in the way it has.
In part it has developed in the way it has because of
the founding arrangements on the one hand but then also
because of the personalities and the background of some
of those personalities who have come into the body. Certain
powerful personalities/members had very clear views on
the way in which they wanted to take it forward and they
have successfully taken it. |
| But there are still fundamental problems
for some of us, notably for me and for Winston Roddick
whom you saw this morning. The Assembly now has two logos,
an Assembly government logo, and it has a Presiding Office
and Assembly member logo. To use the title of the recent
business bill I have ‘no logo’ because I cannot
associate myself exclusively with one side of this organisation
or the other, because my function is determined in the
statute and I am the Permanent Secretary of the National
Assembly as a whole. That can be a pretty uncomfortable
place to be when you have got these two organisations
within the organisation seeking the maximum possible separation
for themselves but where, because of my statutory responsibilities,
there are times when I do not feel I can pretend I am
a member of one part or the other. So there is a lack
of clarity at the heart of this institution in the way
it has developed and irrespective of anything else, that
is an issue that needs to be addressed anyway. I will
pause there, Chairman. |
| LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much
indeed. I think I would like to pursue this corporate
body point, if I may, because it really does seem to me
that the concept has creaked just about as far as it can
and the next stage is some kind of rupture. Winston Roddick
described it as on the verge of a divorce but the parties
were still technically living together. Given the fact
that it is government on the one hand and parliament,
if I can use that phrase although it is imprecise, on
the other hand, how could you give advice to both at the
same time? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I do not and
if I were to try to I would get myself into great difficulty.
I think if you talk to probably every member they would
say that my role is to serve the government of the day,
and I cannot serve the government of the day at the same
time as serving the other two parties and the other 51
elected members either collectively or individually; you
just cannot do it, given the way in which the Assembly
has developed. From a very personal perspective,
I think it would be much the best if statutory reality
could be given to that situation. Just to repeat,
I think from day one and certainly when the Bill was going
through Parliament and when the standing orders were being
drafted, none of us really thought that inevitably this
is where we would end up. You have got two members of
your Commission who come from local government and up
until now officials of local authorities have been able
to have a relationship in terms of engagement with the
other party groups. I think they will increasingly,
if they have not already done so, find that very difficult
to do with the introduction of cabinet government into
local authorities. But from where we were four years
ago there was an expectation that the Assembly would develop
in a way where officials would be able to appropriately
serve members, not necessarily in an equal way but would
have a serving relationship with all members of the Assembly.
That has not happened but it does cause me, on occasions,
problems. If you are the accounting officer for
the Assembly at large, with its £10 billion plus expenditure,
and you do not know for sure what decision the Assembly
might take on a matter which you think reflects on your
own personal interests, that is an uncomfortable position
to be in. Where you have a situation where it is generally
acknowledged that the Presiding Office and members have
to have access to what is called ‘independent’
legal advice, that causes me a problem because independent
legal advice as far as they are concerned is advice which
I as Permanent Secretary do not have access to.
So I do not know the basis upon which they may be going
to take decisions. I do not want to exaggerate the point.
For the most part, these things have been managed through
and I can cope with them and I do not feel the need, except
very rarely, to raise what I regard as these fundamental
issues of principle which go to the heart of what the
members regard as their democratic rights, because I am
associated with government, and what am I doing wanting
to interfere and intervene? I could envisage a situation
where there was potentially a big decision that was going
to be taken which I thought impacted on my personal interests
and I had no real basis --- |
| PETER PRICE: Can you define what
‘personal interest’ means? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: If there was
a decision to spend a lot of money which I did not think
was necessary in the Assembly's budget and the politics
were working out in such a way that this might happen,
then I am the accounting officer for the Assembly. |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: Can I ask you how
these things are managed in Scotland? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: It does not
apply in Scotland because Scotland is the Westminster
model. My opposite number, if that is the word, in Scotland
is the Permanent Secretary of the Scottish Executive and
the Scottish Executive is the government arm of the devolved
arrangements in Scotland. So he has exactly the same accountability
arrangements to ministers in Scotland that exist in Whitehall. |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: So there is no ambiguity,
there have not been any teething problems initially from
which we could learn? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: You would have
to ask him that. I am sure there have been novelties and
innovations and all the rest of it. I think the point
that I am making cannot by definition apply in Scotland.
Just to repeat, I have made the point and I do not want
to over-state the point. This is not a problem that arises
with me weekly, monthly, or, with any luck, yearly.
But it is a theoretical problem which is of concern to
me from time to time where, because of my personal responsibilities,
it could cause me difficulties because it is not self-evident. |
| LORD RICHARD: What would you have
to do statutorily to put it right? How much would you
have to do? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: You need a lawyer
rather than me, but I think essentially it means that
there should be a separate government arm so you would
split the two parts de jure. And it would
mean that whereas at the moment the Assembly ministers
or the First Minister gets his statutory powers by delegation
from the Assembly at large, you would have to change the
situation so that those powers were vested in the First
Minister probably by the Crown, so the delegation would
not come down through the Assembly route, and then you
would just have two separate bodies rather than a single
body seeking as far as possible to behave as if it were
two. |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: The effect
on your chart at the back of your paper would be just
to draw a line up? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: It would separate
out the Presiding Office. |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Just
that one column would separate out? |
| LAURA McALLISTER: There would be
quite enormous staffing implications surely in terms of
the balance between them? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: If nothing else
changed, I do not think, as Sir Michael has indicated,
there are necessarily going to be any knock-on effect
on staffing because, as it is, the Presiding Office operates
as autonomously from me, if I can put it that way, as
they possibly can. We might need to formalise certain
very informal relationships because we have a central
finance function, central personnel function and so on
which the Presiding Office can have access to whenever
they want to, and rightly so. I do not think any member
has a concern about that because the technical support
that they are getting from the government side of the
house on matters like personnel and budgeting and so on
are services which are available to the institution as
a whole and which they can have access to. I do not think
it would be necessary and probably not sensible to seek
to replicate those skills that exist at the moment. So
you could create two bodies without it having a significant
impact on staff. |
| LAURA McALLISTER: Is the implication
of that that the provision of support to the Assembly
members as a whole is inadequate as it currently stands
with this divide? I am talking about legal advice, policy
advice and so on to subject committees. Is that your understanding? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I think the
support that members get in subject committees is largely
politically party-based support as opposed to support
from Assembly policy officials, if I can put it that way.
