In succeeding John Banham and Howard Davies as the Audit Commission’s third controller, Andrew Foster had two hard acts to follow. He wasted no time aspiring to their kind of bravura. If the one had juggled trays on the high wire and the other had circled the ring at a gallop astride several stallions at once, Foster settled from the outset for a more modest role in tails and top hat. But he would run a first-class show, steadily extending the bill and pulling in the crowds with great skill.
Thus, by the middle of 1994 he had repositioned the District Audit Service as a new body, DA, operating at arm’s length from the centre. He had clarified reporting lines within the head office. He had restructured the management board with five directors, adding three newcomers — Bill Ogley, Mollie Bickerstaff and Steve Nicklen — and delegating extensively to all of them. He had made clear his commitment to the work of the two studies directorates, now headed by Bob Chilton and Jonty Boyce, without raising any expectations that he personally would be contributing much to the content of national reports. He had overseen a refurbishment and expansion of the offices in Vincent Square — not least the controller’s office on the fifth floor — to which the staff returned in August. And he had knocked into shape a three-year strategy (Adding Value), corporate plans and budgets with brisk efficiency. It was all much as David Cooksey and his colleagues had hoped and expected — as the deputy chairman, Murray Stuart, hinted at the March 1994 session of the Commission, when he pointedly ‘commended the professional approach taken in drawing up the budget this year’.1
As for the external presentation of its work, Foster transformed the Commission’s in-house publishing operation within his first six months. Where two people had previously produced documents with not much more than the basic Office software, a team of six was soon at work in Vincent Square equipped with the latest software for professional designers. What followed would have graced an academic institution many times the size of the Commission. National reports, audit manuals, management handbooks and other formal papers streamed out of the head office. (Or at least, computer disks streamed out. Contract printers were used for the final production.) The cycle involving just three or four studies each year had long since given way to rolling programmes of work for local government and for health. Between Foster’s appointment as controller and the end of 1997, the Commission would put out over 130 titles — not including Executive Briefings, Executive Summaries, Bulletins to update old reports, a quarterly news-sheet (Headlines) on current work and forthcoming reports, occasional guides to the work of the Commission and, of course, regular annual compendia of national performance indicators.
Nor was it just a matter of quantity. The importance attached to good design was evident from the start, even in the changing appearance of the annual report. The year prior to Foster’s start had seen a first tentative use of photographs. The cover of the 1992 Annual Report featured a hospital nurse in one corner and three workmen in the other, bent double painting yellow parking lines on a kerbside. Inside were a few small sepia prints of employees, and a curious picture (as if to prove its existence) of the latest Code of Audit Practice. The next report, appearing in mid-1993, had full-page photographs of customer-focus in action — handily illustrating care for the elderly, support for families with children in hospital, and vocational training for teenagers. The pictures contributed to a broader change of tone: it was an annual report intent on making everything about the Commission as transparent as possible. The ingredients of its strategy for the years ahead, the principles governing its appointment of auditors, the aims and principal elements of its quality-control programme — all these and more were set out for the reader as the preamble to a detailed review, through almost fifty pages, of the Commission’s work over the year. Even the Commission’s members, hitherto simply listed, were now given miniature profiles.
This was the start of a continuous process of embellishment over the years to follow. And the care lavished on the annual reports was just as apparent across the whole range of Commission publications — most especially the national reports. In the years after 1993, these often stretched to about 100 pages in length. Enormous effort went into ensuring their accessibility, not just for the relevant expert but also for the general manager — and, needless to say, those in the media, Whitehall and Westminster at whom all of the reports were indirectly aimed. As this suggested, the new controller saw it as a big part of his job to ensure that the work of the Commission reached as wide an audience as possible — including end-consumers, as well as those responsible for acting on its recommendations. Foster had known before he joined the Commission that it was producing outstanding analysis of a wide range of public services. He wanted to ensure the analysis found its way into real benefits on the ground. He recalled: ‘The Commission’s output was in a class of its own. Ithought the most important thing was always to find ways of engaging with our audiences and ensuring they took ownership of it.’ 2
The heightened regard inside the Commission for what was actually happening on the receiving end of public services did not go unnoticed in Whitehall. Contemplating the next round of appointments to the Commission, officials at the Department of the Environment were by mid-1994 thinking it might be appropriate to recruit at least one person with some direct experience of representing users of one service or another. Someone less concerned with the drive for ever greater efficiency, that is to say, and more focused on the quality of public services.
Since early 1991, the Commission had said goodbye to seven members. (This tally does not include the departure of Paul Beresford, the Tory leader of Wandsworth Council who was appointed in May 1991 but left in March 1992 to contest a seat in the 1992 general election. He was successful and became the second former Commission member, after John Gunnell, to enter the Commons.) Two of the three remaining original members, Noel Hepworth and Roy Shaw, had gone. The other five leavers were the former deputy chairman Harry Axton, Andrew Likierman, Eleanor James, John Clout and, in September 1993, Jennifer Hunt, the leading authority on nursing, who had joined in 1991.
They had been replaced over the three years by members with a broad range of backgrounds. In addition to the LSE academic, Tony Travers, there were five others. Lawrence Eilbeck was the leader of Carlisle City Council. Clive Thompson was a businessman and the nominee of the Welsh Office. Peter Kemp had just retired as second permanent secretary at the Treasury. Terence English was a former president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Kate Jenkins was a former head of the prime minister’s Efficiency Unit in Downing Street with various advisory roles and a seat on the NHS Policy Board. By the summer of 1994, the officials in Marsham Street had also lined up for imminent appointment two additional figures from the world of local government: Peter Soulsby, former leader of Leicester City Council, and Iris Tarry, former leader of Hertfordshire County Council (and the current chairman of the county’s police authority).
None of these individuals, however, could really be said to have scrutinized public services from the consumer’s side of the counter. With the retirement of Lawrence Eilbeck and Bob Wall in April and July 1994 respectively, and four more departures in prospect for January 1995 – of Murray Stuart, Alan Brown, Tony Christopher and, the last of the 1983 intake, Peter Bowness — the officials in Marsham Street were keen to find one or two replacements with just such a background. They turned for help to the Department of Trade and Industry, which after all had a consumer affairs division. One of the bodies with which the DTI worked closely was the National Association of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux (NACAB). This dealt with about 7 million users of public services in a typical year, which seemed promising — and it so happened that NACAB was just about to appoint a new chairman. Her name was Helena Shovelton.
