Transcript of public session: Mr S Banyard, Mr J Middleton and Ms P Samson of the Inland Revenue

Tuesday, 27 April 2004
10.30 am

Sir William Morris: Well, good morning everyone, and good morning to you, Mr Banyard. Welcome to you and your colleagues. Can I first of all start by saying thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning, and to give evidence? Thanks also for letting us have your written submission, which we found extremely helpful.

I appreciate that for some of our witnesses, the process may seem to be perhaps a little daunting. I am sure that does not apply to your good self, but nevertheless, I thought it might be just helpful if I set out briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning.

But first, let me introduce myself and the other members of the panel. I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. You can see that there are two other members of the panel: on my right is Sir Anthony Burden, who recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary after a very long and distinguished career in the police service; on my left is Miss Anesta Weekes QC. Anesta is an eminent barrister who sits as a recorder and part-time chairperson of employment tribunals. She was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry.

Mr Banyard, as you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service.

Our focus is the Metropolitan Police Service as an organisation, and not the individuals who make up the organisation. The inquiry we are conducting is inquisitorial, it is not, in tone or character, adversarial.

We are very keen to enquire into those issues raised by our terms of reference, so that we can make appropriate recommendation for further good practice, rather than concentrating on criticism of the MPS or individuals within it.

Could I, just for the record, state that a transcript is being taken, so that we have a proper record of the evidence given by all our witnesses, and this will be posted on our website later today.

At the end of these introductory remarks, I will lead on one or two questions to you, followed by Miss Weekes, and then followed by Sir Anthony Burden, who may also ask some questions.

At the conclusion of our questions, we will offer you the opportunity to make a closing comment should you wish to do so.

As I have indicated, we find your written submission of extreme help, and to that extent, we have noted that you have highlighted a number of issues which provide us with the following information: you have talked us through an explanation of the organisational structure of the Inland Revenue and its governance structure. You have talked about the regulatory framework and the rules regarding staffing matters.

We see from your submission a clear profile of the Inland Revenue's workforce, and we are much clearer about how the Inland Revenue deals with complaints, and of course examples of best practice in the Inland Revenue's areas of policy, procedures and practices have also been canvassed to us.

Finally, we are grateful for your explanation of the recent major changes in the management and managerial initiatives.

We would like to ask you questions, naturally, on the material that you have submitted, and to learn from you in order to inform our work, but before we move to the questions, for the benefit of the transcript, I wonder if you would mind just formally introducing yourself and indeed your colleagues.

Mr Banyard: Thank you. I am Stephen Banyard, and I am the director of human resources at the Inland Revenue. Before I held this post, I was the director of local services responsible for operational delivery for a large part of our business. Before that, I have held a number of other positions within the organisation.

With me today is John Middleton, who is now our director of cross-cutting policy, which has responsibility for compliance policy, and he has held also a number of posts in his career, including head of our special compliance office.

Also accompanying me is Pat Samson, who has been the leader of our diversity team and initiative over the last few years, and who has worked closely with Nick Montagu in driving out our diversity policies and practices. We are very pleased to be here today and we hope we can help you.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed.

Questions by Sir William Morris

Sir William Morris: As part of our terms of reference, we have spent some time looking at the issues of governance within the Metropolitan Police Service, and looking as to how we can examine public institutions which might not be directly analogous, but nevertheless, somewhat different from private sector governance practices and procedures.

We note that in paragraph 1.4 of your submission, and there is a reference to that, you have the governance structure of a departmental board, which is made up of a chairperson and director generals, I think there are three director generals, and they are allocated responsibility for three main areas of the business.

I wonder if you could expand on how this arrangement works: how, for example, do the chair and the director generals and the non-executive directors function? How do those functions also interrelate? What are the disadvantages, if any, of such a governance structure, and whether any other public institution has a similar structure?

Mr Banyard: The Inland Revenue's responsibilities and accountabilities pass from ministers to the chairman, and the chairman has constructed a structure which involves the departmental board, which is the highest level board, and that focuses mainly on strategic issues and issues of direction, but not exclusively. That board has three external members to bring experience to the department from outside and from outside the public sector.

The chairman and the three director generals also work closely as a team, and work as a team with their directors through the next level structure, which is the departmental management committee. That is a group of 14 or 15 people who together are responsible for delivering the department's business.

I think the advantages of working through a board structure are that you achieve a wide buy-in to a common set of purposes, and you can then take them forward through the organisation and having a corporate approach to the governance of the department is one of the things we attach importance to.

Sir William Morris: Is the chairman, executive chairman – is he or she full-time?

Mr Banyard: Yes, Nick Montagu was a full-time executive chairman and permanent secretary. At the moment, Ann Chant is in that role, and we are – or ministers are currently running a competition to find a new permanent executive chairman for us and for Customs, because we are coming together and integrating in a new national tax authority some time in 2005.

Sir William Morris: Without giving any secrets away or anticipating the future, do you see the current structure continuing when the two organisations come together in 2005?

Mr Banyard: I think that must be for the new executive chairman to decide, but our current experience would not lead us to advise him otherwise. I believe that other civil service departments have, in recent years, moved to management boards. We certainly find it works.

We have a hierarchy of communities who we buy into our plans and our values and our aspirations. You start with the departmental board, which is the highest level, and which is at director general level. The departmental management committee, which is the next level down, brings in people of my level, executive directors, but we have wider communities; twice a year, our senior management conference meets, and that brings together the top 50 managers in our department, and we have been working with that group, with conferences twice a year, and other meetings as necessary, for the best part of ten years. Building corporacy and building purpose is a long-term journey.

Sir William Morris: I am surprised to note the staffing levels of the Inland Revenue, 85,000 people, I am advised, and naturally, I am making the assumption that they are located nationwide.

Mr Banyard: They are. The 85,000 is the number of people rather than the number of full-time equivalents. We have a number of part-time staff. It includes the valuation office agency, which is an independent agency within the Inland Revenue, and that has approximately 5,000 staff, but, since 1998, we have moved from being an organisation that is just responsible for tax, or mainly responsible for tax, to being an organisation that is responsible for tax credits, for National Insurance contributions, for enforcing the national minimum wage; so the whole role of the department has changed, and our customer base has changed, and we have needed more staff to deal with the additional functions.

Sir William Morris: Yes. Well, with 85,000 people, even with some part-time, it is still a very major employing institution, and, like other institutions, I am sure the human relations aspect has to be managed and managed in a way which maintains consistency. I note earlier you indicated that areas around HR and diversity fall to your colleague.

I wonder whether you can share with us how the devolved structure, if it is devolved, has delivered consistency around areas like equal opportunities and diversity, and just the ordinary managing of the employee/employer relationship; if you can share the structural route with us, that would be extremely helpful.

Mr Banyard: If you go back some years, issues such as human resources were centrally managed. I think it was in the early 1990s that there was the perception that the business was too centralised, and unable to change because of that degree of centralisation, and so under a number of initiatives, empowerment being one of the key ones, responsibility was moved into business units.

Human resources then assumed a different role, which was to be responsible for human resource policies and practices, and it retained the personnel management for the senior staff, which, in civil service terms, was Grades 7 and 6, and the senior civil service.

The devolved structures brought enormous benefits to the organisation, unleashing people's potential to work with customers, to show initiative, to improve the business, but there is always a trade-off between consistency and empowerment.

In the mid 1990s, the human resources director had a small team which conducted triannual reviews of business units to see whether they were and how they were pursuing human resources policies, and how their practice shaped up, so there was a check on consistency then, but that is the QC part, the QA/QC process; the important part is getting it right in the first place, and I think the way you seek to achieve that is very clear corporate understanding of what the organisation is about, a corporate culture having very clearly laid out processes that people can follow, having support to people to do that, and I could talk further, but that is the broad shape of it.

You have got to get the culture and the processes right. In recent years, or recently, we are moving towards a more centralised HR structure again, and we are moving towards HR taking over the line management of almost all of the people who deliver HR services.

That still leaves a lot of responsibility with the line manager, and our job is to equip and support the line manager to carry through the functions that they need to do.

Sir William Morris: Just sticking with the HR and the people management process, we note, from reference in your submission – paragraph 4.21, reference there to grievance officers and grievance panels. What we are not clear about is whether, say, for example, a grievance panel is made up of external individuals, or whether it is made up of internal individuals within the Revenue itself, and precisely what degree of independence they have away from line managers who obviously make some of the decisions which may well give rise to the grievance. If you can, just share with us how the grievance officers and the grievance panel works?

Mr Banyard: I can. The Inland Revenue is a very large organisation; both we are geographically spread, but we have also got a large number of different independent business units, so if there is a need to have a group of people who are independent of a particular complaint or grievance, we can usually – or we can assemble them by drawing widely across the organisation.

It is important that panels are seen to be acting independently, people have to have confidence in them, but I do not think we go outside the organisation, although we would not rule it out if that was thought to be useful.

Ms Samson: I would agree with that. It is not something we have needed to do in the past. We have actually trained our – for example, our independent equal opportunities investigators, they have all been trained internally.

We would still make sure that they are independent of their particular business area where the complaint has actually arisen, but we see that there is a positive benefit in actually training some of our own people in this, because that is part of the awareness raising across the organisation, and they in turn – because they are from different parts of the business – can actually pass on their education around diversity and equality as well, so we can see some positive benefits about having that internal process with independently trained investigators.

Sir William Morris: Thank you. Just one final point from me, going back to governance: I note that in your earlier comment, you talked about the Revenue operating on ministerial directions, and I am making the assumption that that is the routine, board to ministers; you have dispensed with the middle person, so to speak, or the middle tier. And the organisation, or a lot of public institutions – whilst ultimately there is a ministerial responsibility, there is nevertheless routings, like the police services area, police authorities, for example, not exclusively to the Met, and then up to ministers from there on certain matters.

Having experienced the direct service minister governance, what do you see is the advantage or disadvantage of that?

Mr Banyard: I think the structure that is in place with us is the structure that meets the need of ministers, and it has been reviewed recently in the review that Gus O'Donnell led of the Revenue departments, and that is the need for ministers to have control over the policies and practices that we follow at a high level, but for us to have independence over the conduct of our individual cases, which is why we are structured slightly differently to other government departments.

I am not sure I can comment on the advantages or disadvantages because that is the way ministers want us to be.

Sir William Morris: Do you report to the Audit Commission?

Mr Banyard: We are responsible to ministers. The National Audit Office audits us and conducts reviews and enquiries into aspects of our work. They report to the Parliamentary Accounts Committee in the House of Commons, and we are answerable to them, and we are invited to visit them and discuss these reports.

We also report to – or we meet with the Treasury Select Committee hearings from time to time.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much. That completes the questions that I wanted to just explore on governance. I will just ask Miss Weekes to lead the questions from now on.

Questions by Miss Weekes

Miss Weekes: Thank you very much. Mr Banyard, I do not know who would like to deal with this topic, but perhaps I will explain what it is first, and you can choose all three of you, or one of you.

We are particularly interested in the reduction of time spent between notification of a disciplinary against an officer or a complaint and the conclusion of the process within the Met. I will tell you why we are interested. We have received consistent complaints from every single officer of every single rank that the disciplinary process and internal complaints take too long. I am particularly keeping it to disciplinary and complaints for officers and officer staff; I am not necessarily concentrating on the public complaints, because I think you will be aware that the Independent Police Complaints Commission is principally in charge of public complaints.

The delays go from one year to two years, even up to five or six years, and it is quite clear that everyone within the Met understands and are concerned, at all levels, of the cost to the Met of keeping officers on full pay when they are suspended, of the hurt and distress to officers and family whilst they wait, so it is a major issue, and we want to consider some sensible, practical, probably radical suggestions for reform.

I would like to do two things. I would like to go through the processes you have identified in your organisation and the occasions where you have mentioned timing, and then, if I may, put to you the suggestions that may work for the Met, so I can have your comments on what we should look for, what we should keep in mind. This is all to do with making things quicker, saving money and saving morale.

I see that at present, your organisation, in March 2004, was 85,146, I think that is the last count. I will come to the figures that relate to the Met; it is clearly quite different, we are not using it as a direct comparator, and I think you realise that we are looking to you for your assistance on good practice and systems.

You have a pilot scheme for unifying procedure for complaints, so I am going to deal with the way it is at the moment, because I think your pilot scheme is still up and running, is it not?

Mr Banyard: It is up and running, and we are comfortable that it is on the right lines. We hope to roll it out nationally in July.

Miss Weekes: All right. I am going to come to the unified, because there are some interesting features of it that may affect the issue of timeliness.

You have three processes, really, do you not? You have a system for dealing with diversity issues that come up for complaint. You have a system that deals with what you call department's complaint process grievance, and that really fits into formal complaints and informal as well – so it is basically two systems, is that right?

Mr Banyard: There are informal and formal complaints within that process, and the third set of processes are conduct and discipline processes, which may be triggered by complaints or may be triggered quite separately.

I am not sure whether we wrote about them in this or not, I do not think we did.

Miss Weekes: All right. I think my colleague is going to come to the detail about complaints; I would just like to keep to the issue of timeliness.

Can I just deal with what you say about the diversity issues? That is at your page 17. You have set out in quite a lot of detail there the procedure, and you mention one aspect of timing:

"The department aims to complete investigations within 12 weeks."

It is in fact on your screen, if you would like to look at it:

"The department aims to complete investigations within 12 weeks."

Now that is an average, is it? That is your aim; it is not something that is written in stone, and it is not statutory.

Mr Banyard: No, it is not statutory, it is an aim, and you have to have regard to circumstances, but we are conscious – as you have indicated, that speed is an important element in this process, and we therefore do everything we can to carry investigations forward effectively.

Miss Weekes: Well, we are all human, so no doubt you have had your delays. Can you, are you allowed to tell me what your delays are?

Mr Banyard: I am not sure I can answer –

Ms Samson: We do not have that information with us. I could add, what happens actually in the current investigative process is that all of our investigators have in fact got that target. What they are told to do is to actually keep a diary throughout the whole investigation, and to actually note in that diary any reasons why the investigation has actually been delayed.