And that gets back to the split because everyone who works
on the policy area on the government side of the house
is now perceived as exclusively serving ministers, so
to the extent that they assist a committee, they do that
with the agreement of the minister. So that when you attend
a subject committee meeting and the minister is there,
you contribute with the licence that the minister gives
you. If the minister does not ask you to be taking the
lead on a subject you would obviously stand back and let
the minister do that. |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: One practical
detail, the cost of a member of the House of Lords at
the moment i , 85,000 each, they have not got salaries,
an MP is about, 380,000, a member of the European Parliament
is over, 1 million each. One of the chief causes
of this is language translation. One of the sources of
cost of the devolved Assembly is its bilingual nature.
Which would that fall to if you carried out the divide?
Firstly, how much does an AM cost? What is the comparable
figure for an AM at the moment? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I think I
would have to put a note in on that, Sir Michael.
There is a figure for their salary and then the associated
allowances that they get which is not an especially large
figure but I am not sure whether the figures you have
quoted are taking account of other things as well, so
if you count in all the members' services available through
the Presiding Office and then pro rata that out, you get
a different figure. I will let the Commission have the
figures on that via the Secretariat. In the case of the
translation service they are an example of the opposite
to the personnel services that I was talking about. At
the time when the split was formalised, there was an agreement
that the translation unit would sit in the Presiding Office
but it would provide services on an equal basis to the
government side of the house. If there was a split there
would be a need to address whether that situation was
going to continue and, if so, was it going to be formalised
into some sort of service level agreement or whether actually
you should have two separate units. The arguments go to
and fro on that. There is a value in having as much of
a critical mass as you can in one unit, but that is a
detailed issue that will need to be addressed at the time. |
| TED ROWLANDS: On the back of your
question, one thing that surprised me about the paper
to us is that there is not a single figure in it cost-wise.
The original Voice for Wales estimated that the cost of
running the Assembly was between £15 and £20 million.
What is the actual cost of that today? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I probably
will have to give you a note on that, partly because
I am here an hour earlier than I thought I would be so
I have not been able to go through all these papers here. |
| TED ROWLANDS: The second original
Voice for Wales cost was that the Welsh Office side, the
administrative side was going to be £72 million. What
has actually happened? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I will certainly
let you have those figures. I can abstract from that
and say, in line with what I was saying at the outset,
the Assembly has developed in a very different way from
the way in which it was originally envisaged and, as a
consequence of that, certainly the staffing and support
requirements have been greater than was genuinely and
honestly expected at the time. Once you separate out the
Presiding Office then there is an understandable demand
from members to have their own support staff, their own
researchers to underline their independence from the government
side, so that has created more staff than we had originally
envisaged. As I try to indicate in my paper, I would put
it that there has been an increase in the basic workload
of somewhere between 10 and 15 per cent. We then brought
in all these other bodies. |
| TED ROWLANDS: You have to extrapolate,
I want a like-for-like comparison. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: It does get
quite complex but I will do what I can. |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: In the
White Paper there was a suggestion there would be economies,
for example, in quangos which would go some of the way
towards balancing the books, so to speak. Can you give
an indication, it may be impossible to do but if you could
it would be useful because it is an absolutely admirable
paper, you have done so much so quickly and one feels,
‘Phew, gosh, they have been running,’ and one
is all the time coming back to the increase of work, increase
of responsibilities and one wants to get a true figure
of what this really involves. I think that does mean pluses
and minuses, so to speak? As a last point on this,
if they are available, could we have some comparable figures
with Scotland and Northern Ireland? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I will put
in a separate note on all that. I will have to research
comparable figures on Scotland and Northern Ireland. We
may not have comparisons there |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: The research
being done by academics on devolution. I think there is
somebody in Edinburgh although I have not seen it.
I certainly do not want to ask, insofar as I am able to
ask, for a lot of new work to be done; it is to get what
is available. |
| TED ROWLANDS: The reason we are
asking is that one of our terms of reference is we have
to make an assessment of the financial implications of
any changes that we recommend. It would suggest that we
ought to be sceptical about estimates. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I would not
comment on that. What I would say, and I think it is a
relevant point for you to take into account when you read
this information, is that Sir Michael has been kind enough
to say about there being an enormous amount of change
and a lot achieved in a short space of time, and I believe
that to be true. When you are responding to that amount
of change in circumstances of great uncertainty - and
we did not know where we were going to end up, so you
cannot plan for an unknown destination - it meant that
to an extent in the short term I have had to put in resource
to do more of the same in order to deliver what is now
required. I hope I am now at the stage where we can as
an organisation be taking stock and looking to find ways
of doing things better, smarter and reducing some of our
overheads. I do not think it necessarily follows that
the sort of growth path that we have had should necessarily
be continued whenever you have additional responsibilities
imposed or placed on us. I am in the business of looking
to make the organisation work much more effectively and
therefore much more cost-effectively because I think that
is one of my main duties. |
| TED ROWLANDS: If
we put in our report estimated costs I would not like
in a year's time to turn around like I look at the Voice
of Wales and be out by that sort of factor. That is all
I am suggesting. |
| PETER PRICE: Linked to that I assume
that if we separate out the two bodies the staff who work
for the National Assembly would cease to be civil servants.