The process that culminated in Shovelton’s appointment as a member had the merit, it could be said, of being unencumbered by overly formal procedures. But it also suggested a less than obsessive concern in Whitehall for the governance needs of the Commission. For a start, the process took the best part of six months. That July, she was summoned at twelve hours’ notice for an interview with the minister for local government and housing, David Curry. This seemed to go satisfactorily enough, after a shaky introduction. She recalled: ‘Iturned up and was led into his outer office to go into the main one, and in the outer office was a man in a terribly scruffy jersey with holes through the sleeves. He was going through the post box, so I presumed he was the messenger. And that was David Curry, so it was rather an inauspicious start.’ 3
The minister seemed impressed that Shovelton had actually run a Citizens’ Advice Bureau, engaging constantly with local government on behalf of people struggling to make sense of welfare payments, housing benefits and so on. (In fact it had been a return to work for her in 1985, after a debilitating illness that had laid her low for ten years. Running a CAB had led to her being co-opted on to the organization’s national council, on which she had now been sitting for four years.) ‘Well’, Curry said to her approvingly at the close of their discussion together, ‘I reckon you know the dirty end of local government!’ 4 There then followed, for the best part of six months, complete radio silence. Assuming that no job was going to be forthcoming, Shovelton eventually contacted the department for confirmation of this negative outcome early in December. Surprised to hear that, on the contrary, an invitation to join the Commission might be in the offing quite soon, she then caused consternation by asking for a meeting with the Commission’s chairman and requesting that officials send her some background papers that might help her to prepare for it. Neither had ever been requested before, and a frenzy of telephone calls followed. Fortunately, when eventually they did meet just after Christmas, she and David Cooksey found an immediate rapport. The appointment process lurched on, and on 31 January 1995 Shovelton’s formal appointment letter arrived — inviting her to attend her first meeting two days later, on 2 February.
Two other new members were appointed alongside her. Ron Watson was a councillor and former council leader who headed the Tory group within the Association of Metropolitan Authorities. John Foster (who could not attend the February meeting, given the short notice) was chief executive of Middlesbrough Borough Council. Together, they brought the Commission up to fifteen members, including the chairman, leaving room for five more appointments in due course. It would have been sixteen, but for the tragic death in January 1995 of Chris West, the chief executive of Portsmouth and East Hampshire Health Authority, whose work with Vincent Square staff on the NHS franchise had been so valuable in devising basic audit tools in the aftermath of the 1990 legislation.
David Cooksey missed the 2 February meeting through illness. His next meeting turned out to be the last before the announcement of his retirement from the chair. In August, he would finally be stepping down, at the end of what would be his ninth year — and in the wake, rather satisfactorily, of chairing exactly his 100th monthly meeting. Though he did not disclose it immediately, he had agreed to take over the chairmanship of the Local Government Commission for England (LGCE), chaired since 1992 by John Banham. The recommendations of Banham’s Commission, finally completed in January 1995, had caused some dismay among government ministers. (As envisaged by the government at the outset, it proposed replacing the existing county/district structure in many shires with so-called unitary authorities, but it also recommended leaving a surprising number of shires unaltered and proposing only a hybrid arrangement for others. Taking their cue from local opinion surveysto an extent that surprised officials in Whitehall, these recommendations fell well short of what ministers were intent on achieving.) Banham had struggled with a difficult brief, to say the least. As he had told a lecture audience in Cambridge a year earlier with his customary frankness, reviewing the structure of local government had turned out to be ‘what might charitably be called a political nightmare’.5 John Gummer, the environment secretary, rejected many of his final recommendations and returned them to the LGCE for further consideration. He announced in March that Banham had resigned.
Cooksey would be greatly missed by the Commission. He had been an effective ambassador for Vincent Square in its dealings with Whitehall. He had been an exemplary chairman to three controllers, offering avuncular guidance on the one hand and a cool decisiveness on the other, as occasion demanded. And he had presided over nine years of discussions among the Commission members with a skill and courtesy acknowledged by all. It was a group that, under his leadership, had grown rather wiser to the ways of the public sector in general and the challenges faced by the Commission in particular. There was a finer appreciation, for example, of the underlying tension between the Commission’s roles as a watchdog, as an analytical observer and as an improvement agency. Always implicit in its statutory status, this hybrid calling had become much more of an issue since the advent of the Citizen’s Charter and the assumption of responsibility for performance indicators. The members were well aware that a heightened focus on end-users’ perceptions of public services was inevitably going to raise expectations of what the Commission could achieve as an improvement agency — even if they had no firm idea yet how best to respond. This was going to pose problems, as Cooksey would shortly acknowledge. In his valedictory Chairman’s Foreword to the 1995 Annual Report, he noted that the Commission ‘is now moving into much more difficult territory’. Given the growing focus on end-users, ‘future work will increasingly be concerned with the quality of outputs and outcomes. To make real impact here, without losing sight of the economy and efficiency with which services are delivered, will be a tough challenge.’
It had always been a part of the Commission’s public message that it was there to improve standards in local government. But this had been essentially a rhetorical device. The actual improving was to be done by those who noted the Commission’s illuminative papers and analyses with sufficient care. Now people would be looking to it for more than a rhetorical commitment to the business of improving how local bodies performed. This was an evolution with which Andrew Foster seemed entirely comfortable, but the members themselves had already anguished over it for hours at regular away-days and half-days, and would continue to do so.
At the same time the Commission had evolved under Cooksey into a body more at ease with the influential role that it now played in the public sector. It was a process easily dismissed as ‘going native’. But it could equally be seen as an inevitable concomitant of working effectively over time with local bodies such as councils, police committees and hospital trusts. Tony Travers, a seasoned observer of local government, recalled:
The Commission followed a pattern you could see in other institutions. The London Docklands Development Corporation was a precise parallel. In both cases, the first phase saw business people very much in control, but eventually both bodies migrated to being organizations with a much greater sensitivity towards the public sector. It was partly because that was the only way of surviving. But it was also partly because you can only ever batter the public sector for so long before you just demoralize it, and it gives up.6
The Commission’s migration was clear enough. In its early years, membership places had been found for businessmen such as Kenneth Bond, David Lees, Ian Hay Davison and Lawrie Barratt — not to mention the men from McKinsey. By March 1995, there was conspicuously just a single member left, Clive Thompson, with a purely business background. Six of his peers had built their careers around the local delivery of public services; three had always worked in one guise or another on the formulation of public policy. The businessmen had had their day. Again, it was a remarkable facet of his chairmanship that Cooksey, a venture capitalist to his fingertips, had adapted to this shift with no dent whatever to his authority within the boardroom or his credibility in the world beyond it.
His legacy was a robust team culture. Most newcomers were struck, for example, by the complete absence of any party political allegiances around the table. Past or current council leaders set aside their political differences — not that this required a Herculean effort for moderates like the Tory Peter Bowness from Croydon or Labour’s Clive Wilkinson from Birmingham — and pooled their experience of local government in discussions that were genuinely open to all new ideas. The members worked hard, too, and brought to bear a collective experience of the public sector with few parallels. Some brought valuable experience of the workings of Whitehall itself. Kate Jenkins had been a key architect behind sweeping reforms of the civil service during her time inside No. 10 and she had since remainedan influential figure as a private consultant: in 1993, for instance, she had chaired a major review of the recent reforms in NHS management. Others were so distinguished within their own specific fields that their colleagues naturally deferred to them accordingly — and the result was a de facto allocation of various specialist roles that carried particular weight. Donald Irvine’s career at the top of the medical profession gave him an unrivalled understanding of the regulation of complicated institutions within the NHS, and indeed beyond it. Tony Christopher, a man with an eye for details and a punctilious approach that almost suggested a military past, brought a huge knowledge of the world of pay negotiations from his career as a trade union leader. Above all, perhaps, there was the former City accountant Jeremy Orme, whose understanding of financial and regulatory matters was much valued by his colleagues. Orme was especially relied upon as an arbiter of any issues arising between the Commission and the private firms that it appointed in the field.