They are also told to contact the case manager if there are going to be delays, so that the people who are party to the complaint are aware that there are delays in the process, so I think it is that keeping in touch element as well which is incredibly important, because undoubtedly, in some instances, for example, where witnesses are not available at certain times, et cetera, there could be delays, or where there is a great deal of information that the investigator has to see, or a great number of witnesses over a period.

So we are aware that, you know, we have that aim, that it is important that we state that, otherwise, if that is not there, people will think, "Well, there is nothing to aim for here", but I think it is important that we put in the procedures behind that to ensure that where there are delays, people are kept informed of the reasons for that.

Mr Middleton: Perhaps if I could just add a point of local colour, if you like, in cases that I have been involved in as a director, where there has been a grievance in my area of the business, I have tried, wherever possible, to have the investigator work on that as close to full-time as possible, and tried to relieve them of their, if you like, day-to-day workload, as best we can; it is not always possible to do it completely.

But also, when we have had the initial discussions, to make sure they understand the nature of the issue they are investigating, the scope, if you like, and then try and agree with them upfront a likely date when they will complete a report.

That helps to focus everybody's mind. There will inevitably be delays, but if they are working to a deadline, it does focus their minds on completion, which is what everybody wants.

Miss Weekes: I would like to talk to you about the case manager, because one of the things that we have in mind – and it might help you, in fact, if I simply quickly sketch what we are exploring at the moment, not what is necessarily going to be put in place – we do not know what the recommendations are going to be as yet.

It will not surprise you that, coming from my background as a part-time criminal judge and a part-time employment law chairman, I am well used to the concept of managing cases that arrive at a specific time for a fixed date.

All courts, at all levels, cannot function without that, so I have in mind bits of that process that might be incorporated, similarities of the process that might be incorporated, and each court centre has a case manager, someone that is in charge of the listing of cases.

There are judges who are in charge of deciding who gets further time or who does not. Judges are usually in charge of who does or does not get extra time because a witness is sick, or someone is on holiday, or work gets in the way. Legitimate reasons for wanting further time to investigate are usually given.

Within again the court process, there are categories of cases: fast track, those that are clearly not going to be able to come within six weeks or six months. There are those which will, in their time, be finished within a week, or they might take three months; lots of variables about why cases come on before another case.

So have all of that in mind when we come to think of what would be a sensible practical suggestion for making life swifter within the Met.

So keeping those things in mind, I would like to flag up some of the things in your own systems that I have noticed.

Getting officers or your investigators to put things in their diaries; now, that is going to be as good as the investigator is, and will he or she always remember to put it in the diary? Does that work?

Mr Banyard: It does work. It is important that your investigators are trained in the first place, and that you look at their diaries if for no other reason to train them and to develop them.

Ms Samson: Can I pick up on that? What we recently did, we were aware that obviously, the investigator availability is a critical issue around getting cases dealt with very promptly, so last year, we did another exercise to in fact ensure that we had a big enough pool, so that we could address all cases coming through.

In that exercise, we actually selected 84 part-time investigators, so that in fact, what will happen is that, as cases come on-line, there is a pool of people that can be referred to with that case, and their availability can be checked as well.

We are also aware, within that pool of investigators, of some of our more experienced investigators who can take the most complex cases, because they have wider experience than some of the others, so again, within that, there is the ability to actually allocate a case to the person who is going to be available to do it, and also to the person who has got the experience to deal with some of the most complex issues.

The other thing just to mention is – one of the issues that we are looking at is whether or not there is a sufficient business case for actually having a number of full-time investigators in the organisation. We are actually looking at the pros and cons of that approach at the moment.

Miss Weekes: I am going to come back to allocation in a moment, I was just interested in how you always ensure that reasons are put down in the diary, as to why that investigating person or personnel requires more time, and who checks it?

Ms Samson: We obviously have a QA/QC process, and we would hope that, as part of the overall review of the investigation which happens at the end of the investigation, those issues are actually picked up at that time.

But certainly, what we are moving towards in the new complaints process is, because we will have a stream of dedicated case managers, that is all that they will be doing; they will not be doing any other work, they will simply be managing the complaints stream.

They will have a more senior officer who will actually again be dedicated to complaints management in the organisation, so any concerns that they have about the delay of a particular complaint, you know, the investigator, if they feel that there are not good reasons that the investigator has given, that can be referred up through the management stream to that overall manager of the complaints stream.

Mr Banyard: And they also have a role akin to that of a project manager, in that their role – or project sponsor; their role is to hold the project manager, in this case the investigator, to a plan, but also to enable that investigator to follow through with that plan, and it may be that what the investigator is experiencing is difficulty getting into people's diaries, and it is then – the issue is making sure that people treat the investigation with sufficient importance.

Over the years, we have learnt, through all our business units, that dealing with cases swiftly is in everyone's best interests, so it is not difficult to get senior support to push things along if we need to.

Miss Weekes: What happens to those personnel officers or investigating officers that actually just do not toe the line, or maybe all your personnel officers are really very good, and you do not have a problem with pulling them to book?

Ms Samson: I think we would be very aware about – if there were particular issues around an investigator. If we felt that there were difficulties, and that investigator was not up to the job of doing investigations, or indeed if we felt that they were being pulled in too many ways, because of other work priorities, then certainly we would step in and ensure that that case was moved on to somebody else who had the right time and expertise.

It is not in our interests, or indeed the investigator officer's interest, to keep them on if, in fact, they have not got the expertise, they find out that they have not got the expertise; or indeed that they just have not got the time to actually complete the investigation satisfactorily.

So we would step in if we thought that the case was not being properly managed.

Miss Weekes: Does every case fit into 12 weeks, or do you categorise those that can be fast-tracked – do you have a fast track? Do you make some judgment about the sort of length of time that a case is going to take? Do you ask the parties that question?

Ms Samson: We have an overall aim, which is to complete in 12 weeks, and we think that that is important for just focusing people's minds on the swiftness of the action and how important it is.

Miss Weekes: In the new pilot scheme, I do not see any reference to timing there, I presume you will still keep your 12 weeks?

Ms Samson: No, we are saying that within the new system, we are aiming to complete the investigation part of it in nine weeks. We are actually hoping to speed up the process.

Miss Weekes: And again, will you build into that any particular checks, balances, sanctions, if people go over time, or are you just going to let it roll through as it has done before?

Mr Banyard: We want to see how it works out in practice. We do not want to put any more formal structure in place than needs to be there. At the moment, we will let that run, and, if that framework is sufficient, we will stick with it; if we need further regulatory structure, we will put it in place.

Miss Weekes: Within that, I just want to touch one aspect, because it is quite important. You keep statistical records of trends – it may be an obvious question, but we are interested in that: why do you, in fact, do that?

Ms Samson: We review all of our formal complaints, and indeed our employment tribunal complaints, to, if you like, learn from that, to find out what is going on in the organisation.

For example, when we were putting together the new complaints process, we reviewed previous cases where complaints had been made formally.

Some of the learning from those, we have actually been able to take forward and try out now, as part of the new complaints process. For example, one of the things that became patently obvious when we were looking back at previous experiences is about the relationship breakdowns that can happen very early between people, and how that can escalate into much more serious issues.

So as part of the learning, what we are actually doing is we are introducing contact officers to try and get in and do some early mediation to try and bring the parties together and start talking about what the issues are.

So we have tried to actually look at previous complaints, and review what is going on, and see how we can build those into new processes and practices in the organisation.

Mr Banyard: The effect is a continuous learning process, but the new complaints procedures reflect several years of learning; I think the key point is the one that Pat brought out, which is to surface issues early, before they become too large, to move in quickly to help people before entrenched views are formed.

Miss Weekes: How do you keep statistical records, and who keeps them?

Ms Samson: Every part of the organisation, every business team, actually keep their own records of complaints and categories. We collate those annually to look at those. We also have access to employment tribunal complaints through our solicitors, we work in partnership with them, and, again, trying to share the learning that comes from tribunals, so we get our solicitors' views as well about the learning from being involved in previous tribunals.

Miss Weekes: So you have round table discussions?

Ms Samson: We do.

Miss Weekes: Can I just end by asking you one or two points in relation to the Met? I think it is important to flag up that there are some 23,000 plus officers in the Met, and police staff, about 16,000. So we are talking about somewhere in the region of 46,000 individuals; it is a very large organisation.

It has complex operational duties, it is vast and complex, and the legal obligations on individual officers are vast and complex; I know you know that, but I think it is worth flagging that up, when we talk about how we can realistically make it quicker to deal with complaints.

There are going to be more of them, probably, because the public are entitled to complain, and there are internal disputes between officers and staff; you cannot ever get rid of that, when human beings are working together, and life is very busy operationally, and you are having to manage staff.

Now that means that there will be many categories of discipline and categories of internal complaint. If we suggested trying to have a system where you categorise cases, because they will attract different timings – first of all, do you agree with that, a different case would attract a different timing? If it is a breach of a procedural rule, you might be able to deal with that within a month; if it is a corruption case, you are going to need longer.

Mr Banyard: It is certainly true that the more complex the case, the more time you are going to need, and the question is: how firmly do you want to build that into your structures? Whether you want to give people guidelines and aims to work by, or whether you actually turn it into a code and rules.

We do not have a code and rules, because we do not feel at the moment we need that, but I think you would have to judge, from looking at the Met, what you thought would work for them.

Miss Weekes: Yes. The next overall feature would be: who would be responsible for setting the categories, and then for saying, "That is a fast track, we are going to deal with that within six weeks; this is not a fast track, I am going to give you about six months/eight months, but I would like to think we have a fixed date for the disciplinary at the end of eight months".

We have in mind a suggestion that that person should be independent, so that they are independent of the professional standards department that usually investigates, and clearly independent of the person complained of.

Because of the vastness and the numbers of the complaints and the complexity, that person brings to bear a fresh independence of the needs of both parties; any comments on that?

Mr Banyard: That sounds sensible, but not understanding the pressures in the Met, it would be difficult to say to you that that was the only way to go, for example.

I think that person will need to bring independence, but that person will also need to bring a view that people have confidence in, and therefore, they have to be able to balance the needs of the investigation with the needs to continue the business or the normal operational activities of the Metropolitan Police.

It is having somebody who can hold those two issues in mind, and enjoy the confidence of the people in the process, and the people in the business who have to support it.

Mr Middleton: If I could add one further thought, I guess it is a pretty obvious comment, but I think it is worth making, that time is important, but quality is just as important, and if people feel the most important target they have is to complete an investigation within two months, or six months, or whatever, they may well meet that target, but you may not get the best quality investigation, if they are slavishly following a time target.

I think what is probably important – what I would want to see, if I were involved in a system like that, would be dialogue between the person setting the targets and the people who have to manage the staff who are delivering them, and dialogue between that manager and the people who are actually doing the investigation that we all agree is so important.

Miss Weekes: Yes. I think my summary originally included reflecting the court process where parties are allowed to come along and say, "I cannot make that date, these are the genuine reasons why", so that there are reviews built into the system.

Mr Banyard: I think that is useful, to prevent unnecessary delay, but I think you will want to look at the need for a broad buy-in to making these processes work more speedily. I think if you obtain that buy-in, then people will make reasonable accommodation. If people feel that the process, the importance of the process is being elevated, or if they do not see the value of it, then you may not get the positive contribution that you are looking for.

Miss Weekes: The pool of available persons that deal with disciplinary, this is another potential problem for the Met, because officers at commander level, for example, would often be drafted in to deal with the disciplinary panels, and there is a suggestion, which will be incorporated, I believe, through the enactment of the IPCC, that members of the public will now sit on disciplinary panels.

But dealing with the availability of panels, how do you always ensure that your pool of available people is there, so you are not delaying the fixing of a date for a disciplinary by trying to find somebody or pluck them out of operational duties?

Mr Banyard: The conduct and discipline processes have been run with various independent – are run with independent people within the process, the case manager independent of the investigator, independent of the decision taker, but we have an overriding aim to push the processes along quickly.

Frequently, the decision taker may be a senior line manager. It is not in that person's interest to prevaricate with the process, so if a disciplinary charge involves the senior line manager or the HR section in his business unit, acting for them, there is a common purpose, which is that it is in everybody's interests to progress.

I think it is appealing to people's interests first, and only putting the rules in place or the regulatory framework if that does not succeed, and you nevertheless feel you should move more quickly; that is the way I would go.

Mr Middleton: We also try to keep the line management chain involved, we do not divorce the complaints process from the normal line management chain. It is either part of it, if it is an informal complaint, or running parallel to it and keeping in close touch with normal line management.

Miss Weekes: Sometimes the matters before disciplinary involve line management as being the person complained about.

One of the issues also that comes up in the issue of timing is: who should be responsible for keeping the complained officer in the know about what is going on, and how much should he know? If it is a corruption case, there may be public interest immunity issues which he is not entitled to know. But generally, what are your comments and what should we look for when we suggest a process within the timing mechanism for keeping people in the know about what is going on?

Mr Banyard: I think you have in mind there quite serious cases, do you not?

Miss Weekes: Some of them will be.

Mr Banyard: I think, John, you are probably best able to ...

Mr Middleton: I think there are a couple of issues there. For formal complaints, which are not likely to result in a criminal prosecution, then we – there is a very significant level of trade union representation within the Inland Revenue, and we encourage staff to consult their union representatives.

It is only in the more serious cases where staff are suspended from duty; and the less serious, the investigation is very often carried on while staff remain in post.

We take dishonesty by staff very seriously, and our policy is to investigate, with a view to a prosecution, any cases where there is dishonesty, even relatively small amounts, because we feel we have to be seen to be honest – not only be honest; our policy is to back that up.

In those circumstances, we would generally, I think, investigate a member of staff pretty much in the same way that we would investigate a customer who we suspected of defrauding the department: we would be working with a view to prosecution; we would follow the normal rules in the PACE codes of conduct, for example, even though they do not directly apply to the Inland Revenue, we follow them anyway, because that is good practice.

If staff are suspended, I think colleagues would keep them in touch with what is happening, if you like, in the office.