Would that mirror Parliament and Whitehall arrangements?
|
| Secondly, you talked about the fact that
that might then lead to further demands for staff for
the National Assembly itself. Against that, how
do you see the initiatives that you are referring to particularly
in 21 and 22 of your evidence in terms of trying to expose
a greater number of staff within public service in Wales
to work in the National Assembly and the National Assembly
drawing from their strengths? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: On the first
point, I do not think it necessarily follows that, if
you split the two organisations, the parliamentary end
necessarily should no longer be staffed by civil servants.
It is a matter of judgement and ultimately it would be
a matter of political judgement. Linking that to your
second point, as I have tried to make clear in my evidence,
I am very much in the business of trying to develop a
much stronger public sector in Wales because I think that
is in the interests of public services in Wales and I
think it is also in the interests of staff who want to
pursue a career in the public sector in Wales. And part
of that is trying to minimise what I think I have described
as the ‘obstructions’ or ‘frictions’
between different types of organisation, because the moment
you have different terms and conditions of staff it makes
it that much more difficult to have staff moving around.
From where I am sitting, with perhaps a slightly more
narrow perspective, I would not like to see a new set
of terms and conditions and a new type of public sector
being established unless there is a very good reason for
it. I had a discussion with staff from the Presiding Office
earlier this week because I wanted to have an opportunity
to share with them my evidence and hear what they felt
about it, and in particular I was interested in the point
that I had floated into this evidence that it may well
be if there is a separation that the Presiding Office
staff would cease to be civil servants. There were some
people there who were quite strongly of the view and attracted
to the idea of them ceasing to be civil servants, but
I do not think I am doing them an injustice by saying
that their main interest was to ensure that there was
a full and proper separation, and they would see the question
of their status as to whether they were civil servants
or not as a secondary issue. |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: Can I ask you a
question about the numbers of staff that are needed for
the different things. I thought there was a slight contradiction
in the paper in that in your last paragraph you say that
you think that if powers were enhanced that the Assembly
Civil Service would have the capacity to cope without
much further enhancement of its numbers and yet in the
staff survey that you have included over 40 per cent of
your staff are saying that they cannot get their work
done within their normal working hours. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: It is a conundrum,
is it not. I think I have a leadership role and, part
echoing what I was saying earlier, I think where you have
got pressures on people's time and capacity problems in
an organisation you do not automatically and necessarily
take the view that the way to deal with that medium to
long term is by recruiting lots more staff. I think you
have a responsibility, particularly as a senior management
team, to be looking at ways in which the work can be done
differently. You are looking to discuss with ministers
in our case the extent to which it is satisfactory to
reduce standards in certain areas in order to make sure
that we can provide the service expected of us without
imposing unreasonable burdens on staff. I am conscious
always, perhaps picking up partly Mr Rowlands' point,
that I am in the business of reducing our overheads as
much as I reasonably can so as to make resources available
for front-line services. We do have to remember that this
is still a very fluid period in the life of the Assembly.
Part of that evolution is the new pressures that puts
on staff. We have to have a certain amount of time to
be able to adapt to those pressures without me constantly
asking for more staff. I hope you would acknowledge what
I put in this paper - workplace stress is a question which
I take very seriously indeed and does need to be addressed.
It may be that having addressed it I would conclude that
the solution is that we are under-staffed but I am not
convinced of that yet. |
| PETER PRICE: By integrating a number
of public bodies you have added both extra functions and
extra staff? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: Yes. |
| PETER PRICE: What has been the net
impact on workload as a result of that? Have you found,
for example, that the number of staff when brought in
have enabled you to deploy some of them to other functions
that were previously carried out by civil servants who
did not come from that public body? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I cannot give
you a strong evidence-based answer to that because it
differs with the different organisations. We have just
created the CSIW which is a lot of very professional staff
being brought together to perform that inspectorate function.
That is a self-contained process. We brought in Tai Cymru
just before the Assembly was established and there they
have become part of the Housing Directorate, and there
will still be quite a lot of people working in that Housing
Directorate that came from Tai Cymru. But there are a
lot of Tai Cymru staff who have taken the opportunity
of working in this larger organisation to develop themselves
in different ways, and I really value that. But in the
straightforward accounting --- |
| PETER PRICE: Netted off? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: --- I could
not give you an off-the-cuff figure. |
| PETER PRICE: An impression? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I would be surprised
if we have made very significant staff savings as a result
of bringing these organisations in but I have never done
the calculation. |
| PETER PRICE: If I may pursue the
bringing in of staff from wider organisations just for
a moment. Is there anything about the nature of devolution
that makes this a more suitable thing to do, to bring
in those organisations and incorporate them? Is it linked
in some way to devolution or is this a policy that has
been pursued. What have turned out to be the advantages
and disadvantages of doing it? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I think in many
ways that is a question for a politician and not for me
so if you will excuse me I will give a slightly narrow
answer to it. I think that one of the potential benefits
of the Assembly is that it creates the opportunity to
provide much stronger and greater democratic accountability
within Wales, and you can do that in a number of ways.
You can do it by closing organisations down and bringing
them into the body corporate, as we have done, or you
can keep them in existence but have a much greater political
engagement and involvement in the process of appointing
the board members of the bodies, and then you have a much
closer political engagement between the minister responsible
for the body and the bodies. So you have got these two,
I suppose I can polarise them, models of how you can use
the Assembly to create more democratic accountability
in these areas of policy delivery. At any one time I think
it will be a political judgement for the government of
the day to decide where they want to position themselves
on that continuum. |
| MR JONES: In terms of the staff
you say that you wish to see more of them perhaps exchanging
and getting wider experience by going to Whitehall. It
is more of a challenge. If there were a division of the
Presiding Office staff, would that allow them to go to
Whitehall or would that debar them from having that wider
experience? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: At one level
there is no barrier because it is a question of initiative,
both of the individual members of staff and of their managers
to create and allow these opportunities. I would have
thought staff in the Presiding Office who are wanting
to experience other relevant institutions would tend to
be looking for exchanges with Parliament rather than with
government departments. Some of that goes on now and I
am sure there is an opportunity for more of that to happen.