But while the level of each individual’s involvement varied, all contributed in ways that went well beyond a bare monthly attendance. As a group, they prepared each month for a long and varied agenda.∗ And most had additional business to keep them busy, too, between the monthly meetings: as already noted, four ‘panels’ had been set up in 1993 to discuss in detail any issues relating to specific areas, and every new member was invited to say which panel they wanted to join. Panel work often obliged members to engage with technical issues, many of which even involved auditing and accounting — unlike most of the lively discussions that dominated the formal sessions of the Commission as a whole.
Indeed, a hostile critic in the mid-1990s could fairly have questioned the extent of the members’ genuine concern for technical matters — though arguably it had been a standing oddity of the Audit Commission from the start that audit was of little real interest to the commissioners. During his thirteen years as a director at Vincent Square, Harry Wilkinson had single-handedly written large chunks of the canon for public auditing. Yet he had seldom sensed much interest in his work among the members, or indeed the controllers. After an initial chat in 1983, he never once spoke to John Banham about it; he was only very rarely asked about it by Howard Davies; and he was consigned by Andrew Foster to a back office for the two years up to his retirement in 1996. As for the members, some had come and gone without his ever meeting them at all. He recalled: ‘I had nothing to do with the members, really almost nothing, nor they with me.’ 7
The unavoidable reality was that studies and national reports were the bedrock on which the Commission’s reputation was built. No one in David Cooksey’s time ever doubted it. They also allowed members to make a meaningful contribution: they could chip in ideas for future studies, meet with team leaders to chew over current drafts and debate for hours the likely future impact of this or that key conclusion. As Tony Travers recalled:
Every now and again, one of the probity and regularity people would be brought into a meeting as if they were some exotic beast that had been captured. We would sit through their presentation — then they would leave, and we could dive into our long deliberations over some new report that was much more fun.8
The flow of reports was swelling rapidly by 1994, and most were still discussed in some detail prior to publication. Members were also keen to be more involved in the choice of future subjects, and to have an opportunity to review each report with its senior managers at the half-way stage. On all counts, the work of the Health Studies directorate would almost have been sufficient on its own to fill their agenda. As the minutes of their monthly meetings amply attested, nothing drew the members’ avid attention more consistently over the coming few years than the Commission’s NHS franchise.
Andrew Foster insisted in 1993 that the views of health authority officials around the country should be widely canvassed in the process of selecting future subjects. The Health Studies directorate went one better in 1994. Boyce recalled: ‘We got together some groups of doctors, chief executives, nurses and auditors. We showed them the studies we had done to date, explained the sort of criteria we used for making our choices and asked them to give us their opinions about other areas we might look at.’ 9
The sessions were heldat Church House, a beautiful building behind Westminster Abbey (where the House of Lords convened during the second world war). More than forty people attended them. It was agreed from the outset that some criteria were self-evident. Future studies had to focus on issues of material importance to the NHS; there had to be sufficient variation in current practice to suggest genuine scope for improvement; and there had to be grounds for believing that worthwhile recommendations would be welcomed, at least by those with a responsibility for leading the way. Beyond that, the Commission was open to innovative ideas as usual. The discussions went well — prompting a repeat fixture the next year — and a list of ten topics went to the Commission members for their consideration and endorsement in July 1994. They chose four, which eventually emerged at various points of 1996. The choice was primarily driven by the search for reforms that could offer a significant financial return on any successful implementation. No doubt the final pick was also made with an eye to the likely impact of any prospective report on the public standing of the Commission — but that was wholly in keeping with its best traditions. Without doubt, the outcome greatly enhanced that standing. Health-related titles constituted about 45 per cent of the Commission’s publications in 1993–97, and covered a remarkably wide range of topics that left scarcely any corner of the NHS untouched.
The directorate had continued to be led until June 1994 by Ross Tristem, who left on secondment that month to run one of the many new bodies that had sprung up in the aftermath of the 1990 NHS Act: he was to be chief executive of the NHS Trust Federation, the umbrella organization for all NHS trusts. Though he technically left on secondment, it was plain to all his colleagues that Tristem would not be returning. His contribution to the Commission’s success since 1983 had been immense. His successor recalled: ‘He was great fun to work with, and that’s the first thing you always remember about Ross. But he was very sharp and passionately interested in the issues — with no kind of self-aggrandizement whatsoever. The issues were everything.’ 10
Jonty Boyce took over the lead, though he would not be finally confirmed as the full director until 1996. To fill his old position, he promoted someone he himself had hired in 1991, Jocelyn Cornwell. Back then, exploiting the fact that the Commission was not part of the civil service, it had still been possible to pull aboard someone highly recommended by a good contact. Cornwell was introduced to Boyce by Nick Black, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and one of his former colleagues. A Cambridge graduate with a doctorate on patients’ views of their own health, she was working at the time in the Islington Community Health Department. Her professor brought her along to meet Boyce for lunch at Bertorelli’s in Covent Garden, and he more or less hired her on the spot. She joined the existing two associate directors, David Browning and Ken Sneath. Over the next couple of years, however, Sneath was frequently incapacitated by poor health. He finally took early retirement in 1993 and was in turn replaced by a former management consultant from Boston Consulting Group, Joanne Shaw. (Her recruitment was only problematic in so far as she had an equally brilliant rival for the vacant position, a former hospital manager and social services professional called Andrew Webster.)
Boyce and his three associates headed a team that grew to more than forty people by the late 1990s. More than half worked directly on studies, while others provided back-up services — including the development of an in-house databank of statistics on the NHS and an index of useful research sources. The reputation of the directorate ensured plenty of applicants for every new position. The senior team on several occasions set aside a whole day to put shortlisted candidates through the kind of selection procedures customarily used in picking high-fliers for the civil service. Those who made it to Vincent Square constituted a gifted and eclectic group, with doctorates in various disciplines, from Arabic to ornithology: Ian Seccombe had spent several years in the Middle East, while rooks and crows were the special subject offered by a former DA man, Richard (Dick) Waite. (All showed up in the prefaces to their Commission reports as ‘Dr’, which probably did no harm.)