Miss Weekes: Who is the colleague, somebody designated?

Mr Banyard: It is somebody designated.

Ms Samson: I was just going to say that very often, if people are suspended, very often our welfare services as well would be alerted to the fact that we have people who are away from the office, so it may well be that our welfare services are brought into the equation as well at that point, so there is still some support there available, and people are actually made aware of the services of welfare at the point they are suspended.

Miss Weekes: Okay, I think that may be moving into the area that Sir Anthony, I think, would like to ask some questions on. Thank you.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much, Miss Weekes. It is at this point that I should be moving to Sir Anthony for some questions, but we do have a practice in ensuring that our transcript writers are not overburdened, or for too long at any rate, so can I suggest we have a very short break, for five minutes or so, to ensure they have a little rest, if that is okay with you. Thank you very much.

11.30 am
(A short break)
11.37 am

Sir William Morris: Okay, Mr Banyard, thank you for your tolerance with us. I will go straight into asking Sir Anthony Burden to lead the questions on our behalf.

Questions by Sir Anthony Burden

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you, good morning. Just a couple of points, if I may, on complaints, before moving into more general HR areas. You have mentioned on several occasions QA/QC processes. Could you just explain something about those, in terms of the way that you ensure quality control around complaints investigations?

Mr Banyard: Quality assurance is the important part, and that is getting the processes right in the first place, so it is looking at what has happened in the past, understanding what is happening now, getting feedback from stakeholders, getting feedback from customers, people involved in the process, and building that into your process in the first place.

If it is an annual process, for example our annual performance management process, then you build it into guidelines that you give people at the beginning of the year, and I think the positive stuff at the front of the process is important.

The quality control you put in at the end of the process, and you put in – you monitor either informally or formally, with metrics or without, depending on what you feel you need, to see whether in fact what happened was what you intended to happen, and, if not, to find out why not.

I will ask Pat to say a little bit about the QA/QC for this process, grievances.

Ms Samson: Up until having the unified system, obviously all parts of the organisation actually reviewed their own complaints to see the quality of those complaints. However, what we are doing with the new case manager is actually building in a number of checks to do with how a complaint is managed from start to finish.

Because we will have that one group of people, what we will have is very good information, about what is working well in the process, and if there are any areas of concern, so in fact, as part of the pilot in Scotland, that review, if you like, of how cases are managed, from start to finish, is being checked for issues around good management practice and bad management practice, if those come out of the process.

So in fact, we will have a step-by-step analysis then about what works well in taking forward complaints in the organisation. But we think that because that will be a discrete team, the information that we are getting will be very robust, and from that, we can actually do this constant improvement, where we identify if there are particular areas that we want to revisit.

Sir Anthony Burden: And if you have had a high-profile case that has gone to a hearing and has not appeared to have been handled very well, have you a debriefing process on the quality control side that ensures that lessons are learned?

Mr Banyard: We look at all high-profile cases, whether they go well or not, and see what lessons there are to be learned, and if there are lessons around the process system, then we build those in. The new complaints grievance equal opportunities process we are bringing in reflects a lot of that learning.

If the lessons are additional training for individual people involved in the process, then we would take that too.

Sir Anthony Burden: Right. Just a couple of other points. You use the ACAS codes of practice, that has worked well for your organisation.

Mr Banyard: Yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: Do you have ACAS training staff as well?

Ms Samson: We do not have ACAS training, but we have used external consultants to train all of our investigators. They are an organisation who are widely respected in the diversity field, and who have a wealth of experience both in domestic legislation and European legislation, so those are the people that we actually use to train our equal opps investigators.

Sir Anthony Burden: Right, thank you. And complaints in the area of equality and diversity, you have got these 70 internal investigators trained, possibly more now; how can you be assured that the process actually carries the confidence of minority groups within your workforce?

Mr Banyard: We have got a number of ways in which they can bring their views forward. At the highest level, the chairman meets directly with the diversity advisory group, which has a rotating group of people who come to it. We have networking groups, we talk with our people informally.

I think it is through those informal processes, as much as anything, that you learn whether people have confidence in the processes, but we do know from surveys that we have done that people, for example, have confidence that their managers believe in our diversity policies, and try and follow them through.

Sir Anthony Burden: And that has been a constant statistical return, in terms of –

Mr Banyard: That is something we have built up over the years.

Sir Anthony Burden: Okay, thank you. Can I move on to more general HR issues, if I may?

Firstly, let me ask a question around your changed management process, as it relates to people. Obviously, you have been through massive upheaval, you are about to go through massive upheaval. In terms of the actual processes you operate, could you just give us an insight into how those processes are managed and the extent of buy-in from lower levels within the organisation?

Mr Banyard: Perhaps it might be useful if I point you to some things which we think are important in making change go successfully. I think to start off with, you have to have a clear lead and a clear aim for what you wish to achieve with that change, and you have got to get buy-in for it across the organisation.

So for a major change, we would bring that to one of our senior committees of the department; if it was a really fundamental change, we would bring it to the departmental management committee.

Before it ever reached there, all of the key stakeholders will have been brought in or won over through formal or informal conversations, and at the departmental management committee, people will then debate it in the round, and commit to it.

So I think that is the most important thing, you have all got to believe and agree that you want to go there.

You then need good project management built around it, and that is the mechanistics of it, that builds confidence in it. Two other factors that we have felt are important – one is inclusion and ownership.

We gave you the example of area management, but we could cite a number of other programmes where the more you have been able to involve frontline staff in design aspects, perhaps on a representational basis, where you have been able to involve the managers who are going to take this process forward in designing the change, the more they have ownership of that change, and therefore, the more comfortable they feel with it.

If change is being done to you, you feel out of control; many people feel very uncomfortable with it, so although we may not be able to consult people on what we are going to do, we may be able to consult them on how we do it, and if you are then asked, "Well, you take this change forward and lead it", you then become in control.

So inclusion and ownership are important to make the change work, and for the area management changes, for example, across the country we have brought together our local offices, in groups of about six to eight. So, for example, to paint a picture, in Norfolk with offices in King's Lynn, East Dereham, Norwich and Great Yarmouth, those offices are now managed in an area; those changes are quite fundamental across a wide rural belt, and the staff of all of the offices will have been involved with the managers in planning how that change would be made, and how they would achieve the department's goals.

Another very important dimension to change management is communication, and the key – I think a lot of organisations think they are good at the telling part of communication, but actually, you cannot tell people too much during change.

One of the things that we learnt during the merger of the Inland Revenue and the Contributions Agency in 1998, which affected a lot of people being brought into the organisation, was that if we had not got something of substance to tell them, we had not actually made a decision or completed a review, we told them what processes we had done, because that is what they wanted to know. They wanted to know what had happened, how we were getting on with bringing the two parts of the organisation together, when would they find something else out.

I think if people feel that you are keeping them as fully in the picture as you can, that gives them some reassurance, but the other part of communication is the really important part, which is listening; that is, having mechanisms to listen to what people are thinking and saying, and giving the leadership of the department an opportunity to respond to that.

In the early 1990s, we put in place a mechanism in the Inland Revenue called "Team Listening", which enabled us to disseminate messages straight to the frontline, and put in place a mechanism for the responses to those messages to come back up the line to be distilled and to come back to senior management. We still have that process in place, and we can identify the top five issues.

The Contributions Agency also had that mechanism in place when we merged, but that we did not judge was sufficient for a process that was moving very quickly, the merger, and where rumours and fears could blow up very quickly. So we established additional mechanisms there, we established a rumour mine; you could ring up the rumour mine and place your rumour, and we would either confirm or deny it within a stated time period, or at least say that we could not yet rule on the rumour.

So I think you need to put in place mechanisms that meet the needs of people in the organisation they are in, but you cannot tell people too much, and you cannot listen to them too much.

Sir Anthony Burden: If I were an organisation outside of yours seeking from you, as a senior executive, your justification for putting obviously so much effort into communication, and justifying it, what would that justification be?

Mr Banyard: Bottom line, it would have to be the bottom line cost/benefit analysis. If you carry through a change that is of a major nature that involves the organisation processes and almost, therefore, inevitably the culture of what you are trying to deliver, you have got to buy in everybody involved in the process. If you do not, your change will not actually be effective, and I think, if you look at the change literature in the private and the public sector, there are a lot of examples of changes that did not go in as they were intended.

The actual financial cost involved in communication, be it listening or telling, is actually quite small in relation to some of the other costs which you meet. For example, the cost of changing IT systems can be quite high, so in cash terms, I do not believe that this is a major element. It is a major element for some organisations, because they are not used to it, and they do not know how to do it, and it therefore seems irksome.

But if you are trying to – we have 80,000 staff, they are in 357 towns, they are on 500 sites, they are in over 20 different line management chains. We have to have mechanisms to get to all of those people if we want to make a change to be effective. This will be true in most organisations.

Sir Anthony Burden: Just to finish off that point, can I just – that relates to macro change within the organisation. If I am a manager in King's Lynn, and I have got a member of staff applying to me for part-time working, can I ask how you communicate policy, firstly, day-to-day policy, and where would that manager go within your organisation to get that sort of day-to-day assistance in people management terms?

Mr Banyard: Our human resource rules and guidance are contained in a document called "The Guide", supplemented by periodic human resource memos which together form our practices and guidance, and frontline managers are encouraged to go to that first, but sometimes, if what they are looking for is not easy to find, or if they prefer, then business units have human resources teams at the moment; shortly, they will be brought together to be teams working in HR itself, but that does not matter, they will still be there to serve the customer.

So the frontline manager can phone up or talk directly with their HR guidance, who will point them, or tell them, or advise them how they can behave.

Sir Anthony Burden: That brings me on nicely to some comments you made earlier about devolved HR structures. Can I just come back to that, please? Because there are some important issues there for us, around the changes you have made and the changes you are about to make.

If I understand you correctly in what you have said, the day-to-day responsibility for managing people still remains with the local manager.

Mr Banyard: And that responsibility comes up through the service delivery – the operational line, so when I was the director of operations, I was ultimately responsible for an awful lot of what my people did.

Sir Anthony Burden: Yes, but you are pulling back into the centre a sort of overarching HR strategy, so there will be some givens, in organisational terms, that the devolved responsibility is one thing, but it must be within this umbrella of general HR policy; is that about right?

Mr Banyard: That is right. In the period in the 1990s when we moved to devolved HR, I think we used the phrase "the tight and the loose". There were things which were fixed and which you had to comply with completely, and there were areas where guidelines were set and you had freedom to move, and even when we pull a lot of HR delivery back into the centre, there will still be a structure like that, as there is or was for any process that you would have in the department, and the degree to which things are tight will reflect the degree to which you are uncomfortable with inconsistency.

Sir Anthony Burden: If I can just come back to this example of the way that perhaps the policy on part-time working is complied with, you would hope, then, with this new structure, that there would not be inconsistency between Aberdeen and King's Lynn in the way that policy is actually adhered to, because you have got this sort of central thrust, as it were?

Mr Banyard: Yes, and that policy is arrived at – or that position in relation to equal opportunities issues, and, for example, the approach to part-time working; you reach that over a long period.

I think if you are managing a group of people in one building, you can gather all the managers together, you can talk to them, and you can move things very quickly. In a large dispersed organisation, you cannot always move so quickly, so you have to have consistency of purpose.

We have been working at equal opportunities issues since they were given priority in the early 1980s in the civil service, so if I use the QA/QC analogy, the most important thing for us is to ensure that people in every part of the organisation do understand what we are trying to achieve by part-time working, and do understand that there is a balance between the needs of the business and the needs of the individual.

There are parts of our business where we have very flexible working hours, because the business can support that, and it enables us to recruit very able people who might not be able to work for other employers. It gives us a niche in the market.

In other parts of our business, we have to operate much more – or much less flexible hours. In our contact centres, we have to provide a service seven days a week, from 8.00 in the morning until 10.00 at night. Now for that, we have to have more fixed terms of employment, and more direction. We try and achieve a balance between what we need – we try and achieve, through our managers, the understanding of the flexibilities there. You will never get total consistency.

Sir Anthony Burden: No. At business unit level, are you now content with the HR staffing levels and levels of expertise that you have got at that unit level?

Mr Banyard: I think we are content, but you should be aware of the initiative by Peter Gershom, who is looking at – or who has looked, in his efficiency review, at how to make savings within government, and how HR can be restructured to be more effective, which may result in delivering the same service, we believe at better quality with fewer people by bringing them together.

But at the moment, we have a staffing ratio of approximately one HR person to every 62 staff, which is quite good by civil service standards. That includes the policy and systems people that we have that I am directly responsible for, and all the people who do the day-to-day personnel records and keep them there.

We will be moving towards a ratio nearer one to 100, which is where most government departments will be going, and we will be doing that, we believe, without reducing the service.

Sir Anthony Burden: Perhaps we could come back to you outside of the hearing on the business unit structure, we would find that very interesting, thank you.

Around diversity, gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, are you happy you have got all those balls in the air equally balanced at the same time?

Mr Banyard: I think it would be a brave person who said they had everything equally balanced. We are conscious that they are all areas we have to emphasise and make progress with. I am not sure I would pull any one out and say we are more behind or more in front, but we do recognise the need to concentrate and indeed the Northern Ireland equality scheme lays out for us the need to look explicitly at nine or ten specific areas.

I think, more generally, we have tried to emphasise diversity, and we have tried to give our managers an understanding of what diversity and the diversity initiative is trying to address.

I can remember – I am not sure whether I am answering your question, so stop me if I am not.

Sir Anthony Burden: No, please, carry on.

Mr Banyard: As a regional director in 1999, we were – we felt a great support towards the diversity initiative which the department was launching, but I felt that a number of my officers in charge – I was a regional director responsible for 65 local offices in the eastern counties – were also broadly supportive, but wanted a greater understanding of what diversity was about.

We engaged a consultant, Geraldine Bown, who gave a particularly good workshop and seminar, which explained to people how they reacted to difference, explained the advantages of reacting to difference positively, and how diversity was an important element for us.