I know the Presiding Officer in particular is very keen
that it should. Whatever happens and if anything happens,
if the Presiding Office were to be split off into a separate
institution I do not think that that would materially
affect the staff's opportunities to experience comparable
activities and comparable organisations. In all my time
as Permanent Secretary when I have direct or indirect
influence I will be doing all I can to encourage that
because in the long term organisations benefit from people
having experienced other related areas of activity. |
| TED ROWLANDS: Could I pursue your
paragraphs 33, 34, and 35. This is where you offer us
the judgement of how you can accommodate primary legislation
to a manageable load. As you say in different paragraphs
costs occur in different ways. I can see why, given that
you are already doing quite a lot of preparatory work
in drafting instructions and all the rest of it, that
that is not a huge additional cost possibly but then in
the other paragraphs you start to identify some real costs.
First of all, there is the question of the cost to the
Presiding Office side of things and handling it all, it
is all time-consuming and there are extra sitting days.
Then in paragraph 35 in the very last couple of sentences
you draw attention to others you do not think much about.
I can assure you it happens, if you start to prepare legislation
in a more front-line sort of way you generally build in
additional administrative costs because you have pressure
groups mounting more effort than they would have done
previously possibly and, secondly, the correspondence
and things that flow from it. All my experience teaches
me that legislation is not cheap and the resource that
goes into it, the ministerial time alone as a cost is
enormous. If we are going to address this question, would
it be possible to try to have a short answer describing
the cost of carrying out such a programme. We know that
the Assembly this year listed its ten bills or whatever
it was, the equivalent of what the Queen's Speech would
have been if it were a prime legislative body, and it
would have contained those ten bills. Assuming they wanted
to carry those through, could we devise an attempt of
working out what the resource implications and cost implications
would be of doing that so we can address our remit about
the financial implications of recommending such a switch
or a course? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I am very
happy to do that and to put in a note on it. In part,
though, I think one has to bear in mind that it does not
necessarily follow that the Assembly would deal with legislation
in exactly the same way as Westminster. I was having an
interesting discussion with my senior colleagues before
I came here because I wanted to get their views on my
evidence. It may be, for example - and it is hypothetical
- that you could have a situation where you could follow
through a primary legislative programme in such a way
that it was not going to itself generate as much subordinate
legislation. |
| TED ROWLANDS: So you could save
on that. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: Precisely so. |
| TED ROWLANDS: It would be a longer
bill. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: It could be
but I think as a Commission there needs to be an awareness
that it does not necessarily follow that the primary legislative
process and its consequentials within an Assembly context
would be the same as Westminster. |
| LORD RICHARD: My impression reading
your paper is you see the possibility of primary legislation
as a desirable addition to what they have got, provided
they do not use it too often, which is a perfectly rational
and acceptable position |
| TED ROWLANDS: That is a temptation
politicians will not accept. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I understand
that. |
| LORD RICHARD: If I am understanding
what you are saying, you can cope quite nicely with four
or five important pieces of primary legislation a year
and the Assembly Civil Service would manage that. I suppose
if there were more, perhaps ten or so bills a year, it
may be a bit different. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: That conclusion
you have fed back to me would have to be tested against
the work I have promised to Mr Rowlands, so I think it
is important that I should do that. I think what
I was really saying, and perhaps taking advantage of my
position a bit, is that if you are in effect the chief
executive of the Assembly, I should take the opportunity
to speak the Assembly up whenever I can. I think the impression
that I have got, and a lot of my colleagues have got,
is that the Assembly has filled an important gap in the
governance arrangements within this country. That gap
is how I have tried to express it. When you have
60 elected members focusing on the things that are important
to the people of Wales within an existing statutory framework
but with different budgets, eventually you come up with
all sorts of interesting, novel, highly desirable things
which can be done to improve people's lives in Wales.
I make this as a non-political point. It is something
which the institution has the capacity to do and to deliver
and increasingly over the last two or three years that
is what we have seen the Assembly doing. I am very proud
that the institution has been doing that. I think it can
do more of that and become more successful at it. I just
think - and this is a personal view - that it would be
a shame if it had primary legislative powers and then
became a bill-producing machine and that was lost. So
I just hope that if you were to recommend in that direction,
and I literally hold no views on that, I would ask you
to think very carefully about the extent to which the
institution might evolve in that way so as not to lose
the very real benefits which are being realised at the
moment. |
| LORD RICHARD: You say that the existing
settlement produces enough pressure on the individual
members - and that this will be more inventive and it
will be able to work around the road blocks in their way.
If you remove the road blocks --- |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: They are inventive
and they are very creative. The way I characterise
it is that in the past - and I do not mean this in a pejorative
way, Mr Rowlands was a minister himself - you had three
Welsh Office ministers who were operating to a very significant
extent from London and from Whitehall and they were doing
the best they could with their networks and their --- |
| TED ROWLANDS: I need to say I do
dissent from the first paragraph - your reference to ‘offshore’.