The studies they undertook built steadily on the foundations laid by the three inaugural reports of 1990–91, followed in 1992 by the study of bed management in the NHS and the handbooks on nursing. Huge effort had also gone into three reports on community care that had been published under Tristem’s lead in 1992. (They were entitled Community Care: Managing the Cascade of Change; Community Revolution: Personal Social Services and Community Care; and Homeward Bound: a New Course for Community Health.) The directorate had a wide remit, covering social services as well as ‘community health’ –meaning medical services for those still living at home — and hospitals. The directorate generally produced three or four major reports each year, and the Commission itself grouped them by topic under about two dozen different sub-headings. In essence, though, most belonged to one of three categories: they were focused primarily on clinical or management issues, or else they looked specifically at the continuing reorganization of the NHS triggered by the 1990 Act. (Almost all carried a punning title — there was just a single category in that respect.)
Studies in the clinical category either dealt with a single issue — like the inaugural study, into day surgery — or else looked at the implications for the clinicians of broader changes. In 1995, for example, United They Stand looked at the treatment of elderly patients with hip fractures (the subject, years before, of Boyce’s own D. Phil. thesis) and Dear to Our Hearts? dealt with the treatment and prevention of cardiac disease; in 1996, By Accident or Design analysed ways of improving accident and emergency (A&E) services; and in 1997, First Class Delivery provided an influential study of maternity services (based in part on a series of interviews with 2,350 women). Also in 1997, Anaesthesia under Examination had the distinction of being one of the few reports to stump Vincent Square’s indefatigable punsters — though the cognoscenti would know it nicely reversed the title of a standard procedure known to doctors as ‘examination under anaesthesia’.
The clinical dimension certainly met with the occasional push-back from doctors. The Commission’s consistent purpose was straightforward enough. It sought rigorously to compare what were inelegantly known as inputs and outcomes: were the resources being poured into this or that corner of the NHS leading to satisfactory treatment services from the perspective of the patients? But there were always those in the profession who doubted anything so mysterious as medicine could ever be explained to — still less, by — the uninitiated.
A report on radiology services in 1995, called Improving Your Image, provoked fury among radiologists in one region of England who castigated one of its recommendations as clinically unsafe. (The report, noting the existence of long waiting times in some departments, argued for a practice known as ‘hot reporting’ that was being introduced in a few departments. One radiologist would be designated ‘reader for the day’ to report on all the X-rays being taken, regardless of who had supervised them. This made far more reports available, far quicker, for other doctors to refer to.) But serious clinical objections to the directorate’s work were rare, especially after the mid-90s. No doubt, after 1993, it helped that the Commission’s members included a former president of one of the Royal Colleges. For his part, Terence English soon came to have a high regard for Boyce and his team and was a willing ally.
The media could be a much bigger problem. The 1996 report on A&E departments triggered one of the more unfortunate encounters. Few areas of the NHS could be more newsworthy than A&E: patients make about 15 million visits a year to emergency departments, which for many people therefore represent the face of the health service. Fieldwork across twenty-four hospital trusts underpinned the Commission’s final report. Its conclusions painted a none too flattering portrait: too few senior doctors, too narrow a role for nurses, too few facilities for children and too much waiting in line for almost everyone — these were just some of the heavily researched findings. Looking to the future, the report noted the considerable variation in departments’ workloads. It flagged a widely held view among the experts that smaller departments often struggled to respond properly to serious emergencies. Reviewing the evidence for this, it questioned the need for those with fewer than 50,000 cases a year that were also within 10 miles of an alternative department. There turned out to be sixty-two of these, and the report recommended a full review of each one. Their locations were documented within the back-up papers — but omitted from the published report, for obvious reasons.
On the day before publication, embargoed copies of the report were sent out to the media as usual. That evening, well after most people had left the office, a late media query came through to Vincent Square. One of the younger and more generous-spirited members of the health directorate took the call. It was from a canny journalist at the Press Association, the news agency that reports stories on a continuous basis and makes its copy available to local newspapers all over the country. He had noted the recommendation for reviewing the viability of smaller departments adjacent to others, he said, and was in the process of working out which they were from the publicly available data. He was just wondering, though, whether — simply in the interests of saving time and avoiding silly mistakes, of course — it might be possible to short-circuit the process and just get the names from the Audit Commission directly? Obligingly, the generous spirit faxed over the list. Next morning, local newspapers in many of the affected areas across the country ran front-page stories headlining the PA copy: Top Secret List of NHS Regulator — Local A&E Department to Close. And the national press published the entire list. The story ran for days, and was a brutal reminder of the latent conflict dwelt upon by the Butler Review the year before, between the Commission as watchdog and the Commission as consultant or think-tank.
The second category of national reports looked at more purely managerial issues within the NHS. With the Soviet Red Army in meltdown, it was a press cliche´ that the only human enterprises bigger than the NHS were the Army of the People’s Republic of China and the state-owned Indian Railways. How the three organizations might have ranked in a pecking order based on efficiency was thought by some to be a moot point. There was no shortage of experts selling advice on how to change this. While the NHS was spending about £120 million a year on management consultants, however, one of the Commission’s earliest health reports, the optimistically titled Reaching the Peak?, showed in 1994 that well over half of all externally sourced recommendations were completely ignored.
This did not deter the Health Studies Directorate itself — nor should it have, since the thrust of its work still complied with that old adage from the Davies era about illuminating choices: the Commission’s reports were not there to dictate future policy to local bodies, but rather to help them assess the policy options ahead of them. A new series of NHS Management Papers explored in detail how the best practitioners controlled their senior management costs (A Price on their Heads), made the most use of non-executive directors on NHS trust boards (Taken on Board) or adapted their NHS trust structures to accommodate managerial reforms (Form Follows Function). And there were national reports on the basic management of the NHS, too. An astonishingly detailed study of hospital doctors, The Doctor’s Tale, provided an overview of their duties, training and working practices.
Inevitably, such work steadily strengthened the impression that piercing analysis of the NHS had been somewhat neglected over the years. This was not always received within the Department of Health as a welcome observation. The fact that the Commission’s controller had worked briefly in the department before arriving in Vincent Square — and had been keen, initially at least, to be more accommodating towards it — seemed not to have made much difference either way to a relationship that remained professional but hardly cordial. Foster himself recalled: ‘The existence of an independent reporting mechanism, which is what we were, was a source of massive friction over time.’ 11
The relationship cannot have been much improved by two widely noted Commission reports in 1995: they were sharply critical of the development and implementation of information-management systems in many acute hospitals (For Your Information) and of the current, shambolic state of their medical records (Setting the Records Straight). Whatever the department’s views, though, one Commission member responded with particular interest to these titles. Helena Shovelton was at that time chairing one of the independent reviews that were being conducted for District Health Authorities all over the country, to adjudicate between hospitals and social services over the division of responsibilities between them for patient care. (Hospitals were free; residential homes were not. Patients, unsurprisingly, often needed prising out of their hospital beds.) Arguments between the two sides often came down to an inspection of the medical records. Shovelton recalled: ‘But what was always interesting, on trawling through them, was how deeply inadequate they were. Often nobody had bothered actually to look through them. Medical records were cited as evidence, where no evidence really existed. They were simply a mess.’ 12 The clarity of the health directorate’s work in this area impressed her.