Now, as an organisation, we have a very wide customer group. We have moved from being a tax organisation, which just deals with tax, to being an organisation that, as I said earlier, is responsible for national minimum wage, and for people's National Insurance contributions, so we are responsible for protecting the individual rights of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

We touch most groups of society, so diversity is not an option for us, diversity is absolutely fundamental. If we are to enjoy the confidence of our customer groups, we have to have the understanding of those groups, and to do that, we have to have a diverse workforce, and equality policies to support it.

Sir Anthony Burden: I was very interested in your comment, saying that the workforce felt confident that their managers believed in diversity.

Mr Banyard: Yes, and that is, in a sense, why I gave you the example. Diversity has not only been driven out from HR, it has been driven out because individual business managers have behaved in a corporate manner, have seen that the organisation wants to go in a particular direction, have bought in to that direction, and have taken initiatives to advance it themselves.

Sir Anthony Burden: Have you, as an organisation, gone through a pain barrier with this? Was there a time when you would say, "No, we did not have the confidence of our workforce in terms of diversity", and you were just believed to be lip service, et cetera?

Mr Banyard: That is not an easy question to answer. The history that we followed was that the civil service introduced a strong equal opportunities push quite early in the 1980s, I believe, and I am conscious, having grown up in the organisation, that equal opportunities has been an issue which successive boards and chairmen have taken seriously, and therefore we have taken seriously.

Diversity was introduced to us gradually in the late 1990s, and I think it appealed to people, because it was positive and it was seeking to get the best out of people, and it recognised that society was changing, but what really drove it home for us was our customer base changed very radically, and we had to respond to it, which has given us – the real strength behind our diversity initiative is that it is fundamental to our business policy.

Sir Anthony Burden: Very similar to policing in that respect. There are several initiatives that you mentioned which are very helpful: the panels of diversity champions, for example.

Mr Banyard: Yes, which I am going to this afternoon.

Sir Anthony Burden: That has been a major initiative driving this forward?

Mr Banyard: Yes, it has. The panel of diversity champions brings together a group of senior directors. It is chaired by a regional director, actually he has just been promoted to being a national director, but he was a regional director, and represented on the group are a range of national – that is, human resources or IT subject directors, and also business operational unit directors.

We report through the champion of champions to the chairman, who takes an active interest in diversity: Nick Montagu took an active interest, and Ann Chant has succeeded him, she takes a very active interest too.

In addition to that, the chairman has the diversity advisory group, which brings together a very wide range of people on a rotating basis who are people chosen not least because of their ability to speak up.

But coming back to the champions group, we look at diversity issues, we take them forward on behalf of the board, and if we cannot progress them satisfactorily ourselves, then we would push them up to the departmental management committee.

Mr Middleton: Perhaps I could help just with a personal reflection from my previous job as director of the special compliance office, which I think colleagues here would say is or was the part of the organisation that I think most people would have expected to have been perhaps a little more resistant to that sort of change than others, just for historic reasons.

The office investigates serious tax frauds, it is the only part of the Inland Revenue that carries out investigation to criminal standard with a view to prosecution, and deals with other, sort of, significant abuses of the tax system.

I think the lesson I would draw from leading the teams there – when I worked there, there were about 600 people in eight centres across the country – is that people have to understand that you are in it for the long run. This is not just another initiative which those in the organisation who do not want to join can just sort of keep their heads down and it will pass them by, and another initiative will come along in a year or two's time that they can ignore again; this is here to stay, and that you work really hard to incorporate diversity principles into the business planning, rather than have separate diversity things.

Because totems are important to start with, but it has to develop beyond that into, "This is what we are about", and that requires visibility at the top and through all management levels.

As Stephen said earlier, it is about talking and listening, and applying a sort of simple principle which I tried hard to do, I did not find it easy, I have to say, in visiting offices, when going round the country, "You have got one mouth and two ears, and you should use them in those proportions".

Having diversity issues just as part of the normal day-to-day business, as well as the awareness training and the continuation of that, which we tried to do, and the contact officers which we had, and giving them visibility, actually building diversity into the plans, into the way we do business, to make sure it is on the agenda for all the senior management team meetings and conferences.

Sir Anthony Burden: Can I just ask you then – because that is very relevant, in terms of your management standards – are you happy that you have golden threaded diversity through your management standards within the organisation?

I mean, you make a very relevant point, it is not out there in a box, separate from everything else you do. But have you achieved it?

Mr Banyard: My view is we are on a journey, and, like a large number of other organisations, we have different starting points, but we certainly have not reached our end point. So whilst I think we have done some good work on diversity, I would be the first to say we have got a long way to go, and what may appear to be good today may not stand the test of time tomorrow.

Ms Samson: Can I just pick up two related issues on management standards? The first thing is, I think, when we were looking at the management standards, I think it was important for us that we looked at each of the standards and said, "Within each of those management standards, there are diversity issues and diversity behaviours that managers will have to employ in order to demonstrate that they are actually meeting that standard".

So as part of the process that we actually went through, we took the first drafts of management standards, shared them very widely with a number of people from all sorts of different groups, and asked for their views on the standards as well, so that we were getting a cross-section of people's views.

We also then went on and developed a separate diversity standard that we thought people should have to meet and demonstrate within the organisation.

The other piece of work that we actually did related to that was to look at the core competence framework for the organisation, and to say – not, is this the core competence framework that we want to use now, but is this the core competencies that, looking at our long-term diversity aims, will enable us to actually achieve those aims?

So in fact what we did, in looking at the core competence framework, was to identify those diversity behaviours that we were moving the organisation towards, although not accepting that everything would be perfect at this time.

So I think those pieces of work were dual pieces of work, that we think will have long-term benefits, particularly the core competence framework, which actually defines how we recruit people, how we develop people, and I think those are critically important. That is a critically important piece of work, I think, in actually setting the organisation up for the future.

Sir Anthony Burden: But the consultation ensured buy-in?

Ms Samson: Yes, we had a cross-section of people who actually informed the work that we were doing, but the people who led the actual project – we were part of the consultation process that they used, but they went wider than just the diversity team, so they used it as a project, and that had all sorts of stakeholder analysis attached to that.

Mr Banyard: It is also very heavily built into our senior civil service core competence framework, and that is general across the civil service. There are four I can pick out for you here, but these are drawn from when we select people for posts.

If I could digress for a moment, we have been at this for a number of years, which has enabled us to, through the normal turnover of people in posts, to see corporacy, for example, being corporate, and valuing diversity as being some of the important criteria we select people on.

So every period of time, we build in the essential ingredient, which is hearts and minds, people committed to what you are trying to do.

But these are four of the core competencies for the senior civil service: taking personal responsibility for making progress in equality and diversity; identifying and bringing on talent, especially among underrepresented groups; understanding, valuing and incorporating different perspectives; making the best use of diverse talents.

Now in a number of jobs I have advertised, as director of local services, to recruit regional directors, I have used at least two of those in a slate of ten or twelve core competencies which we would select on. So it is important that where you use it is when you choose people.

Sir Anthony Burden: Yes. And, of course, I think the confidence levels coming from your staff would suggest perhaps you have moved past the stage, or maybe you were never at the stage where diversity only becomes an issue for managers and directors when they themselves are seeking promotion, or looking to move through the organisation, and there is a need to know.

Mr Banyard: I think you use that process to help ensure you have got in place people who support, but inevitably, when you are introducing something new, it is not sufficient to say you want to do it, you have actually got to win hearts and minds to it, which means you have got to believe in it, and you have got to demonstrate that you are going to follow it through consistently. It is not, as John said, today's initiative and tomorrow's memory.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Can I just, on one very quick point, refer you to your organisational profile? It is your fast stream, which is line 4. In terms of – fast stream, that is your sort of fast track graduate entry –

Mr Banyard: Graduate entry, yes.

Sir Anthony Burden: That seems to be a very impressive spread in terms of diversity, although I am sure you would say, in terms of minority ethnic recruitment, you would like it to be better. But can I ask, is it important for you that you get that sort of spread on your scheme, and how you have achieved it?

Mr Banyard: The fast stream is particularly important, because they are not the only group from which our future leadership will be chosen, people come up through a variety of routes, but they are one of the groups from which our future leadership is chosen, and because they are on an accelerated path or can be on an accelerated path, it enables us to shift the balance in the senior ranks quite quickly, but we do need to get that right.

If I take the example of people from an ethnic minority background, to try and help that, we have, for the last three years, run an eight-week work experience scheme for undergraduates with ethnic minority backgrounds, and we have used this to introduce them to work, to improve their prospects for employability, but more importantly than that, to secure people from their backgrounds for our organisation.

We have refined the process this year, and we are running a summer training experience, again eight weeks' work experience, for some 40 first year undergraduates from ethnic minority backgrounds. Those that like it, we encourage to go on to a second year scheme, after their second year undergraduate, which is an intern scheme, where they are recruited on fair and open terms.

If they are successful on that, we offer them a job, and our intern scheme last year, all of the ten – because it was a pilot scheme – interns were successful, and four were from ethnic minority backgrounds and were offered jobs.

Now that is an example of a process which I had to follow to encourage people. A lot of our people on the fast stream also come internally, because we recruit very widely across the country, and we get a lot of graduates who start with us in – or non-graduates, but very talented people, who start with us in clerical positions, so we run entry into the fast track internally, and we have over the years run a number of schemes to encourage everybody, but particularly focused on those from disadvantaged groups, to come forward, and therefore we have worked to bring forward women within the organisation, and our representation, as you can see, is not yet where we want to be, but in the senior ranks, we are going up at about 3 per cent per year, so we will get there eventually.

Sir Anthony Burden: But you seem to be very successful in the machine that – you know, the engine that will feed this eventually, through this fast stream process.

I mean, you have mentioned positive action programmes, which obviously are successful, but is there any magic formula, either in terms of the positive action programmes or the selection programme itself, the process itself, which ensures that the sort of gatekeepers of the fast stream process recruit in a fair and non-discriminatory way?

Mr Banyard: I think the first thing is the brand of the organisation. You have got to be attractive to the people who you want to bring in, and part of the – if you are not attracting a group, it may be because your processes are disadvantaging them, but it may also be because, in jargon, your brand is not attractive to them in the first place, so they do not apply.

So you have got to do work with particular groups to ensure that the picture of the organisation you are presenting to them does not turn them off to start off with, and there are a number of techniques for doing this, but through the summer training experience, for example, we get direct conversation with people, we use role models in our advertising, we build links with university recruitment agencies, and through them, emphasise our commitment to diversity.

We then examine our processes to make sure that they do not disadvantage people. For example, we have introduced, not for the fast stream, but for our clerical grades, an improved fast track recruitment process, which includes a first selection step; if you do not get through that step, you could still nevertheless take an equivalent work test to see whether in fact you can do the work we are asking you to do, and get back into the stream again. That has shown some quite good results in terms of getting people through.

So we begin to see people – we also improved our promotion processes, and we are quite encouraged; for example, in that table, if you look at the line C2 on the left, a C2 is our middle manager, and will manage a number of frontline managers, and you will see that the proportion there from the ethnic minorities is now 5 per cent. That has been going up at just under 1 per cent a year, and we see it on an upwards path, and we certainly want to see it go up, so that it is proportionate to their representation in the organisation as a whole.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Perhaps we could come back to you on that point. Finally, my colleague reminds me, on the issue of consultation and – communication more than consultation, but you have placed much emphasis, quite rightly, on that and success within your organisation.

The Metropolitan Police use the intranet as a way of communicating with staff. What is your most successful form of communication, do you feel, in communicating with your 85,000 members of staff?

Mr Banyard: One of the rules we have learnt with communication is you never get it right; whatever you put in place that you believe is perfect does not stand the test of time.

We use the intranet because it enables us to get a message out swiftly, and the same message to everybody. But I think, in communicating things to people, you need to have a strategic approach. If an issue affects someone personally and individually, then the communication should be one to one, face to face.

If it affects a group, but it actually affects them, but as a group, then the communication should be one to group, face to face.

If the communication is general, and affects the whole organisation, or if it is for information, then I think you can use the written word, whether it comes through paper – because we still have a monthly magazine – or whether it comes on the net.

Sometimes, you cannot help it, things are moving fast, we work in a political environment, and we work in an environment where news travels very quickly, and it is sometimes more important that your staff find out quickly than that they find out face to face.

So another guiding rule, if you like, is that the staff find out first from us, and that may lead us to override the need for face to face. But where we can, and where you can manage the message, important things are best still done face to face, with listening built in.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you very much indeed.

Sir William Morris: Thank you, Sir Anthony. Now, Mr Banyard, can I first of all say thank you very much indeed for your help? We have actually finished the questions that my colleagues and I wanted to explore with you, but you will recall that in my opening comments earlier on, I said that at the end of our questions, we would give you and your colleagues the opportunity to make a brief closing comment if you so wished.

If you do want to do that, then I would invite you to do so at this point.

Mr Banyard: I think there are really three things I want to say. One is that equality and diversity is a journey, and that where an organisation is today reflects much more what its previous leaders did than what happened yesterday, and what we are doing today will colour what happens tomorrow. You might like to bear that in mind when you are thinking of the Met.

The second thought is that we look forward to reading your report, because I think we will be able to learn from that too.

The third is that if the Metropolitan Police did think that there was something in what we had done that they would find useful, I would like to extend an invitation to them to come and talk to us informally, and we would gladly share any of our experience with them.

Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed, and thank you for your generous offer. I am sure we will pass your offer on. Could I just for the record put some concluding words on our transcript note? It is to say that, as with all our witnesses, it may be that, once we have heard from others, we will want to ask you a few more questions, either in writing, or ask you to come back for one of these hearings.

If we need to do that, then we will try and do it in a way which causes you the least possible inconvenience, but for the moment, on behalf of my colleagues, what I just have to do is to say thanks very much indeed for your written submissions, thanks for the candour and the detailed way in which you have responded to our questions this morning, and indeed, thanks for your overall contribution to the work of the Inquiry. Thank you very much indeed.

Mr Banyard: Thank you.