In 1975-79 there was nothing offshore about it. |
| LORD RICHARD: It was wading in the
shallows! |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I did not mean
any offence, I wanted to have an impactful phrase which
showed that the Welsh Office was a bit out of the mainstream
of some government departments, or perceived to be as
such. What you have got now is 60 elected members from
all over Wales with their different political values and
beliefs with their own networks which they are bringing
into the Assembly and into their subject committees, so
when bits of business are coming before a subject committee
there is a much more forensic, well-informed assessment
and consideration of those issues than was possible under
the old arrangements. It is out of that cauldron that
we have had a lot of innovative proposals. Again I make
that not in a party political sense, it is just the system,
whatever party was in power, would be delivering those
things which I think have been a bit better. |
| LORD RICHARD: What you have got
to have for that to work surely is an effective three
party system? If the Assembly is deeply political that
would not be effective. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: You have got
the experience of party that I have not. The point that
I would hang on to, which I think is critical to what
I have been saying as continuing to be achievable, is
the concept of having a minister present in the subject
committee. If you have a minister present in a subject
committee where these things are being discussed and debated,
by definition, the minister's views are being formed and
influenced in a much more focused way than would happen
otherwise. If you had a situation where ministers were
detached from the subject committee then that would encourage
a much greater politicisation and I would agree with you. |
| PAUL VALERIO: You say you are quite
capable of coping with additional powers and the atmosphere
in the Assembly is good and very positive but what about
the time and opportunity for scrutiny of secondary legislation,
with an increased workload, what sort of ratios of increases
would be required to adequately maintain the standards? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I cannot, I
am sorry, give you an informed and evidence-based answer
to that. I think it is a judgement you may feel that you
as a Commission need to reach. I think you would need
to take the views of the members themselves because I
have not discussed this with them. These are just really
my reflections and my observations. Logically there would
come a point when you could not add powers and responsibilities
to the Assembly to such an extent that you could expect
the existing 60 members adequately to do the job. I think
we can agree on that logical position. Where that point
comes is not something I can make judgements on. All I
can do is draw attention to it and in so doing say there
may be things which the Assembly is currently doing which
it could be doing differently and in a less time-consuming
way, and if members felt sufficiently comfortable with
that then that would create additional space to do, say,
primary legislation without losing any of the other things
which are generally regarded to be of particular value.
I think one of the things you might like to look at is
the extent to which, if the Assembly were to have primary
legislative powers, the amount of time devoted to subordinate
legislation could be reduced without there being a significant
loss of democratic accountability and control. |
| HUW THOMAS: Part prompted by the
‘offshore’ government departments, how does
Whitehall now regard you and to what extent do you see
your role as helping overcome some of the boundary issues
and ragged edges that we have been hearing about from
ministers and some of your senior colleagues? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: Can I just take
this as an opportunity to withdraw the offshore remark
because I do not want to cause offence to Mr Rowlands
or indeed to anyone. I was just wanting to try and --- |
| TED ROWLANDS: --- Thank you |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: --- capture
the reader's attention in the first few lines. I seriously
do not want it to cause offence and I withdraw it in deference
to Mr Rowlands. On the relationship with Whitehall, my
own personal view is that at one level Whitehall have
got used to devolution, they do not see it as a big issue
or a big problem. They are very tolerant of us and when
issues arise they will always be looking to resolve them
in a constructive way. The problem we have is that the
devolution to the Welsh Assembly is still very new and
if suddenly some issue arises and the Whitehall official
or team which has got responsibility for that has never
had to deal with the Assembly before, it has never been
on the radar screen, they have never thought through what
that means for the way they conduct themselves, then something
can go seriously wrong and cause embarrassment because
they advised the minister in the wrong way and the minister
has not had drawn to his or her attention the Assembly
or Wales angle, so things go wrong. That is all part of
the learning process and whilst it is unfortunate I do
not think one should read too much into it. |
| On the ragged edges, it always was the
case that the Welsh Office was an expansionist department
which whenever an opportunity arose to take additional
responsibilities it would do so, and that is where the
ragged edges have grown up because all we did when we
created the Assembly was take a snapshot of what those
ragged edges looked like and transferred them into the
transfer order which give the Assembly its powers. There
are areas where officials and perhaps members feel these
edges could be rounded off a bit but that is much more
in some portfolios than others. I have not read all the
evidence you have had from the ministers or read their
transcripts but that will be the impression that they
have given you. Some ministers do not see the absence
of legislative powers as a problem at all. |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: Can I ask you about
your budgets and how the staff budget is agreed. What
is the process by which the appropriate numbers and so
on to support the Assembly functions are agreed? What
is strictly within your purview as Permanent Secretary
and has had to be brokered within the political process?