The potential for reporting usefully on the NHS’s management practices was vast — and within months of Ross Tristem’s departure, Andrew Foster was urging the health directorate to look again at the possibility of out-sourcing studies, a practice abandoned in the mid-1980s. (He had already persuaded the local government directorate to do so, resulting in a 1995 report on the fire service, researched by the accountants Ernst… Young and written up by an in-house project team as In the Line of Fire.) A topic was chosen — the management of supplies by NHS trusts — and the tender attracted a long list of bidders. The contract went in the end to one of the several large accountancy firms’ consultancy arms that dominated the shortlist, Robson Rhodes. Their research (assisted by a secondee from the Commission, Nick Mapstone) was of a high standard — and it so happened that they had an ex-DA auditor on their staff, which made work on the audit guide much easier for them. But it nonetheless proved difficult, and expensive, to translate their early drafts of the report, Goods for your Health, into the house styleof the Commission. Outsourcing in future would be used to assist with research, but rarely again for whole reports.
A third category of health reports tackled head-on the tumultuous reorganization triggered by the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. Not without some misgivings among Commission members, the health directorate ventured forth to examine how the reorganization was going. In introducing the concept of purchasers and providers within the NHS, the 1990 Act invited health authorities to become commissioners (or ‘purchasers’) of health services on the one hand and invited hospitals on the other to reconstitute themselves as self-governing trusts; together they would constitute a so-called ‘internal market’. By 1994, trusts were providing about 90 per cent of all NHS specialist services (and accounting for about two thirds of NHS spending in England and Wales). But these changes were not always conveyed properly to the people working within the NHS. A study team from the Commission surveyed 400 staff working within trusts around the country, and asked them to respond to the statement: ‘I am generally well informed about what’s happening in the trust.’ Fully half of the respondents disagreed with it. The team went on to produce a national report, Trusting in the Future, that sought to provide a detailed agenda for those engaged in making the trusts effective. One of the biggest challenges for the trusts involved putting non-medical professionals in charge of new business units and clinical directorates, and the Commission documented plenty of robust comments on that score, from managers and doctors alike.
Reports on the reshaping of the NHS, though, were of course hugely problematic: by their nature, they would encroach on policy territory that was jealously guarded by the officials in Richmond House. It was therefore with some trepidation that the Commission gave the go-ahead for a study into GP fundholders. These were the groups of general practitioners who had taken up an option provided by the 1990 Act, to purchase hospital and community services themselves, rather than remain dependent on contracts arranged by their local District Health Authority. It was arguably the most radical of the Tories’ reforms, and it was hated with a passion by most Labour politicians. Whatever the Commission concluded about fundholders was highly likely to offend one party or the other. The eventual report, What the Doctor Ordered, ran to 136 pages. It was the longest ever produced in Vincent Square. Its encyclopedic approach suited the complexity of the subject matter — but it also gave the report a Delphic dimension, for both Tories and Labour could be sure to find within it at least something that supported their case.
In so far as the report itself had a conclusion, it was probably that the GP fundholder concept was stronger in theory than in practice. Boyce recalled:
If you could take all of the things that were being done by GP fundholders in different places, and amalgamate them into one ideal that could then be replicated everywhere, the result would have been brilliant. But the reality was that all of them faced an overwhelming agenda that none could really handle. So they used the freedom granted by the 1990 Act to do more of whatever the individual GPs happened to be interested in or good at.13
As always, both the health secretary and the shadow spokesman on health were given a preview of the report shortly before its publication. While Andrew Foster spoke to the minister, Stephen Dorrell, it was left to Boyce to brief Labour’s Harriet Harman. The health studies director prepared for his meeting with some care — but once it had begun, it was quickly apparent to Boyce’s relief that Harman had scarcely opened the report or read any of the papers prepared for her about it.14 This seemed to sum up the general reaction to the report. It was now late in 1996, and leading figures on both sides of the political divide were too busy preparing for the coming general election to have a row over a report with no especially outspoken conclusions. So the Commission got away with many observations that in other circumstances might have stirred up a hornets’ nest. In risking overt criticism of the prevailing model for the NHS, it had strayed a long way into policy-making territory normally regarded as out of bounds.
There was just one area in which the Commission had a de facto licence to stray in this manner — the social services sector. This slight anomaly was a legacy of the powerful contribution made by the Commission to the development of the social services over many years. It went back to the Section 27 report of 1986, Making a Reality of Community Care, that had done so much to shape subsequent legislative reforms of the sector. And since then, the Commission had consistently taken a special interest in the welfare of children, the elderly and the mentally handicapped, with a long string of reports, including those of 1992, many of them prepared under the direction of David Browning. Three more substantial publications — two national reports and a management handbook — appeared before the end of 1997. They comprised an update on the progress of the government’s reforms, Balancing the Care Equation; a report on the adequacy of services for the elderly, The Coming of Age; and a management handbook, Take Your Choice, to assist social services departments in their commissioning of providers to meet local needs. By this date, however, the Commission’s role in the world of social services had undergone a significant extension.
Responsibility for overseeing local authorities’ social services rested in the 1990s with a unit inside the Department of Health called the Social Services Inspectorate (SSI). Theirs was an unenviable lot whenever the tabloids worked themselves into a lather over the latest disclosure of some horrific child-abuse case that an incompetent (or unfortunate) social services worker had failed to pre-empt. But by 1995, a series of mishaps had begun seriously to alarm not just the media, but policy makers inside the government, too. The Policy Unit within 10 Downing Street under Sarah Hogg concluded that the time had come to abolish the SSI and find some more effective oversight body for services that were accounting for annual expenditure of about £7 billion. The prime minister concurred with this, and a meeting was arranged for him to break the news himself to his health secretary, Virginia Bottomley. She was herself a former psychiatric social worker with a more than passing interest in social services, and she objected to the move. It was soon the gossip of the Whitehall village that John Major had made the mistake of tackling his glamorous cabinet colleague over a late-night dinner. To nobody’s very great surprise, she had managed to talk him out of abolishing her inspectorate and the hunt was on for a compromise.