12.25 pm
(The short adjournment)

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	Archive note Important note: This is an archive of the website that was formerly at www.morrisinquiry.gov.uk. It is being hosted on the MPA website for archival purposes only and may contain out-of-date information. Page summary This resource is from the Transcripts section. This section contains a transcript of the public session with Inland Revenue, on 27 April 2004. Sections available here: Transcript of public session: Mr S Banyard, Mr J Middleton and Ms P Samson of the Inland Revenue Questions by Sir William Morris Questions by Miss Weekes Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Alternative versions This transcript is also available with original line and page numbering. Content Transcript of public session: Mr S Banyard, Mr J Middleton and Ms P Samson of the Inland Revenue Tuesday, 27 April 2004 10.30 am Sir William Morris: Well, good morning everyone, and good morning to you, Mr Banyard. Welcome to you and your colleagues. Can I first of all start by saying thank you very much indeed for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning, and to give evidence? Thanks also for letting us have your written submission, which we found extremely helpful. I appreciate that for some of our witnesses, the process may seem to be perhaps a little daunting. I am sure that does not apply to your good self, but nevertheless, I thought it might be just helpful if I set out briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning. But first, let me introduce myself and the other members of the panel. I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. You can see that there are two other members of the panel: on my right is Sir Anthony Burden, who recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary after a very long and distinguished career in the police service; on my left is Miss Anesta Weekes QC. Anesta is an eminent barrister who sits as a recorder and part-time chairperson of employment tribunals. She was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry. Mr Banyard, as you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. Our focus is the Metropolitan Police Service as an organisation, and not the individuals who make up the organisation. The inquiry we are conducting is inquisitorial, it is not, in tone or character, adversarial. We are very keen to enquire into those issues raised by our terms of reference, so that we can make appropriate recommendation for further good practice, rather than concentrating on criticism of the MPS or individuals within it. Could I, just for the record, state that a transcript is being taken, so that we have a proper record of the evidence given by all our witnesses, and this will be posted on our website later today. At the end of these introductory remarks, I will lead on one or two questions to you, followed by Miss Weekes, and then followed by Sir Anthony Burden, who may also ask some questions. At the conclusion of our questions, we will offer you the opportunity to make a closing comment should you wish to do so. As I have indicated, we find your written submission of extreme help, and to that extent, we have noted that you have highlighted a number of issues which provide us with the following information: you have talked us through an explanation of the organisational structure of the Inland Revenue and its governance structure. You have talked about the regulatory framework and the rules regarding staffing matters. We see from your submission a clear profile of the Inland Revenue's workforce, and we are much clearer about how the Inland Revenue deals with complaints, and of course examples of best practice in the Inland Revenue's areas of policy, procedures and practices have also been canvassed to us. Finally, we are grateful for your explanation of the recent major changes in the management and managerial initiatives. We would like to ask you questions, naturally, on the material that you have submitted, and to learn from you in order to inform our work, but before we move to the questions, for the benefit of the transcript, I wonder if you would mind just formally introducing yourself and indeed your colleagues. Mr Banyard: Thank you. I am Stephen Banyard, and I am the director of human resources at the Inland Revenue. Before I held this post, I was the director of local services responsible for operational delivery for a large part of our business. Before that, I have held a number of other positions within the organisation. With me today is John Middleton, who is now our director of cross-cutting policy, which has responsibility for compliance policy, and he has held also a number of posts in his career, including head of our special compliance office. Also accompanying me is Pat Samson, who has been the leader of our diversity team and initiative over the last few years, and who has worked closely with Nick Montagu in driving out our diversity policies and practices. We are very pleased to be here today and we hope we can help you. Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed. Questions by Sir William Morris Sir William Morris: As part of our terms of reference, we have spent some time looking at the issues of governance within the Metropolitan Police Service, and looking as to how we can examine public institutions which might not be directly analogous, but nevertheless, somewhat different from private sector governance practices and procedures. We note that in paragraph 1.4 of your submission, and there is a reference to that, you have the governance structure of a departmental board, which is made up of a chairperson and director generals, I think there are three director generals, and they are allocated responsibility for three main areas of the business. I wonder if you could expand on how this arrangement works: how, for example, do the chair and the director generals and the non-executive directors function? How do those functions also interrelate? What are the disadvantages, if any, of such a governance structure, and whether any other public institution has a similar structure? Mr Banyard: The Inland Revenue's responsibilities and accountabilities pass from ministers to the chairman, and the chairman has constructed a structure which involves the departmental board, which is the highest level board, and that focuses mainly on strategic issues and issues of direction, but not exclusively. That board has three external members to bring experience to the department from outside and from outside the public sector. The chairman and the three director generals also work closely as a team, and work as a team with their directors through the next level structure, which is the departmental management committee. That is a group of 14 or 15 people who together are responsible for delivering the department's business. I think the advantages of working through a board structure are that you achieve a wide buy-in to a common set of purposes, and you can then take them forward through the organisation and having a corporate approach to the governance of the department is one of the things we attach importance to. Sir William Morris: Is the chairman, executive chairman – is he or she full-time? Mr Banyard: Yes, Nick Montagu was a full-time executive chairman and permanent secretary. At the moment, Ann Chant is in that role, and we are – or ministers are currently running a competition to find a new permanent executive chairman for us and for Customs, because we are coming together and integrating in a new national tax authority some time in 2005. Sir William Morris: Without giving any secrets away or anticipating the future, do you see the current structure continuing when the two organisations come together in 2005? Mr Banyard: I think that must be for the new executive chairman to decide, but our current experience would not lead us to advise him otherwise. I believe that other civil service departments have, in recent years, moved to management boards. We certainly find it works. We have a hierarchy of communities who we buy into our plans and our values and our aspirations. You start with the departmental board, which is the highest level, and which is at director general level. The departmental management committee, which is the next level down, brings in people of my level, executive directors, but we have wider communities; twice a year, our senior management conference meets, and that brings together the top 50 managers in our department, and we have been working with that group, with conferences twice a year, and other meetings as necessary, for the best part of ten years. Building corporacy and building purpose is a long-term journey. Sir William Morris: I am surprised to note the staffing levels of the Inland Revenue, 85,000 people, I am advised, and naturally, I am making the assumption that they are located nationwide. Mr Banyard: They are. The 85,000 is the number of people rather than the number of full-time equivalents. We have a number of part-time staff. It includes the valuation office agency, which is an independent agency within the Inland Revenue, and that has approximately 5,000 staff, but, since 1998, we have moved from being an organisation that is just responsible for tax, or mainly responsible for tax, to being an organisation that is responsible for tax credits, for National Insurance contributions, for enforcing the national minimum wage; so the whole role of the department has changed, and our customer base has changed, and we have needed more staff to deal with the additional functions. Sir William Morris: Yes. Well, with 85,000 people, even with some part-time, it is still a very major employing institution, and, like other institutions, I am sure the human relations aspect has to be managed and managed in a way which maintains consistency. I note earlier you indicated that areas around HR and diversity fall to your colleague. I wonder whether you can share with us how the devolved structure, if it is devolved, has delivered consistency around areas like equal opportunities and diversity, and just the ordinary managing of the employee/employer relationship; if you can share the structural route with us, that would be extremely helpful. Mr Banyard: If you go back some years, issues such as human resources were centrally managed. I think it was in the early 1990s that there was the perception that the business was too centralised, and unable to change because of that degree of centralisation, and so under a number of initiatives, empowerment being one of the key ones, responsibility was moved into business units. Human resources then assumed a different role, which was to be responsible for human resource policies and practices, and it retained the personnel management for the senior staff, which, in civil service terms, was Grades 7 and 6, and the senior civil service. The devolved structures brought enormous benefits to the organisation, unleashing people's potential to work with customers, to show initiative, to improve the business, but there is always a trade-off between consistency and empowerment. In the mid 1990s, the human resources director had a small team which conducted triannual reviews of business units to see whether they were and how they were pursuing human resources policies, and how their practice shaped up, so there was a check on consistency then, but that is the QC part, the QA/QC process; the important part is getting it right in the first place, and I think the way you seek to achieve that is very clear corporate understanding of what the organisation is about, a corporate culture having very clearly laid out processes that people can follow, having support to people to do that, and I could talk further, but that is the broad shape of it. You have got to get the culture and the processes right. In recent years, or recently, we are moving towards a more centralised HR structure again, and we are moving towards HR taking over the line management of almost all of the people who deliver HR services. That still leaves a lot of responsibility with the line manager, and our job is to equip and support the line manager to carry through the functions that they need to do. Sir William Morris: Just sticking with the HR and the people management process, we note, from reference in your submission – paragraph 4.21, reference there to grievance officers and grievance panels. What we are not clear about is whether, say, for example, a grievance panel is made up of external individuals, or whether it is made up of internal individuals within the Revenue itself, and precisely what degree of independence they have away from line managers who obviously make some of the decisions which may well give rise to the grievance. If you can, just share with us how the grievance officers and the grievance panel works? Mr Banyard: I can. The Inland Revenue is a very large organisation; both we are geographically spread, but we have also got a large number of different independent business units, so if there is a need to have a group of people who are independent of a particular complaint or grievance, we can usually – or we can assemble them by drawing widely across the organisation. It is important that panels are seen to be acting independently, people have to have confidence in them, but I do not think we go outside the organisation, although we would not rule it out if that was thought to be useful. Ms Samson: I would agree with that. It is not something we have needed to do in the past. We have actually trained our – for example, our independent equal opportunities investigators, they have all been trained internally. We would still make sure that they are independent of their particular business area where the complaint has actually arisen, but we see that there is a positive benefit in actually training some of our own people in this, because that is part of the awareness raising across the organisation, and they in turn – because they are from different parts of the business – can actually pass on their education around diversity and equality as well, so we can see some positive benefits about having that internal process with independently trained investigators. Sir William Morris: Thank you. Just one final point from me, going back to governance: I note that in your earlier comment, you talked about the Revenue operating on ministerial directions, and I am making the assumption that that is the routine, board to ministers; you have dispensed with the middle person, so to speak, or the middle tier. And the organisation, or a lot of public institutions – whilst ultimately there is a ministerial responsibility, there is nevertheless routings, like the police services area, police authorities, for example, not exclusively to the Met, and then up to ministers from there on certain matters. Having experienced the direct service minister governance, what do you see is the advantage or disadvantage of that? Mr Banyard: I think the structure that is in place with us is the structure that meets the need of ministers, and it has been reviewed recently in the review that Gus O'Donnell led of the Revenue departments, and that is the need for ministers to have control over the policies and practices that we follow at a high level, but for us to have independence over the conduct of our individual cases, which is why we are structured slightly differently to other government departments. I am not sure I can comment on the advantages or disadvantages because that is the way ministers want us to be. Sir William Morris: Do you report to the Audit Commission? Mr Banyard: We are responsible to ministers. The National Audit Office audits us and conducts reviews and enquiries into aspects of our work. They report to the Parliamentary Accounts Committee in the House of Commons, and we are answerable to them, and we are invited to visit them and discuss these reports. We also report to – or we meet with the Treasury Select Committee hearings from time to time. Sir William Morris: Thank you very much. That completes the questions that I wanted to just explore on governance. I will just ask Miss Weekes to lead the questions from now on. Questions by Miss Weekes Miss Weekes: Thank you very much. Mr Banyard, I do not know who would like to deal with this topic, but perhaps I will explain what it is first, and you can choose all three of you, or one of you. We are particularly interested in the reduction of time spent between notification of a disciplinary against an officer or a complaint and the conclusion of the process within the Met. I will tell you why we are interested. We have received consistent complaints from every single officer of every single rank that the disciplinary process and internal complaints take too long. I am particularly keeping it to disciplinary and complaints for officers and officer staff; I am not necessarily concentrating on the public complaints, because I think you will be aware that the Independent Police Complaints Commission is principally in charge of public complaints. The delays go from one year to two years, even up to five or six years, and it is quite clear that everyone within the Met understands and are concerned, at all levels, of the cost to the Met of keeping officers on full pay when they are suspended, of the hurt and distress to officers and family whilst they wait, so it is a major issue, and we want to consider some sensible, practical, probably radical suggestions for reform. I would like to do two things. I would like to go through the processes you have identified in your organisation and the occasions where you have mentioned timing, and then, if I may, put to you the suggestions that may work for the Met, so I can have your comments on what we should look for, what we should keep in mind. This is all to do with making things quicker, saving money and saving morale. I see that at present, your organisation, in March 2004, was 85,146, I think that is the last count. I will come to the figures that relate to the Met; it is clearly quite different, we are not using it as a direct comparator, and I think you realise that we are looking to you for your assistance on good practice and systems. You have a pilot scheme for unifying procedure for complaints, so I am going to deal with the way it is at the moment, because I think your pilot scheme is still up and running, is it not? Mr Banyard: It is up and running, and we are comfortable that it is on the right lines. We hope to roll it out nationally in July. Miss Weekes: All right. I am going to come to the unified, because there are some interesting features of it that may affect the issue of timeliness. You have three processes, really, do you not? You have a system for dealing with diversity issues that come up for complaint. You have a system that deals with what you call department's complaint process grievance, and that really fits into formal complaints and informal as well – so it is basically two systems, is that right? Mr Banyard: There are informal and formal complaints within that process, and the third set of processes are conduct and discipline processes, which may be triggered by complaints or may be triggered quite separately. I am not sure whether we wrote about them in this or not, I do not think we did. Miss Weekes: All right. I think my colleague is going to come to the detail about complaints; I would just like to keep to the issue of timeliness. Can I just deal with what you say about the diversity issues? That is at your page 17. You have set out in quite a lot of detail there the procedure, and you mention one aspect of timing: "The department aims to complete investigations within 12 weeks." It is in fact on your screen, if you would like to look at it: "The department aims to complete investigations within 12 weeks." Now that is an average, is it? That is your aim; it is not something that is written in stone, and it is not statutory. Mr Banyard: No, it is not statutory, it is an aim, and you have to have regard to circumstances, but we are conscious – as you have indicated, that speed is an important element in this process, and we therefore do