How does it compare with staffing costs in other parts
of the Civil Service? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: The Assembly
has an administration budget for which I have responsibility
and all the other policy areas have budgets for the main
expenditure groups and in our jargon those are the programme
budgets, so there is a programme budget for economic development
and a programme budget for agriculture and then we have
our administration budget for administration costs. When
a budget is approved by the Assembly, the Assembly formally
approves all these main expenditure groups so the budget
that I work from is formally approved by the Assembly
and what goes --- |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: On the recommendation
of the finance minister? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: Absolutely,
so what goes into that budget reflects some discussions
which have taken place between us as officials and the
Finance Minister. |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: What about a comparison
with other areas of the Civil Service? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I would have
to let you have a note on that if you wanted that
to be pursued. The impression, and I think it is a fair
impression, was that we always felt in the Welsh Office
that as compared with the Scottish Office we have had
less generous funding than them. In part that may be an
unfair conclusion because I think if you are twice the
size of us, as the organisation in Scotland is essentially,
that gives you certain advantages in terms of capacity
and overheads and so on. I am certainly not suggesting
to you that I regard, myself, the Assembly as seriously
under-funded on administration costs and I would be surprised
if any comparison indicated that we were, but, equally,
I would be very surprised, to the extent you can do a
straight comparison, if the figures indicated that we
were particularly generously funded. |
| PETER PRICE: If one looks at the
impact on the staff themselves, you have quoted the staff
attitude survey for the National Assembly. Are there comparable
figures for Whitehall government departments or for the
Scottish Executive and, if so, are there any notable differences
between the two. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I do not think
at the moment there are sufficiently comparable figures
but we are currently doing this year's annual survey and
in this year's survey we have extended the number of questions
and built into the questionnaire questions which are comparable
across a large part of Whitehall, so that will give me
(and therefore you) comparative data, I expect these to
be available in February and I am very happy to share
those with the Secretariat. |
| LAURA McALLISTER: Can I ask you
about the Public Service Management Initiative you referred
to. It strikes me as a very laudable aim. Two questions
really. First of all, are you confident that we have sufficient
infrastructure? I am thinking particularly about the university
sector in terms of offering one form of provision for
this. To my knowledge, and I teach in this area, there
are not specific public administration programmes in universities
as things stand at this time, certainly not at post-graduate
level. Have you had any liaison with them? Secondly, should
that happen and should this group of specifically Welsh
looking civil servants emerge, what would be the implications
of that in terms of their loyalty? Would there be implications
in terms of their loyalty towards the United Kingdom Crown
Civil Service or would they see their loyalty as an Assembly
loyalty first and foremost almost to the exclusion of
the other side? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: On the Public
Service Management Initiative, and this is a view that
I passionately hold, there is a very strong case for creating
better career opportunities within the public sector in
Wales a benefit to public services as well as to people
who want to live and work in Wales. We are still at the
early stages but obviously we are involving and engaging
the higher and further education sectors in this. There
has been some quite active interest from certain parts
of the higher education sector. The way I look at it is
this: it is a question of tapping into both the physical
and intellectual infrastructure that exists in Wales so
that there should not be a need to have a massive investment
to achieve this. You make use of the teaching facilities
that exist in colleges and universities up and down Wales,
and to the extent they have got down time you can exploit
that down time. If you have provided the necessary leadership
and given people the confidence that this is going to
happen and this is what you want, it is my experience
that the higher and further education sectors can be sufficiently
responsive. Okay, it takes a bit of time but if this is
going to become a reality they can adapt themselves and
we can make use of the intellectual capital that is here.
I am not suggesting that we should be relying exclusively
on them because I am also a great believer that on matters
like leadership and management, a lot of it is sharing
experience that exists anyway. So where that happens all
you want is the physical location and the secretarial
infrastructure to bring people together to give people
on the course the necessary experience and opportunity
for interaction. |
| On the question of the Civil Service and
loyalty, this is something that I feel very strongly about.
In all my experience civil servants - and the Civil Service
Code makes it clear - owe their loyalty to the administration
that they serve. So in the case of the Assembly Civil
Service we owe our loyalty to ministers or where appropriate,
to the Assembly at large. It is in our blood and there
is no difficulty about that and where people get concerned
about dual loyalty and do we not also therefore have a
loyalty to the Civil Service arrangements or government
departments, the way you reconcile that is through our
integrity. If you have integrity and you know you have
a loyalty to your administration, that just drives you.
It really does drive you and you are operating in a system
and a set of circumstances where certainly all your official
colleagues are sailing by this same lodestar. There is
an understanding and a recognition that in order to fulfil
your responsibilities you have an absolute duty to service
the administration that you are serving, and you do that
with integrity. |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Departments
very often are thought to have a departmental ethos. How
would you describe the departmental ethos of the National
Assembly circular administration since 1998? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: 1999. Are we
talking about the ethos within the Civil Service circular
administration? I have been in the business of transforming
that ethos for two reasons: one, as I have indicated in
my paper, the Civil Service needed to be refreshed and
I needed to be giving leadership to that transformation
process anyway, and then the way we did business in serving
the Welsh Office, by definition, is no longer going to
be appropriate for serving the Assembly. I had two reasons
for wanting to change the culture of my organisation.
The way I am seeking to change it is to get everyone to
realise that it is their job to identify themselves with
the provision of excellent public services in Wales, to
know that they are part of a large organisation which
is constantly seeking to improve itself, which values
people and in particular the people of Wales. These strong
principles are in the process of being embedded through
the organisation and it will take time for that to be
recognised and acknowledged. |
| I think if you talk to my colleagues who
have lived through this, they would acknowledge that the
nature of the organisation that they work for and therefore
the nature of the culture that we have has changed. It
has still got a long way to go. |
| TOM JONES: To win the hearts and
minds of the Welsh people, the Assembly as opposed to
the government has perhaps to be seen to be closer to
those people and perhaps geography would be one thing
and there are some moves afoot to relocate some of your
staff to different parts of Wales, starting with Ted's
patch. Does that create problems? Are you keen on encouraging
that or will it be difficult to maintain this team spirit
that you are building? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: The National
Assembly is the National Assembly for Wales and therefore
it needs to be well represented throughout Wales. I think
as staff we all fully accept that and want to, as effectively
as we can, deliver that ambition of having three large,
new offices located in different parts of Wales. |
| Achieving that is not going to be easy
because there are all sorts of personnel issues in particular
around it. There is a very clear and firm resolve that
it will happen, that we will do it as professionally as
we can. At the intellectual level I am not aware of any
serious resistance to that. You can well imagine at the
individual level people can get concerned about what it
may mean for them, but as officials within the organisation
we have totally accepted that. |
| TOM JONES: Just one small question
on something somebody asked earlier on. Are you also Permanent
Secretary to the staff of the Wales Office? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: No, the direction
of travel was I was Permanent Secretary of the Welsh Office,
then for three months I was Permanent Secretary of the
Welsh Office and the National Assembly, then on 1 July
the Welsh Office ceased to exist and I remain as Permanent
Secretary of the National Assembly. When the Welsh Office
ceased to exist what is now called the Wales Office came
into being but that is a very, very small department and
it has its own head of department who is not a permanent
secretary. |
| LORD RICHARD: Could I ask you about
paragraph 22, it is the one that Laura was asking you
about. Towards the end of that paragraph you say: ‘This
in turn should help to reduce the frictions that currently
exist within the policy ‘delivery chain’...’