Looking around for another supervisory body with a potentially complementary role in social services, Sarah Hogg and her colleagues quickly alighted on the Audit Commission and its famously energetic controller. He was telephoned within days. Would his team be interested, asked Hogg, in a wider mandate on social services? Andrew Foster was not in the business of turning down invitations to expand the Commission’s franchise. It was always his instinct to go for growth, and he had no hesitation recommending to David Cooksey that they push ahead with some preparatory papers. When he presented these at a subsequent monthly meeting of the members, however, several of them expressed significant reservations. Taking on direct responsibility, albeit in tandem with another body, for monitoring a corner of the public sector — and being paid fees by the central government for doing so — represented a change of tack for the Commission that triggered considerable unease. Foster recalled:
They were nervous. But that was the dynamic throughout that time. In the executive we wanted to push on, while the Commission would quite often see lots of political risk. But Ithought we were doing excellent work, and I had a vision of an integrated approach to public services that would allow them to be managed much more effectively.15
How exactly the Commission’s expanded mandate would be reconciled with the continued existence of the SSI was left to a series of long meetings through the autumn between Jonty Boyce and the senior SSI officials. They received little guidance on what was wanted, but Boyce came to a firm view that any joint body that was located organizationally within either Vincent Square or the DoH would simply be unworkable. He recalled: ‘I had to persuade the SSI people that the only real way to do it was to create a separate organization that was equally accountable to the SSI and the Audit Commission.’ 16
This was the model adopted for the Joint Reviews of Social Services, to be conducted by a body that would have its own offices (which were rented in Victoria) and its own chief executive, though no very satisfactory name. Its head would report to both the Commission’s health studies director and the chief inspector of the SSI. It was given statutory backing in the Audit (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, enabling the Commission to ‘assist the secretary of state in any study designed to improve the economy, efficiency, effectiveness and quality of performance in the discharge of social services functions by local authorities’ (italics added). It was introduced that December and enacted in April 1996.
While the Bill was making its way through Parliament, Boyce went after the person he thought ought to run it: this was Andrew Webster, who had so narrowly missed being made an associate director of the health team back in 1993. Webster had a strong background in both social services and health. He accepted the job, and work on the first reviews began under his leadership in July 1996. It was regarded by most observers as a very satisfactory outcome, quickly vindicated by the quality of the joint reviews that began appearing by early 1997 on almost a monthly basis. And the reviews had a mandate for proactive assessment that could be used as a first step towards more innovative work. Within a year, Webster and Boyce together had invented the notion of a twofold inquiry, which would look not just at the current situation within a department but also at that department’s capacity to improve in the future. It was an idea with some potential.
For the Audit Commission, meanwhile, the new arrangement marked a watershed of sorts. For the first time, it had accepted direct funding from the government: the Commission would be paid by the Treasury for its contributions to the joint reviews. It also seemed to have been the case that members had been on the receiving end of ministerial pressure to take up the job — though of course no one could be sure of that. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the record of the members’ monthly meetings now began to include slightly more frequent references to the sacrosanct importance of the Commission’s independence. For it had effectively aligned itself with one of Whitehall’s big-spending departments in a manner that had never been envisaged in the 1980s. It was an irony that this was the DoH — given the froideur between health officials and Vincent Square — not to say a credit to Boyce’s ambassadorial skills in overcoming the froideur. (This was hardly improved by the Joint Reviews compromise, once it was realized that the SSI had been left holding the tabloid baby: it would still be responsible for the reactive investigations if things went embarrassingly wrong.) But this made no difference to the principle. The Commission had taken a big step closer to working in partnership with central government, for better or worse.
In the process, a sequence of events had unfolded that would recur in other contexts. In essence, the Commission had established a glowing reputation with its national reports. This had prompted someone in government to think the Commission might add very usefully to the work of an existing supervisory body. Good use had been made of the controller’s contacts and assiduous networking within Whitehall. The Commission members — not unreasonably mindful of prospective managerial and operational risks, as well as the incremental political dangers — had reacted a little ambivalently. The controller had enthusiastically embraced the new opportunity as a welcome addition to the Commission’s parish — and the distance between Vincent Square and central government had been ever so slightly diminished.
As it happened, the Commission’s own chairman prompted something closely resembling this pattern of events, in moving into his new role at the Local Government Commission for England (LGCE) in 1995. David Cooksey certainly had a high opinion of Vincent Square’s local government studies. Wearing his new cap as chairman-designate of the local government review body, he realized immediately that harnessing some of his erstwhile colleagues’ expertise would be an excellent idea. Within days of his March appointment, he talked to Andrew Foster about the possibility of up to three senior staff moving on secondment to his team. He also co-opted the services of one of his fellow Commission members, Helena Shovelton, as a member of the LGCE. In truth, he needed all the help he could get. In addition to John Banham resigning, the LGCE’s chief executive, Martin Easteal, had quit, and the government had dispensed with thirteen of the LGCE’s sixteen original commissioners. (Shovelton’s experience of the public sector appointment process didn’t improve much. Her LGCE seat was offered on the telephone to the first person who took the call, which happened to be her cleaning lady.17)
The Commission members responded cautiously at their April meeting, setting up a special panel under Clive Thompson — who had succeeded Murray Stuart as deputy chairman in February 1995 – to consider the request. ‘The controller would report to the group on the appropriateness of the secondments.’ 18 The panel reported back next month that it could see ‘no unduly detrimental short term impact’ –though they must have given the matter some careful thought, because Cooksey had asked for the services of both the director of the local government studies, Bob Chilton, and one of his most experienced team leaders, Greg Birdseye. The two of them headed off to the LGCE in July — as chief executive and research director, respectively — and ended up being absent for a full year.
Hiring them was a typically shrewd move by Cooksey: there can hardly have been two men in England better qualified than Chilton and Birdseye to advise on local government reorganization. Birdseye recalled:
We had produced a whole series of titles on the topic since 1992. I was leading on it, and we issued half a dozen shorter papers. We looked at how to prepare councils for reorganization, how to prepare for closing down a council or opening up a new one, how to merge authorities, how to look after municipal assets and so on — it was really quite a useful portfolio by the end.19
They had even turned out a paper, Phoenix Rising, on New Zealand’s mixed experience of wholesale reorganization since 1989 ‘as a reminder of the risks’.
Around the time of their departure in July, members were informed by the LGCE that it intended to tap further into the Commission’s expertise. Cooksey’s main task was to resolve the uncertainty over the boundaries for twenty-one authorities left over from his predecessor’s era. The LGCE had a statutory right to call on the Commission for its opinion on each, and Cooksey intended to exert that right. ‘Commissioners expressed some concerns about the extent of the task envisaged for both auditors and the Audit Commission…’ 20 But of course they acceded.
Several of the Commission’s staff were kept busy visiting each of the twenty-one authorities for months thereafter. Many councils had an axe to grind over their treatment at the hands of the LGCE and discussions with them could be a sensitive matter. One of the places that had to be visited was Huntingdon, the prime minister’s own constituency. Steve Evans was assigned the job. His evident apprehensions about it prompted some mischief at Vincent Square. Peter Wilkinson produced some notepaper witha House of Commons heading. He and Doug Edmonds concocted an invitation for Evans to join John Major for sherry at the Commons just two days before the date he was due to be in Huntingdon. Edmonds recalled: ‘Steve was in turmoil about it. He spent the entire day anguishing over how to turn the PM down. The rest of us deeply sympathized. “Life’s full of choices! It’s integrity versus your job!” and so on. We eventually came clean about 5.30 p.m. Steve was a bit cross about that.’ 21
Meanwhile, it was no small concession for the Commission to have parted with Chilton’s services as head of his directorate (though Peter Wilkinson stepped nimbly into his shoes for the year he was away). While weighing every ounce of their intellectual content as carefully as anyone, Chilton had brought a more disciplined approach and huge energy to all its studies since 1990. If the health franchise had in some respects stolen the limelight, this had diminished the importance of the local government programme not a jot. Two studies in particular had been landmarks. One was a Section 27 report called Passing the Bucks published in 1993, which had provided a monumental review of the system by which central government distributed £40 billion a year of funding via the so-called Standard Spending Assessments. (So voluminous were the appendices that they were given a volume of their own, which kicked off with an exemplary historical perspective, ‘Never a Golden Age’.)