everything we can to carry investigations forward effectively. Miss Weekes: Well, we are all human, so no doubt you have had your delays. Can you, are you allowed to tell me what your delays are? Mr Banyard: I am not sure I can answer – Ms Samson: We do not have that information with us. I could add, what happens actually in the current investigative process is that all of our investigators have in fact got that target. What they are told to do is to actually keep a diary throughout the whole investigation, and to actually note in that diary any reasons why the investigation has actually been delayed. They are also told to contact the case manager if there are going to be delays, so that the people who are party to the complaint are aware that there are delays in the process, so I think it is that keeping in touch element as well which is incredibly important, because undoubtedly, in some instances, for example, where witnesses are not available at certain times, et cetera, there could be delays, or where there is a great deal of information that the investigator has to see, or a great number of witnesses over a period. So we are aware that, you know, we have that aim, that it is important that we state that, otherwise, if that is not there, people will think, "Well, there is nothing to aim for here", but I think it is important that we put in the procedures behind that to ensure that where there are delays, people are kept informed of the reasons for that. Mr Middleton: Perhaps if I could just add a point of local colour, if you like, in cases that I have been involved in as a director, where there has been a grievance in my area of the business, I have tried, wherever possible, to have the investigator work on that as close to full-time as possible, and tried to relieve them of their, if you like, day-to-day workload, as best we can; it is not always possible to do it completely. But also, when we have had the initial discussions, to make sure they understand the nature of the issue they are investigating, the scope, if you like, and then try and agree with them upfront a likely date when they will complete a report. That helps to focus everybody's mind. There will inevitably be delays, but if they are working to a deadline, it does focus their minds on completion, which is what everybody wants. Miss Weekes: I would like to talk to you about the case manager, because one of the things that we have in mind – and it might help you, in fact, if I simply quickly sketch what we are exploring at the moment, not what is necessarily going to be put in place – we do not know what the recommendations are going to be as yet. It will not surprise you that, coming from my background as a part-time criminal judge and a part-time employment law chairman, I am well used to the concept of managing cases that arrive at a specific time for a fixed date. All courts, at all levels, cannot function without that, so I have in mind bits of that process that might be incorporated, similarities of the process that might be incorporated, and each court centre has a case manager, someone that is in charge of the listing of cases. There are judges who are in charge of deciding who gets further time or who does not. Judges are usually in charge of who does or does not get extra time because a witness is sick, or someone is on holiday, or work gets in the way. Legitimate reasons for wanting further time to investigate are usually given. Within again the court process, there are categories of cases: fast track, those that are clearly not going to be able to come within six weeks or six months. There are those which will, in their time, be finished within a week, or they might take three months; lots of variables about why cases come on before another case. So have all of that in mind when we come to think of what would be a sensible practical suggestion for making life swifter within the Met. So keeping those things in mind, I would like to flag up some of the things in your own systems that I have noticed. Getting officers or your investigators to put things in their diaries; now, that is going to be as good as the investigator is, and will he or she always remember to put it in the diary? Does that work? Mr Banyard: It does work. It is important that your investigators are trained in the first place, and that you look at their diaries if for no other reason to train them and to develop them. Ms Samson: Can I pick up on that? What we recently did, we were aware that obviously, the investigator availability is a critical issue around getting cases dealt with very promptly, so last year, we did another exercise to in fact ensure that we had a big enough pool, so that we could address all cases coming through. In that exercise, we actually selected 84 part-time investigators, so that in fact, what will happen is that, as cases come on-line, there is a pool of people that can be referred to with that case, and their availability can be checked as well. We are also aware, within that pool of investigators, of some of our more experienced investigators who can take the most complex cases, because they have wider experience than some of the others, so again, within that, there is the ability to actually allocate a case to the person who is going to be available to do it, and also to the person who has got the experience to deal with some of the most complex issues. The other thing just to mention is – one of the issues that we are looking at is whether or not there is a sufficient business case for actually having a number of full-time investigators in the organisation. We are actually looking at the pros and cons of that approach at the moment. Miss Weekes: I am going to come back to allocation in a moment, I was just interested in how you always ensure that reasons are put down in the diary, as to why that investigating person or personnel requires more time, and who checks it? Ms Samson: We obviously have a QA/QC process, and we would hope that, as part of the overall review of the investigation which happens at the end of the investigation, those issues are actually picked up at that time. But certainly, what we are moving towards in the new complaints process is, because we will have a stream of dedicated case managers, that is all that they will be doing; they will not be doing any other work, they will simply be managing the complaints stream. They will have a more senior officer who will actually again be dedicated to complaints management in the organisation, so any concerns that they have about the delay of a particular complaint, you know, the investigator, if they feel that there are not good reasons that the investigator has given, that can be referred up through the management stream to that overall manager of the complaints stream. Mr Banyard: And they also have a role akin to that of a project manager, in that their role – or project sponsor; their role is to hold the project manager, in this case the investigator, to a plan, but also to enable that investigator to follow through with that plan, and it may be that what the investigator is experiencing is difficulty getting into people's diaries, and it is then – the issue is making sure that people treat the investigation with sufficient importance. Over the years, we have learnt, through all our business units, that dealing with cases swiftly is in everyone's best interests, so it is not difficult to get senior support to push things along if we need to. Miss Weekes: What happens to those personnel officers or investigating officers that actually just do not toe the line, or maybe all your personnel officers are really very good, and you do not have a problem with pulling them to book? Ms Samson: I think we would be very aware about – if there were particular issues around an investigator. If we felt that there were difficulties, and that investigator was not up to the job of doing investigations, or indeed if we felt that they were being pulled in too many ways, because of other work priorities, then certainly we would step in and ensure that that case was moved on to somebody else who had the right time and expertise. It is not in our interests, or indeed the investigator officer's interest, to keep them on if, in fact, they have not got the expertise, they find out that they have not got the expertise; or indeed that they just have not got the time to actually complete the investigation satisfactorily. So we would step in if we thought that the case was not being properly managed. Miss Weekes: Does every case fit into 12 weeks, or do you categorise those that can be fast-tracked – do you have a fast track? Do you make some judgment about the sort of length of time that a case is going to take? Do you ask the parties that question? Ms Samson: We have an overall aim, which is to complete in 12 weeks, and we think that that is important for just focusing people's minds on the swiftness of the action and how important it is. Miss Weekes: In the new pilot scheme, I do not see any reference to timing there, I presume you will still keep your 12 weeks? Ms Samson: No, we are saying that within the new system, we are aiming to complete the investigation part of it in nine weeks. We are actually hoping to speed up the process. Miss Weekes: And again, will you build into that any particular checks, balances, sanctions, if people go over time, or are you just going to let it roll through as it has done before? Mr Banyard: We want to see how it works out in practice. We do not want to put any more formal structure in place than needs to be there. At the moment, we will let that run, and, if that framework is sufficient, we will stick with it; if we need further regulatory structure, we will put it in place. Miss Weekes: Within that, I just want to touch one aspect, because it is quite important. You keep statistical records of trends – it may be an obvious question, but we are interested in that: why do you, in fact, do that? Ms Samson: We review all of our formal complaints, and indeed our employment tribunal complaints, to, if you like, learn from that, to find out what is going on in the organisation. For example, when we were putting together the new complaints process, we reviewed previous cases where complaints had been made formally. Some of the learning from those, we have actually been able to take forward and try out now, as part of the new complaints process. For example, one of the things that became patently obvious when we were looking back at previous experiences is about the relationship breakdowns that can happen very early between people, and how that can escalate into much more serious issues. So as part of the learning, what we are actually doing is we are introducing contact officers to try and get in and do some early mediation to try and bring the parties together and start talking about what the issues are. So we have tried to actually look at previous complaints, and review what is going on, and see how we can build those into new processes and practices in the organisation. Mr Banyard: The effect is a continuous learning process, but the new complaints procedures reflect several years of learning; I think the key point is the one that Pat brought out, which is to surface issues early, before they become too large, to move in quickly to help people before entrenched views are formed. Miss Weekes: How do you keep statistical records, and who keeps them? Ms Samson: Every part of the organisation, every business team, actually keep their own records of complaints and categories. We collate those annually to look at those. We also have access to employment tribunal complaints through our solicitors, we work in partnership with them, and, again, trying to share the learning that comes from tribunals, so we get our solicitors' views as well about the learning from being involved in previous tribunals. Miss Weekes: So you have round table discussions? Ms Samson: We do. Miss Weekes: Can I just end by asking you one or two points in relation to the Met? I think it is important to flag up that there are some 23,000 plus officers in the Met, and police staff, about 16,000. So we are talking about somewhere in the region of 46,000 individuals; it is a very large organisation. It has complex operational duties, it is vast and complex, and the legal obligations on individual officers are vast and complex; I know you know that, but I think it is worth flagging that up, when we talk about how we can realistically make it quicker to deal with complaints. There are going to be more of them, probably, because the public are entitled to complain, and there are internal disputes between officers and staff; you cannot ever get rid of that, when human beings are working together, and life is very busy operationally, and you are having to manage staff. Now that means that there will be many categories of discipline and categories of internal complaint. If we suggested trying to have a system where you categorise cases, because they will attract different timings – first of all, do you agree with that, a different case would attract a different timing? If it is a breach of a procedural rule, you might be able to deal with that within a month; if it is a corruption case, you are going to need longer. Mr Banyard: It is certainly true that the more complex the case, the more time you are going to need, and the question is: how firmly do you want to build that into your structures? Whether you want to give people guidelines and aims to work by, or whether you actually turn it into a code and rules. We do not have a code and rules, because we do not feel at the moment we need that, but I think you would have to judge, from looking at the Met, what you thought would work for them. Miss Weekes: Yes. The next overall feature would be: who would be responsible for setting the categories, and then for saying, "That is a fast track, we are going to deal with that within six weeks; this is not a fast track, I am going to give you about six months/eight months, but I would like to think we have a fixed date for the disciplinary at the end of eight months". We have in mind a suggestion that that person should be independent, so that they are independent of the professional standards department that usually investigates, and clearly independent of the person complained of. Because of the vastness and the numbers of the complaints and the complexity, that person brings to bear a fresh independence of the needs of both parties; any comments on that? Mr Banyard: That sounds sensible, but not understanding the pressures in the Met, it would be difficult to say to you that that was the only way to go, for example. I think that person will need to bring independence, but that person will also need to bring a view that people have confidence in, and therefore, they have to be able to balance the needs of the investigation with the needs to continue the business or the normal operational activities of the Metropolitan Police. It is having somebody who can hold those two issues in mind, and enjoy the confidence of the people in the process, and the people in the business who have to support it. Mr Middleton: If I could add one further thought, I guess it is a pretty obvious comment, but I think it is worth making, that time is important, but quality is just as important, and if people feel the most important target they have is to complete an investigation within two months, or six months, or whatever, they may well meet that target, but you may not get the best quality investigation, if they are slavishly following a time target. I think what is probably important – what I would want to see, if I were involved in a system like that, would be dialogue between the person setting the targets and the people who have to manage the staff who are delivering them, and dialogue between that manager and the people who are actually doing the investigation that we all agree is so important. Miss Weekes: Yes. I think my summary originally included reflecting the court process where parties are allowed to come along and say, "I cannot make that date, these are the genuine reasons why", so that there are reviews built into the system. Mr Banyard: I think that is useful, to prevent unnecessary delay, but I think you will want to look at the need for a broad buy-in to making these processes work more speedily. I think if you obtain that buy-in, then people will make reasonable accommodation. If people feel that the process, the importance of the process is being elevated, or if they do not see the value of it, then you may not get the positive contribution that you are looking for. Miss Weekes: The pool of available persons that deal with disciplinary, this is another potential problem for the Met, because officers at commander level, for example, would often be drafted in to deal with the disciplinary panels, and there is a suggestion, which will be incorporated, I believe, through the enactment of the IPCC, that members of the public will now sit on disciplinary panels. But dealing with the availability of panels, how do you always ensure that your pool of available people is there, so you are not delaying the fixing of a date for a disciplinary by trying to find somebody or pluck them out of operational duties? Mr Banyard: The conduct and discipline processes have been run with various independent – are run with independent people within the process, the case manager independent of the investigator, independent of the decision taker, but we have an overriding aim to push the processes along quickly. Frequently, the decision taker may be a senior line manager. It is not in that person's interest to prevaricate with the process, so if a disciplinary charge involves the senior line manager or the HR section in his business unit, acting for them, there is a common purpose, which is that it is in everybody's interests to progress. I think it is appealing to people's interests first, and only putting the rules in place or the regulatory framework if that does not succeed, and you nevertheless feel you should move more quickly; that is the way I would go. Mr Middleton: We also try to keep the line management chain involved, we do not divorce the complaints process from the normal line management chain. It is either part of it, if it is an informal complaint, or running parallel to it and keeping in close touch with normal line management. Miss Weekes: Sometimes the matters before disciplinary involve line management as being the person complained about. One of the issues also that comes up in the issue of timing is: who should be responsible for keeping the complained officer in the know about what is going on, and how much should he know? If it is a corruption case, there may be public interest immunity issues which he is not entitled to know. But generally, what are your comments and what should we look for when we suggest a process within the timing mechanism for keeping people in the know about what is going on? Mr Banyard: I think you have in mind there quite serious cases, do you not? Miss Weekes: Some of them will be. Mr Banyard: I think, John, you are probably best able to ... Mr Middleton: I think there are a couple of issues there. For formal complaints, which are not likely to result in a criminal prosecution, then we – there is a very significant level of trade union representation within the Inland Revenue, and we encourage staff to consult their union representatives. It is only in the more serious cases where staff are suspended from duty; and the less serious, the investigation is very often carried on while staff remain in post. We take dishonesty by staff very seriously, and our policy is to investigate, with a view to a prosecution, any cases where there is dishonesty, even relatively small amounts, because we feel we have to be seen to be honest – not only be honest; our policy is to back that up. In those circumstances, we would generally, I think, investigate a member of staff pretty much in the same way that we would investigate a customer who we suspected of defrauding the department: we would be working with a view to prosecution; we would follow the normal rules in the PACE codes of conduct, for example, even though they do not directly apply to the Inland Revenue, we follow them anyway, because that is good practice. If staff are suspended, I think colleagues would keep them in touch with what is happening, if you like, in the office. Miss Weekes: Who is the colleague, somebody designated? Mr Banyard: It is somebody designated. Ms Samson: I was just going to say that very often, if people are suspended, very often our welfare services as well would be alerted to the fact that we have people who are away from the office, so it may well be that our welfare services are brought into the equation as well at that point, so there is still some support there available, and people are actually made aware of the services of welfare at the point they are suspended. Miss Weekes: Okay, I think that may be moving into the area that Sir Anthony, I think, would like to ask some questions on. Thank you. Sir William Morris: Thank you very much, Miss Weekes. It is at this point that I should be moving to Sir Anthony for some questions, but we do have a practice in ensuring that our transcript writers are not overburdened, or for too long at any rate, so can I suggest we have a very short break, for five minutes or so, to ensure they have a little rest, if that is okay with you. Thank you very much. 11.30 am (A short break) 11.37 am Sir William Morris: Okay, Mr Banyard, thank you for your tolerance with us. I will go straight into asking Sir Anthony Burden to lead the questions on our behalf. Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you, good morning. Just a couple of points, if I may, on complaints, before moving into more general HR areas. You have mentioned on several occasions QA/QC processes. Could you just explain something about those, in terms of the way that you ensure quality control around complaints investigations? Mr Banyard: Quality assurance is the important part, and that is getting the processes right in the first place, so it is looking at what has happened in the past, understanding what is happening now, getting feedback from stakeholders, getting feedback from customers, people involved in the process, and building that into your process in the first place. If it is an annual process, for example our annual performance management process, then you build it into guidelines that you give people at the beginning of the year, and I think the positive stuff at the front of the process is important. The quality control you put in at the end of the process, and you put in – you monitor either informally or formally, with metrics or without, depending on what you feel you need, to see whether in fact what happened was what you intended to happen, and, if not, to find out why not. I will ask Pat to say a little bit about the QA/QC for this process, grievances. Ms Samson: Up until having the unified system, obviously all parts of the organisation actually reviewed their own complaints to see the quality of those complaints. However, what we are doing with the new case manager is actually building in a number of checks to do with how a complaint is managed from start to finish. Because we will have that one group of people, what we will have is very good information, about what is working well in the process, and if there are any areas of concern, so in fact, as part of the pilot in Scotland, that review, if you like, of how cases are managed, from start to finish, is being checked for issues around good management practice and bad management practice, if those come out of the process. So in fact, we will have a step-by-step analysis then about what works well in taking forward complaints in the organisation. But we think that because that will be a discrete team, the information that we are getting will be very robust, and from that, we can actually do this constant improvement, where we identify if there are particular areas that we want to revisit. Sir Anthony Burden: And if you have had a high-profile case that has gone to a hearing and has not appeared to have been handled very well, have you a debriefing process on the quality control side that ensures that lessons are learned? Mr Banyard: We look at all high-profile cases, whether they go well or not, and see what lessons there are to be learned, and if there are lessons around the process system, then we build those in. The new complaints grievance equal opportunities process we are bringing in reflects a lot of that learning. If the lessons are additional training for individual people involved in the process, then we would take that too. Sir Anthony Burden: Right. Just a couple of other points. You use the ACAS codes of practice, that has worked well for your organisation. Mr Banyard: Yes. Sir Anthony Burden: Do you have ACAS training staff as well? Ms Samson: We do not have ACAS training, but we have used external consultants to train all of our investigators. They are an organisation who are widely respected in the diversity field, and who have a wealth of experience both in domestic legislation and European legislation, so those are the people that we actually use to train our equal opps investigators. Sir Anthony Burden: Right, thank you. And complaints in the area of equality and diversity, you have got these 70 internal investigators trained, possibly more now; how can you be assured that the process actually carries the confidence of minority groups within your workforce? Mr Banyard: We have got a number of ways in which they can bring their views forward. At the highest level, the chairman meets directly with the diversity advisory group, which has a rotating group of people who come to it. We have networking groups, we talk with our people informally. I think it is through those informal processes, as much as anything, that you learn whether people have confidence in the processes, but we do know from surveys that we have done that people, for example, have confidence that their managers believe in our diversity policies, and try and follow them through. Sir Anthony Burden: And that has been a constant statistical return, in terms of – Mr Banyard: That is something we have built up over the years. Sir Anthony Burden: Okay, thank you. Can I move on to more general HR issues, if I may? Firstly, let me ask a question around your changed management process, as it relates to people. Obviously, you have been through massive upheaval, you are about to go through massive upheaval. In terms of the actual processes you operate, could you just give us an insight into how those processes are managed and the extent of buy-in from lower levels within the organisation? Mr Banyard: Perhaps it might be useful if I point you to some things which we think are important in making change go successfully. I think to start off with, you have to have a clear lead and a clear aim for what you wish to achieve with that change, and you have got to get buy-in for it across the organisation. So for a major change, we would bring that to one of our senior committees of the department; if it was a really fundamental change, we would bring it to the departmental management committee. Before it ever reached there, all of the key stakeholders will have been brought in or won over through formal or informal conversations, and at the departmental management committee, people will then debate it in the round, and commit to it. So I think that is the most important thing, you have all got to believe and agree that you want to go there. You then need good project management built around it, and that is the mechanistics of it, that builds confidence in it. Two other factors that we have felt are important – one is inclusion and ownership. We gave you the example of area management, but we could cite a number of other programmes where the more you have been able to involve frontline staff in design aspects, perhaps on a representational basis, where you have been able to involve the managers who are going to take this process forward in designing the change, the more they have ownership of that change, and therefore, the more comfortable they feel with it. If change is being done to you, you feel out of control; many people feel very uncomfortable with it, so although we may not be able to consult people on what we are going to do, we may be able to consult them on how we do it, and if you are then asked, "Well, you take this change forward and lead it", you then become in control. So inclusion and ownership are important to make the change work, and for the area management changes, for example, across the country we have brought together our local offices, in groups of about six to eight. So, for example, to paint a picture, in Norfolk with offices in King's Lynn, East Dereham, Norwich and Great Yarmouth, those offices are now managed in an area; those changes are quite fundamental across a wide rural belt, and the staff of all of the offices will have been involved with the managers in planning how that change would be made, and how they would achieve the department's goals. Another very important dimension to change management is communication, and the key – I think a lot of organisations think they are good at the telling part of communication, but actually, you cannot tell people too much during change. One of the things that we learnt during the merger of the Inland Revenue and the Contributions Agency in 1998, which affected a lot of people being brought into the organisation, was that if we had not got something of substance to tell them, we had not actually made a decision or completed a review, we told them what processes we had done, because that is what they wanted to know. They wanted to know what had happened, how we were getting on with bringing the two parts of the organisation together, when would they find something else out. I think if people feel that you are keeping them as fully in the picture as you can, that gives them some reassurance, but the other part of communication is the really important part, which is listening; that is, having mechanisms to listen to what people are thinking and saying, and giving the leadership of the department an opportunity to respond to that. In the early 1990s, we put in place a mechanism in the Inland Revenue called "Team Listening", which enabled us to disseminate messages straight to the frontline, and put in place a mechanism for the responses to those messages to come back up the line to be distilled and to come back to senior management. We still have that process in place, and we can identify the top five issues. The Contributions Agency also had that mechanism in place when we merged, but that we did not judge was sufficient for a process that was moving very quickly, the merger, and where rumours and fears could blow up very quickly. So we established additional mechanisms there, we established a rumour mine; you could ring up the rumour mine and place your rumour, and we would either confirm or deny it within a stated time period, or at least say that we could not yet rule on the rumour. So I think you need to put in place mechanisms that meet the needs of people in the organisation they are in, but you cannot tell people too much, and you cannot listen to them too much. Sir Anthony Burden: If I were an organisation outside of yours seeking from you, as a senior executive, your justification for putting obviously so much effort into communication, and justifying it, what would that justification be? Mr Banyard: Bottom line, it would have to be the bottom line cost/benefit analysis. If you carry through a change that is of a major nature that involves the organisation processes and almost, therefore, inevitably the culture of what you are trying to deliver, you have got to buy in everybody involved in the process. If you do not, your change will not actually be effective, and I think, if you look at the change literature in the private and the public sector, there are a lot of examples of changes that did not go in as they were intended. The actual financial cost involved in communication, be it listening or telling, is actually quite small in relation to some of the other costs which you meet. For example, the cost of changing IT systems can be quite high, so in cash terms, I do not believe that this is a major element. It is a major element for some organisations, because they are not used to it, and they do not know how to do it, and it therefore seems irksome. But if you are trying to – we have 80,000 staff, they are in 357 towns, they are on 500 sites, they are in over 20 different line management chains. We have to have mechanisms to get to all of those people if we want to make a change to be effective. This will be true in most organisations. Sir Anthony Burden: Just to finish off that point, can I just – that relates to macro change within the organisation. If I am a manager in King's Lynn, and I have got a member of staff applying to me for part-time working, can I ask how you communicate policy, firstly, day-to-day policy, and where would that manager go within your organisation to get that sort of day-to-day assistance in people management terms? Mr Banyard: Our human resource rules and guidance are contained in a document called "The Guide", supplemented by periodic human resource memos which together form our practices and guidance, and frontline managers are encouraged to go to that first, but sometimes, if what they are looking for is not easy to find, or if they prefer, then business units have human resources teams at the moment; shortly, they will be brought together to be teams working in HR itself, but that does not matter, they will still be there to serve the customer. So the frontline manager can phone up or talk directly with their HR guidance, who will point them, or tell them, or advise them how they can behave. Sir Anthony Burden: That brings me on nicely to some comments you made earlier about devolved HR structures. Can I just come back to that, please? Because there are some important issues there for us, around the changes you have made and the changes you are about to make. If I understand you correctly in what you have said, the day-to-day responsibility for managing people still remains with the local manager. Mr Banyard: And that responsibility comes up through the service delivery – the operational line, so when I was the director of operations, I was ultimately responsible for an awful lot of what my people did. Sir Anthony Burden: Yes, but you are pulling back into the centre a sort of overarching HR strategy, so there will be some givens, in organisational terms, that the devolved responsibility is one thing, but it must be within this umbrella of general HR policy; is that about right? Mr Banyard: That is right. In the period in the 1990s when we moved to devolved HR, I think we used the phrase "the tight and the loose". There were things which were fixed and which you had to comply with completely, and there were areas where guidelines were set and you had freedom to move, and even when we pull a lot of HR delivery back into the centre, there will still be a structure like that, as there is or was for any process that you would have in the department, and the degree to which things are tight will reflect the degree to which you are uncomfortable with inconsistency. Sir Anthony Burden: If I can just come back to this example of the way that perhaps the policy on part-time working is complied with, you would hope, then, with this new structure, that there would not be inconsistency between Aberdeen and King's Lynn in the way that policy is actually adhered to, because you have got this sort of central thrust, as it were? Mr Banyard: Yes, and that policy is arrived at – or that position in relation to equal opportunities issues, and, for example, the approach to part-time working; you reach that over a long period. I think if you are managing a group of people in one building, you can gather all the managers together, you can talk to them, and you can move things very quickly. In a large dispersed organisation, you cannot always move so quickly, so you have to have consistency of purpose. We have been working at equal opportunities issues since they were given priority in the early 1980s in the civil service, so if I use the QA/QC analogy, the most important thing for us is to ensure that people in every part of the organisation do understand what we are trying to achieve by part-time working, and do understand that there is a balance between the needs of the business and the needs of the individual. There are parts of our business where we have very flexible working hours, because the business can support that, and it enables us to recruit very able people who might not be able to work for other employers. It gives us a niche in the market. In other parts of our business, we have to operate much more – or much less flexible hours. In our contact centres, we have to provide a service seven days a week, from 8.00 in the morning until 10.00 at night. Now for that, we have to have more fixed terms of employment, and more direction. We try and achieve a balance between what we need – we try and achieve, through our managers, the understanding of the flexibilities there. You will never get total consistency. Sir Anthony Burden: No. At business unit level, are you now content with the HR staffing levels and levels of expertise that you have got at that unit level? Mr Banyard: I think we are content, but you should be aware of the initiative by Peter Gershom, who is looking at – or who has looked, in his efficiency review, at how to make savings within government, and how HR can be restructured to be more effective, which may result in delivering the same service, we believe at better quality with fewer people by bringing them together. But at the moment, we have a staffing ratio of approximately one HR person to every 62 staff, which is quite good by civil service standards. That includes the policy and systems people that we have that I am directly responsible for, and all the people who do the day-to-day personnel records and keep them there. We will be moving towards a ratio nearer one to 100, which is where most government departments will be going, and we will be doing that, we believe, without reducing the service. Sir Anthony Burden: Perhaps we could come back to you outside of the hearing on the business unit structure, we would find that very interesting, thank you. Around diversity, gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, are you happy you have got all those balls in the air equally balanced at the same time? Mr Banyard: I think it would be a brave person who said they had everything equally balanced. We are conscious that they are all areas we have to emphasise and make progress with. I am not sure I would pull any one out and say we are more behind or more in front, but we do recognise the need to concentrate and indeed the Northern Ireland equality scheme lays out for us the need to look explicitly at nine or ten specific areas. I think, more generally, we have tried to emphasise diversity, and we have tried to give our managers an understanding of what diversity and the diversity initiative is trying to address. I can remember – I am not sure whether I am answering your question, so stop me if I am not. Sir Anthony Burden: No, please, carry on. Mr Banyard: As a regional director in 1999, we were – we felt a great support towards the diversity initiative which the department was launching, but I felt that a number of my officers in charge – I was a regional director responsible for 65 local offices in the eastern counties – were also broadly supportive, but wanted a greater understanding of what diversity was about. We engaged a consultant, Geraldine Bown, who gave a particularly good workshop and seminar, which explained to people how they reacted to difference, explained the advantages of reacting to difference positively, and how diversity was an important element for us. Now, as an organisation, we have a very wide customer group. We have moved from being a tax organisation, which just deals with tax, to being an organisation that, as I said