Can you expand on that a little bit? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: You have a situation
where the Assembly minister or the Assembly government
decides that they want to have this change in education
which is going to impact on schools. So that decision
is taken and the implementation of that decision then
goes to the local education authority and then goes to
the school. You have got similar things in health perhaps
where something goes from the Assembly to a health authority
to a trust and then it is down to a consultant to implement
it. If you have got people involved in that delivery chain
who do not know each other, do not understand each other,
do not necessarily share the same basic values, you can
see how you will not necessarily get the message across
or the team work that is required through that delivery
process. What I am saying, effectively, is that if we
can create opportunities for people in the future who
have a career in public service in Wales as part of their
own training and development either to have experienced
two or more different parts of the public sector or to
have had a series of development training experiences
with people who operate in these sectors, you will start
to reduce the artificial psychological barriers that may
exist and you will create a much better shared understanding
of what people's roles and responsibilities are and how
they can operate more effectively. |
| LORD RICHARD: It has got to be a
small institution for that. I do not know how it works
in England, for example. Presumably, the frictions are
lubricated in various ways. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: For those of
us who are involved in thinking about delivery at the
moment, which is quite a topical subject, one of the things
that we are concerned about is the fact that there are
just all these people who have got the responsibility
for different aspects of service delivery who do not necessarily
understand themselves as much as they should do, and therefore
communication is not as good as it could be and therefore
that is impacting on the way things happen. What I am
saying is that Wales is a small country but it is a country
where people share a very strong feeling for Wales and
if you can create opportunities for people to interact
as part of their training and development experiences,
there will be a payoff over time, not necessarily very
quantifiable but there will be a payoff in the way in
which services are managed and delivered in the future. |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: I wonder if I could
go back to your earlier answer about jagged edges. I think
you said that you had not had an opportunity to see all
the ministers but you felt there would be more jagged
edges in some portfolios than others. To what extent is
uncertainty causing problems on a day-to-day basis for
Assembly civil servants? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: Not on a day-to-day
basis. The basic tenet, and it is a view held very strongly
at the highest political levels of both sides - the UK
government and the Assembly - is that the relationship
at all levels should be one of no surprises. The job of
all of us who are making the devolution settlement work
is to ensure that there genuinely should be no surprises.
What I was saying is that where surprises exist or occur,
in my experience, they usually occur because of ignorance
or misunderstanding as opposed to wilful conduct. One
of the things I am doing to address that is I am setting
up meetings at least once or probably twice a year with
my key permanent secretary opposite numbers in Whitehall
so that we can pause and review what has gone well and
badly in terms of their relationship with us and our relationship
with them. So we are seeking to embed the learning and
ensure that we do not make the same mistakes twice. Through
things like that I think we will smooth out the relationships.
What you will then make be left with is the view that
the Assembly ought to have certain powers and responsibilities
which did not transfer at the time. You have got that
jagged edge as well which is a separate issue and essentially
a political issue. |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Do you
get the impression that I have got from people in Whitehall
that they think the settlement of which you were one of
the authors, embodied in the Government of Wales Act,
is bound to change? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I do not think
I can answer that on a political level for reasons you
will understand, but at an official level I think there
is a view, going back to the first discussion we had really,
that given the way the Assembly has evolved into these
two quasi organisations that has to be made reality in
some form or another. That aside, anything over and above
that is a political extra, if I can put it that way, but
the basic structures that exist at the moment, given the
way in which the Assembly has evolved constitutionally,
mean that it has inherited a fault line drawn it which
needs to be acknowledged. |
| TED ROWLANDS: Could I ask you how
you get on with the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office
because Edwina Hart came here and talked of frustration.
If you have these meetings with permanent secretaries,
do you see it as an opportunity for persuasion of the
Permanent Secretary of the Home Office? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: He is on my
list of permanent secretaries whom I will be having a
formal meeting with on these matters. I meet him anyway
on a reasonably regular basis when permanent secretaries
are coming together. I have no reason to believe that
he would not fully share all the sentiments I have expressed
to you this afternoon. In other words, I do not think
it is a Civil Service problem that may arise. |
| TED ROWLANDS: Historically, if I
may say, the Home Office has always been the most jealously
non-devolutionary department from my own researches and
experiences. Edwina Hart's evidence is that this
tradition has been well maintained! |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I do not think
I should add to Mrs Hart's evidence. I think it is the
case that the Home Office has a reputation for being one
of the more traditional government departments, if I can
put it that way, and which is therefore perhaps institutionally
less exposed to the impact of external changes than others. |
| LORD RICHARD: Spoken like a civil
servant! |
| PETER PRICE: Can I follow that through,
whether the differences in the relationships with Whitehall
departments are almost entirely a reflection of the different
ethos in the different departments, which inevitably has
grown up over time, or whether there is any other factor
that you could identify in terms of the different powers
of the two bodies or in some other way an identifiable
pattern to the relationships and the differences between
them? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I think all
government departments have their own particular cultures
which are evolving in different ways and at different
times. One thing which all the government departments
increasingly have in common is that there is a requirement
on them to transform themselves, and Andrew Turnbull has
been appointed essentially to drive through further and
quicker change in the Civil Service machine. As part and
parcel of that, there are certain imperatives on departments
which they all share now which they did not in the past.