The other was a study of people, pay and performance in local government. This was one of the most ambitious research projects ever undertaken by the Commission, as befitted a topic of central importance. Between 1987 and 1993, the number of staff in local government’s middle and higher management grades had shot up by 60 per cent. Most councils were looking at a steep rise in the wage bill (itself, coincidentally, 60 per cent of their total spending), even though pay rates had not much exceeded inflation. In two national reports published in 1995, Paying the Piper and Calling the Tune, the study’s findings laid into a generally unsatisfactory aspect of town-hall finances with no fudging. ‘The study found considerable variation in pay rates, little sharing of information between councils, poor management information, incoherent local pay policies and an absence of the hallmarks of good performance management.’ 22
Most of the other notable reports published in the mid-1990s dealt with one or the other of two sectors that had always been important to the Commission: education and housing. In both, a closer liaison with Whitehall gradually emerged in the usual way. Indeed, the process in both cases made itself apparent even before the 1995 initiative over social service reviews.
Back in 1990, the introduction of the Local Management of Schools initiative had been seized on by Chilton’s directorate as another opportunity to remind schools and local education authorities (LEAs) alike of a message pressed hard in various Commission papers all through the 1980s. A fall in the number of school-age children had still not been properly accommodated: surplus places by 1990 represented a huge drain on the country’s educational budget. (In one 1990 report, Rationalising Primary School Provision, it was estimated that the primary sector was providing for 22 per cent more pupils than actually existed.) The message made a mark, and reminded Whitehall again of the extent of the Commission’s work on schools over recent years. The upshot was an invitation to the Commission, in 1991, to join forces with Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools on an evaluation of educational courses available for 16–19 year olds. The resulting joint report, Unfinished Business, was published in 1993. It was the first of a series of joint projects. They included a 1993 report with Ofsted (as the department of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector had become in 1992, coining the acronym from Office for Standards in Education). This was entitled Keeping Your Balance, and laid down some standards for good financial management in schools. A Management Paper followed in 1995, called Lessons in Teamwork, which offered school governors a primer on how best to fulfil their role.
The man appointed to run Ofsted in 1994 was Chris Woodhead — a former teacher whose views on the importance of traditional classroom values (and rejection of most of the supposedly progressive educational ideas of the 1960s and 1970s) had already made him a controversial figure on the national stage. Woodhead was strongly supported by John Major in his work on raising school standards. Not surprisingly, though, he ran into difficulties in his relations with a number of LEAs run by Labour authorities. At some point, it occurred to officials within the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) that perhaps the Audit Commission could offer him useful help in tackling inspections of the LEAs.
As ever, Andrew Foster pursued the opportunity with some adroit canvassing behind the scenes. By the summer of 1996, plans were being laid in the education department for legislation that would allow the Commission to participate with Ofsted in joint LEA reviews. On 5 September, at their monthly meeting, Foster broke the news to Commission members — who reacted with their usual misgivings. ‘Commissioners expressed their concern that in any joint ventures the independence and integrity of the Commission must be safeguarded and asked to be kept informed of developments.’ 23
It sounded anodyne enough in the minutes — but the true feelings of the members might perhaps be better gauged from the curious sequel. In December, the controller disclosed to them that a report about to be published on LEAs and the operation of school admission policies, Trading Places, had been discussed at length with the DfEE — and then redrafted. The revised report, he told them, ‘had the same shape and outline but differed in tone from the original version’. After the customary remonstrances about the need to safeguard independence and integrity, the members agreed among themselves that two of them, Peter Soulsby and John Foster, should leave the boardroom and trawl through the revisions in detail. ‘At a later stage in the meeting these two reported back to the Commission who also received advice on the nature of the Commission’s powers from the Commission solicitor.’ 24 The report was approved for publication, but it had been a revealing episode. Working closely in cahoots with other Whitehall non-departmental bodies might pose legal difficulties that members were not inclined simply to leave to the controller to resolve at his discretion.
At the start of the new year, 1997, the controller and Bob Chilton received a consultation paper from Ofsted. It outlined Chris Woodhead’s views on how the Commission might work alongside his department on LEA reviews. Given the members’ wariness in December, it was not hard to predict how they would react. Chilton presented a draft to the next monthly meeting on 9 January, explaining that Woodhead’s proposal would involve the Commission ‘only on a very selective and intermittent basis’. The members were having none of that, and readily endorsed a sniffy response. Any future requests from Ofsted for help ‘would be considered by the Commission on an individual basis’.25
Undeterred, though, DfEE officials had meanwhile been pushing ahead with their legislative plans. They remained as keen as ever to secure a role for the Commission. It emerged in the Education Act 1997 that was passed two months later. It cannot have been wholly to the Commission members’ liking: ‘If requested to do so by the Chief Inspector, the Audit Commission may assist with any [LEA] inspection.’ 26 This appeared to leave the ball squarely in Woodhead’s court, but Foster did not allow himself to be discouraged. ‘We were invited in because it was seen that we had a good methodology, ways of quantifying resources and making an objective assessment of them.’ 27 He pressed on until he reached an agreement with Woodhead, and at the July 1997 meeting was able to assure members ‘that the working arrangements proposed [with Ofsted] allowed for the Commission to have joint ownership of scheduled inspection reports and to submit specific sections of special inspection reports’. It looked, after all, like another successful expansion of Vincent Square’s franchise. True, future relations with the chief inspector were a little difficult to predict. But Foster could at least take comfort by July from the sea-change in the political environment: the New Labour world would be more congenial to him than to his counterpart at Ofsted.
The story in housing was a little less byzantine. Housing was a sector that had figured prominently in the Commission’s reports of the 1980s, from the work on council-rent arrears in the earliest days to John Banham’s 1986 broadside, Managing the Crisis in Council Housing. It was not a subject that the Commission could ever leave for long. Local authorities in England and Wales owned around 3.5 million council houses, and spent about £3 billion a year on managing and maintaining them. The associated problems covered a wide range of topics. Under the leadership of Doug Edmonds — and the keen eye of that other housing specialist, Bob Chilton — housing teams at Vincent Square had carried the torch with a series of major studies, producing especially influential national reports on social deprivation (Housing the Homeless, 1989) and the general performance of local government in the sector (Developing Local Authority Housing Strategies, 1992). Within a few weeks of Andrew Foster’s arrival in the controller’s office, the first national report requiring his sign-off was a study of the national administration of housing benefits (Remote Control, 1993).