earlier, is responsible for national minimum wage, and for people's National Insurance contributions, so we are responsible for protecting the individual rights of some of the most vulnerable people in society. We touch most groups of society, so diversity is not an option for us, diversity is absolutely fundamental. If we are to enjoy the confidence of our customer groups, we have to have the understanding of those groups, and to do that, we have to have a diverse workforce, and equality policies to support it. Sir Anthony Burden: I was very interested in your comment, saying that the workforce felt confident that their managers believed in diversity. Mr Banyard: Yes, and that is, in a sense, why I gave you the example. Diversity has not only been driven out from HR, it has been driven out because individual business managers have behaved in a corporate manner, have seen that the organisation wants to go in a particular direction, have bought in to that direction, and have taken initiatives to advance it themselves. Sir Anthony Burden: Have you, as an organisation, gone through a pain barrier with this? Was there a time when you would say, "No, we did not have the confidence of our workforce in terms of diversity", and you were just believed to be lip service, et cetera? Mr Banyard: That is not an easy question to answer. The history that we followed was that the civil service introduced a strong equal opportunities push quite early in the 1980s, I believe, and I am conscious, having grown up in the organisation, that equal opportunities has been an issue which successive boards and chairmen have taken seriously, and therefore we have taken seriously. Diversity was introduced to us gradually in the late 1990s, and I think it appealed to people, because it was positive and it was seeking to get the best out of people, and it recognised that society was changing, but what really drove it home for us was our customer base changed very radically, and we had to respond to it, which has given us – the real strength behind our diversity initiative is that it is fundamental to our business policy. Sir Anthony Burden: Very similar to policing in that respect. There are several initiatives that you mentioned which are very helpful: the panels of diversity champions, for example. Mr Banyard: Yes, which I am going to this afternoon. Sir Anthony Burden: That has been a major initiative driving this forward? Mr Banyard: Yes, it has. The panel of diversity champions brings together a group of senior directors. It is chaired by a regional director, actually he has just been promoted to being a national director, but he was a regional director, and represented on the group are a range of national – that is, human resources or IT subject directors, and also business operational unit directors. We report through the champion of champions to the chairman, who takes an active interest in diversity: Nick Montagu took an active interest, and Ann Chant has succeeded him, she takes a very active interest too. In addition to that, the chairman has the diversity advisory group, which brings together a very wide range of people on a rotating basis who are people chosen not least because of their ability to speak up. But coming back to the champions group, we look at diversity issues, we take them forward on behalf of the board, and if we cannot progress them satisfactorily ourselves, then we would push them up to the departmental management committee. Mr Middleton: Perhaps I could help just with a personal reflection from my previous job as director of the special compliance office, which I think colleagues here would say is or was the part of the organisation that I think most people would have expected to have been perhaps a little more resistant to that sort of change than others, just for historic reasons. The office investigates serious tax frauds, it is the only part of the Inland Revenue that carries out investigation to criminal standard with a view to prosecution, and deals with other, sort of, significant abuses of the tax system. I think the lesson I would draw from leading the teams there – when I worked there, there were about 600 people in eight centres across the country – is that people have to understand that you are in it for the long run. This is not just another initiative which those in the organisation who do not want to join can just sort of keep their heads down and it will pass them by, and another initiative will come along in a year or two's time that they can ignore again; this is here to stay, and that you work really hard to incorporate diversity principles into the business planning, rather than have separate diversity things. Because totems are important to start with, but it has to develop beyond that into, "This is what we are about", and that requires visibility at the top and through all management levels. As Stephen said earlier, it is about talking and listening, and applying a sort of simple principle which I tried hard to do, I did not find it easy, I have to say, in visiting offices, when going round the country, "You have got one mouth and two ears, and you should use them in those proportions". Having diversity issues just as part of the normal day-to-day business, as well as the awareness training and the continuation of that, which we tried to do, and the contact officers which we had, and giving them visibility, actually building diversity into the plans, into the way we do business, to make sure it is on the agenda for all the senior management team meetings and conferences. Sir Anthony Burden: Can I just ask you then – because that is very relevant, in terms of your management standards – are you happy that you have golden threaded diversity through your management standards within the organisation? I mean, you make a very relevant point, it is not out there in a box, separate from everything else you do. But have you achieved it? Mr Banyard: My view is we are on a journey, and, like a large number of other organisations, we have different starting points, but we certainly have not reached our end point. So whilst I think we have done some good work on diversity, I would be the first to say we have got a long way to go, and what may appear to be good today may not stand the test of time tomorrow. Ms Samson: Can I just pick up two related issues on management standards? The first thing is, I think, when we were looking at the management standards, I think it was important for us that we looked at each of the standards and said, "Within each of those management standards, there are diversity issues and diversity behaviours that managers will have to employ in order to demonstrate that they are actually meeting that standard". So as part of the process that we actually went through, we took the first drafts of management standards, shared them very widely with a number of people from all sorts of different groups, and asked for their views on the standards as well, so that we were getting a cross-section of people's views. We also then went on and developed a separate diversity standard that we thought people should have to meet and demonstrate within the organisation. The other piece of work that we actually did related to that was to look at the core competence framework for the organisation, and to say – not, is this the core competence framework that we want to use now, but is this the core competencies that, looking at our long-term diversity aims, will enable us to actually achieve those aims? So in fact what we did, in looking at the core competence framework, was to identify those diversity behaviours that we were moving the organisation towards, although not accepting that everything would be perfect at this time. So I think those pieces of work were dual pieces of work, that we think will have long-term benefits, particularly the core competence framework, which actually defines how we recruit people, how we develop people, and I think those are critically important. That is a critically important piece of work, I think, in actually setting the organisation up for the future. Sir Anthony Burden: But the consultation ensured buy-in? Ms Samson: Yes, we had a cross-section of people who actually informed the work that we were doing, but the people who led the actual project – we were part of the consultation process that they used, but they went wider than just the diversity team, so they used it as a project, and that had all sorts of stakeholder analysis attached to that. Mr Banyard: It is also very heavily built into our senior civil service core competence framework, and that is general across the civil service. There are four I can pick out for you here, but these are drawn from when we select people for posts. If I could digress for a moment, we have been at this for a number of years, which has enabled us to, through the normal turnover of people in posts, to see corporacy, for example, being corporate, and valuing diversity as being some of the important criteria we select people on. So every period of time, we build in the essential ingredient, which is hearts and minds, people committed to what you are trying to do. But these are four of the core competencies for the senior civil service: taking personal responsibility for making progress in equality and diversity; identifying and bringing on talent, especially among underrepresented groups; understanding, valuing and incorporating different perspectives; making the best use of diverse talents. Now in a number of jobs I have advertised, as director of local services, to recruit regional directors, I have used at least two of those in a slate of ten or twelve core competencies which we would select on. So it is important that where you use it is when you choose people. Sir Anthony Burden: Yes. And, of course, I think the confidence levels coming from your staff would suggest perhaps you have moved past the stage, or maybe you were never at the stage where diversity only becomes an issue for managers and directors when they themselves are seeking promotion, or looking to move through the organisation, and there is a need to know. Mr Banyard: I think you use that process to help ensure you have got in place people who support, but inevitably, when you are introducing something new, it is not sufficient to say you want to do it, you have actually got to win hearts and minds to it, which means you have got to believe in it, and you have got to demonstrate that you are going to follow it through consistently. It is not, as John said, today's initiative and tomorrow's memory. Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Can I just, on one very quick point, refer you to your organisational profile? It is your fast stream, which is line 4. In terms of – fast stream, that is your sort of fast track graduate entry – Mr Banyard: Graduate entry, yes. Sir Anthony Burden: That seems to be a very impressive spread in terms of diversity, although I am sure you would say, in terms of minority ethnic recruitment, you would like it to be better. But can I ask, is it important for you that you get that sort of spread on your scheme, and how you have achieved it? Mr Banyard: The fast stream is particularly important, because they are not the only group from which our future leadership will be chosen, people come up through a variety of routes, but they are one of the groups from which our future leadership is chosen, and because they are on an accelerated path or can be on an accelerated path, it enables us to shift the balance in the senior ranks quite quickly, but we do need to get that right. If I take the example of people from an ethnic minority background, to try and help that, we have, for the last three years, run an eight-week work experience scheme for undergraduates with ethnic minority backgrounds, and we have used this to introduce them to work, to improve their prospects for employability, but more importantly than that, to secure people from their backgrounds for our organisation. We have refined the process this year, and we are running a summer training experience, again eight weeks' work experience, for some 40 first year undergraduates from ethnic minority backgrounds. Those that like it, we encourage to go on to a second year scheme, after their second year undergraduate, which is an intern scheme, where they are recruited on fair and open terms. If they are successful on that, we offer them a job, and our intern scheme last year, all of the ten – because it was a pilot scheme – interns were successful, and four were from ethnic minority backgrounds and were offered jobs. Now that is an example of a process which I had to follow to encourage people. A lot of our people on the fast stream also come internally, because we recruit very widely across the country, and we get a lot of graduates who start with us in – or non-graduates, but very talented people, who start with us in clerical positions, so we run entry into the fast track internally, and we have over the years run a number of schemes to encourage everybody, but particularly focused on those from disadvantaged groups, to come forward, and therefore we have worked to bring forward women within the organisation, and our representation, as you can see, is not yet where we want to be, but in the senior ranks, we are going up at about 3 per cent per year, so we will get there eventually. Sir Anthony Burden: But you seem to be very successful in the machine that – you know, the engine that will feed this eventually, through this fast stream process. I mean, you have mentioned positive action programmes, which obviously are successful, but is there any magic formula, either in terms of the positive action programmes or the selection programme itself, the process itself, which ensures that the sort of gatekeepers of the fast stream process recruit in a fair and non-discriminatory way? Mr Banyard: I think the first thing is the brand of the organisation. You have got to be attractive to the people who you want to bring in, and part of the – if you are not attracting a group, it may be because your processes are disadvantaging them, but it may also be because, in jargon, your brand is not attractive to them in the first place, so they do not apply. So you have got to do work with particular groups to ensure that the picture of the organisation you are presenting to them does not turn them off to start off with, and there are a number of techniques for doing this, but through the summer training experience, for example, we get direct conversation with people, we use role models in our advertising, we build links with university recruitment agencies, and through them, emphasise our commitment to diversity. We then examine our processes to make sure that they do not disadvantage people. For example, we have introduced, not for the fast stream, but for our clerical grades, an improved fast track recruitment process, which includes a first selection step; if you do not get through that step, you could still nevertheless take an equivalent work test to see whether in fact you can do the work we are asking you to do, and get back into the stream again. That has shown some quite good results in terms of getting people through. So we begin to see people – we also improved our promotion processes, and we are quite encouraged; for example, in that table, if you look at the line C2 on the left, a C2 is our middle manager, and will manage a number of frontline managers, and you will see that the proportion there from the ethnic minorities is now 5 per cent. That has been going up at just under 1 per cent a year, and we see it on an upwards path, and we certainly want to see it go up, so that it is proportionate to their representation in the organisation as a whole. Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Perhaps we could come back to you on that point. Finally, my colleague reminds me, on the issue of consultation and – communication more than consultation, but you have placed much emphasis, quite rightly, on that and success within your organisation. The Metropolitan Police use the intranet as a way of communicating with staff. What is your most successful form of communication, do you feel, in communicating with your 85,000 members of staff? Mr Banyard: One of the rules we have learnt with communication is you never get it right; whatever you put in place that you believe is perfect does not stand the test of time. We use the intranet because it enables us to get a message out swiftly, and the same message to everybody. But I think, in communicating things to people, you need to have a strategic approach. If an issue affects someone personally and individually, then the communication should be one to one, face to face. If it affects a group, but it actually affects them, but as a group, then the communication should be one to group, face to face. If the communication is general, and affects the whole organisation, or if it is for information, then I think you can use the written word, whether it comes through paper – because we still have a monthly magazine – or whether it comes on the net. Sometimes, you cannot help it, things are moving fast, we work in a political environment, and we work in an environment where news travels very quickly, and it is sometimes more important that your staff find out quickly than that they find out face to face. So another guiding rule, if you like, is that the staff find out first from us, and that may lead us to override the need for face to face. But where we can, and where you can manage the message, important things are best still done face to face, with listening built in. Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you very much indeed. Sir William Morris: Thank you, Sir Anthony. Now, Mr Banyard, can I first of all say thank you very much indeed for your help? We have actually finished the questions that my colleagues and I wanted to explore with you, but you will recall that in my opening comments earlier on, I said that at the end of our questions, we would give you and your colleagues the opportunity to make a brief closing comment if you so wished. If you do want to do that, then I would invite you to do so at this point. Mr Banyard: I think there are really three things I want to say. One is that equality and diversity is a journey, and that where an organisation is today reflects much more what its previous leaders did than what happened yesterday, and what we are doing today will colour what happens tomorrow. You might like to bear that in mind when you are thinking of the Met. The second thought is that we look forward to reading your report, because I think we will be able to learn from that too. The third is that if the Metropolitan Police did think that there was something in what we had done that they would find useful, I would like to extend an invitation to them to come and talk to us informally, and we would gladly share any of our experience with them. Sir William Morris: Thank you very much indeed, and thank you for your generous offer. I am sure we will pass your offer on. Could I just for the record put some concluding words on our transcript note? It is to say that, as with all our witnesses, it may be that, once we have heard from others, we will want to ask you a few more questions, either in writing, or ask you to come back for one of these hearings. If we need to do that, then we will try and do it in a way which causes you the least possible inconvenience, but for the moment, on behalf of my colleagues, what I just have to do is to say thanks very much indeed for your written submissions, thanks for the candour and the detailed way in which you have responded to our questions this morning, and indeed, thanks for your overall contribution to the work of the Inquiry. Thank you very much indeed. Mr Banyard: Thank you. 12.25 pm (The short adjournment) Internal links On this website: Evidence: Inland Revenue Evidence provided by and documents referred to by the Inland Revenue in its appearance at the Inquiry.
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Transcripts > Inland Revenue (27 Apr 04)
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