So Whitehall departments have all got their public service
agreements which they have to deliver. They have a much
stronger accountable set of arrangements with the centre
and permanent secretaries have a much stronger accountability
relationship with Andrew Turnbull. All of that is affecting
the nature of the relationship but in my experience in
these sorts of relationships to a very significant extent
the most significant variable is personality, and at all
levels if you can establish a good working relationship
it requires both sides to invest in that working relationship
and then you can usually ensure that the no surprises
requirement is delivered. |
| TED ROWLANDS: Can I ask one personal
question, you are the first post-devolution Permanent
Secretary. Do you still look at a career structure within
the broader Civil Service or do you see yourself now as
the sort of man who will see it through? |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: It is a very
personal question and I will give you a personal answer.
I do not see how anyone can take the responsibilities
that I have got without making an absolute commitment
to the organisation, so I have made that commitment and
I am not looking to do anything else. On the other hand,
if you are in a role fulfilling the sort of role I am
doing, you actually hold that position in trust, and so
I am very conscious that I fully expect to continue to
do it for as long as I have the trust of the people who
I am either responsible for or accountable to. |
| LORD RICHARD: You could not really
move to central government, could you? You are not in
the same position as the Permanent Secretary of the Home
Office. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: The whole process
of senior appointments in the Civil Service has changed
anyway and it is now very unusual for a permanent secretary
in Whitehall to just be moved from one job to another.
It has happened to Rachel Lomax, but in very special circumstances.
The normal process is that permanent secretary posts are
either advertised openly or, if the circumstance are regarded
as warranting it, are advertised internally to the Civil Service,
but there is nonetheless a competition. The thought that
somebody might decide to pick me up and drop me somewhere
else is just not going to happen. |
| SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: In an
earlier exchange I asked an official: ‘more going
on, more policy initiatives and more work. Would you say
it has been more fun in the Welsh Office since devolution
or not?’ And the reply was: ‘I look for fun
wherever I can find it. The straight answer is that there
are days when it is absolutely exhilarating, wonderful
and remarkable and days when you wonder why you joined.’
Do you think that the level of Assembly staffing is adequate
and if it is inadequate in any way - and you put something
in your paper but you put it more elegantly, in more of
a Sir Humphrey form what that exchange represents - what
can be done about it, given that you said earlier in answer
to a question from Peter Price that more or less you can
get the levels of support you want. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: It is about
the biggest issue that I am currently grappling with.
I take stress in the workplace very seriously. I take
it very seriously when my staff tell me that they think
we are not able as an organisation to allocate the resources
to tasks as quickly and responsively as we should. It
will take me a bit of time to know the answer to the question
as to whether, all other things being equal, we can now
regard the Assembly staffing as being in a sufficiently
stable state for me to be able continuously to improve
the quality of the service that we provide at the same
time as taking out the long work hours and associated
stress which some, although not all, of my staff experience.
By definition, those are very important issues and ones
which are right at the top of my list to address. But
as I was saying earlier, I do not think that the solutions
to these things are necessarily or should necessarily
be let's just keep throwing money at it. There are things
you can do. You can invest in and make better use of IT.
You can have a better engagement with members to find
out if you can provide them with what they would regard
as a satisfactory service without putting as much resource
into it. You can do other things. We are not a strongly
executive organisation or implementation organisation
but we do, for example, handle lots of grant applications.
One of the things I have got my eye on is whether we can
centralise the whole of the grant-giving procedures as
a way of saving resource which can then be applied to
doing some of the other things that are under pressure. |
| Over the next 12 months I think I will
be wanting to reach a judgement on those matters. I cannot
give you a definitive answer but I think I have given
you an indication that I have not got an appetite for
assuming the answer is always to put in more staff. |
| VIVIENNE SUGAR: Can I ask you a
question about the composition of staff. We are charged
with looking at the representativeness of the Assembly.
Can I ask you about the representativeness of the Assembly
staff. Can you just talk about the equality agenda. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: In terms of
gender we have slightly more women than men, but in the
senior Civil Service we only have 27 per cent women. So
we have a highly skewed distribution of women, which is
something that is being actively addressed. I think our
percentages are slightly better than the overall Civil
Service average, but I do not make that point as one I
am proud of. |
| On ethnic minorities I think we are significantly
under-represented. I would think probably the figure at
the moment is between one and two per cent of the Assembly's
staff comes from ethnic minorities. In terms of self-reported
disability - and we have different measures of disability
- we have slightly more than the national average. These
are all figures that I am giving you from memory so I
ask you to acknowledge that. |
| What are we are doing about it? It is an
area where I am giving a lot of personal leadership. We
had a report which was done for the Equal Opportunities
Committee on institutional racism, and as a result of
that report there have been a lot of recommendations made
which were saying: ‘If you want to be able as an
organisation to rebut any charge that you are institutionally
racist, there are these things you should be doing.’ |
| The most important and critical recommendation
was that we should be opening up recruitment rather than
relying on internal promotion, so we are in the process
of moving to a system of open recruitment for advancement
within the Assembly which I think will be the most effective
way of ensuring that we have addressed some of those imbalances.
In the case in particular of the ethnic minorities, and
possibly in the case of Welsh language speakers as well,
just opening up recruitment will not in the short or medium
term be enough. So we are investing time and effort into
outreach activities in particular communities. I have
strengthened the Equality Policy Unit so that we have
a greater capacity to deal with these issues on the one
hand, but also to be working more actively to mainstream
equality through the way in which we do our business.
This is an area where I would not claim we are there yet
but increasingly the Assembly will be at the cutting edge
of how you drive equality and value diversity through
an organisation both in terms of employment policies but
also in terms of the way it actually does its business.
In our case that means in terms of the way in which we
develop and determine policy and also in terms of the
way we implement it. |
| LORD RICHARD: I think you gave those
figures in your evidence to the select committee, if I
remember rightly. Can I thank you very much indeed for
coming. I found it personally very illuminating and very
helpful. You will send us the notes. |
| SIR JON SHORTRIDGE: I will indeed. |
| LORD RICHARD: Good, thank you very
much indeed. |