The principal professional association in public sector housing was the Chartered Institute of Housing, which annually held a conference in Harrogate. It was the Mecca for the sector. By the 1990s, it was a rare conference that did not have Doug Edmonds or one of his colleagues among the guest speakers. As the authority on council housing, the Commission’s voice counted. By this time, however, the most interesting development in the sector centred not on council housing but on a different group altogether, the housing associations (HAs, also known as Registered Social Landlords, or RSLs). These were the not-for-profit bodies that had been around for generations. They usually owned just a fraction of the stock levels held by large councils and had long relied on interest-free loans from central government, channelled via a non-departmental public body, the Housing Corporation.
The significance of the HAs had been transformed by the 1988 Housing Act. It had given them permission to borrow money privately using their stock as collateral. It had also given all council-house tenants a legal right to choose whether they wished to rent from their local authority or a housing association. Over the next three years, the stock held by the HAs grew by nearly 30 per cent. They still owned in aggregate well under a million houses, far fewer than local government. But the initiative in the public sector had clearly passed to the HAs — as many councils acknowledged, by arranging for large-scale transfers of their housing stock into HA ownership. This left many of the larger HAs with a challenging task, for which few were at all well prepared. The Housing Corporation had the responsibility for overseeing their activities, and in 1991 it acquired a new chief executive. A former DoE civil servant and member of the Central Policy Review Staff, Anthony Mayer arrived at the Corporation after six years in the City with N. M. Rothschild. He saw immediately an urgent need for some incisive analysis of the HAs’ activities.
Late in 1991, a lunch was arranged with Howard Davies. Like John Moore and others before him, Mayer found Davies a persuasive advocate for the charms of the Audit Commission. It was agreed between them that a study team from Vincent Square would work with the Housing Corporation on VFM projects. Roger Jarman was one of the Corporation’s senior managers at the time. He recalled: ‘If there were any preconditions for the Commission’s involvement, we couldn’t see them. People were taken aback at the invitation that had been made to the Commission.’ 28
In the wake of Davies’s departure, the proposed cooperation seems to have faltered for a while. But what then happened, once Andrew Foster was installed, adhered to the usual pattern. A series of private Whitehall meetings for Cooksey and Foster together led to a chance for the Commission to engage formally with the Corporation and the HA sector. Alerted by the controller in October 1994 to the possibility of a two-year agreement for the secondment of staff from Vincent Square to the Corporation, the Commission responded with its customary caution. Members stressed the need for any agreement to include ‘terms which would safeguard its independence and freedom to express in public its opinions’. Whether or not these were included is unclear, but a letter went out the next month from John Gummer’s DoE to the Corporation and the Commission, asking them to work together on promoting value for money among the HAs.
Some high-quality analysis followed, on profiles of the larger associations and on a series of six jointly prepared reports. They started with a comparative review of housing activities across all local authorities and HAs that was based upon the performance indicators for 1993–94 (Homing in on Performance, 1995). Then followed an assessment of the HAs’ substantial new-build programmes (Within Site, 1996); a report on the essentials of housing management (House Styles, 1996); a report on the rehabilitation of older housing stock (To Build or Not to Build, 1998); a report on the selection of new-build sites (Competing for Attention, 1998); and a handbook on housing for the vulnerable, including the mentally ill (A Measure of Support, 1998). They were liveried in orange and white, with the logos of both bodies on the cover, but there was never much doubting who was the dominant partner. Jarman recalled: ‘It was talked about as a joint studies programme, but all the reports were actually written by the Audit Commission and were their responsibility.’ 29
Since the funding for the programme came entirely from the Housing Corporation, the partnership was not without its tensions — but it was plain to ministers and their officials that the Commission had added a critically useful dimension to the Corporation’s role. Before the two-year agreement expired, a substantial overhaul of the whole HA sector was enshrined in the 1996 Housing Act. Ministers were careful to ensure that the role of the Commission was consolidated as part of the legislation. In effect, the Commission now had access not only to the whole of the HA sector but to the work of the Housing Corporation, too. It was another signal extension to the Commission’s mandate, and work on the sector went forward into 1997 at a brisk pace. Exactly as in health and education, though, the statutory basis of the Commission’s engagement with a new partner left considerable discretion to both sides to agree between themselves how best to share their complementary roles.
There was one other partnership embarked upon in these years, where no such discretion was ever going to be available. While its own professional inspectorate would always hold the reins, though, the Commission nonetheless had plenty to contribute towards the management of the police.
Andrew Foster’s arrival in 1993 more or less coincided with the Commission’s publication of its first substantial piece of work on the police since 1991. It was called Helping with Enquiries. Here for the first time the Commission was engaging not with peripheral services, like finger-printing, but with core issues of the policing profession. Why were the various categories of crime tackled as they were? Why were the results so varied? What could be done through better management of resources to improve the outcomes? Reactions to it could almost have been scripted before the publication. The Home Office and the HMIC were guarded, as they had been throughout the report’s preparation. Senior uniformed officers within the service — far from hostile, thanks to the sensitivity and persistence of the Commission between 1987 and 1991 – noted the report appreciatively. But they tended to observe that, naturally, its conclusions were a commonplace among chief constables, who’d been saying this sort of thing all along. Among rank-and-file detectives, there was a genuinely warm reception: the report provided hard evidence to justify changes that the more progressive officers had been urging for a while.
The media showed huge interest in the report. This in turn helped to encourage more enthusiasm for police studies in Vincent Square. It was an early pointer for Foster to the huge potential inherent in police reports for building the media’s general awareness of the Commission’s work. This was reasonable enough in itself, but his liking for the subject went deeper. Foster appreciated immediately the way in which police studies would play to the strengths of the Commission. Police officers knew the value of hard evidence, but had stuck for generations with some basic assumptions that had long since parted company with any evidence at all. This was fertile territory for the evidence-based analysis the Commission could bring to bear.
The team leader on this report, Kate Flannery, knew all about the value of challenging basic assumptions. She had been assigned to the police team by Steve Evans in 1991, within a week of starting work at the Commission. Her career until then had consisted of twelve years in local government and management consultancy. She knew nothing whatever about the police and had certainly never met a chief constable until the day she and Evans sat with four of them to decide on the choice of the Commission’s next study. This staffing tactic was of course the Commission’s secret weapon: with no prior knowledge, she was much more likely to ask the naive and therefore truly testing questions. (One of Flannery’s colleagues had worked for years in the Metropolitan Police Service: he was never allowed near the police studies.)
Flannery recalled: ‘Two study options were put to our panel of advisers: one was the use of IT in the police service and the other was the management of criminal investigations. Ithought: “If they pick IT, I’m absolutely done for” and I could see myself not lasting long at the Audit Commission.’ 30 Fortunately for her, they chose the second topic. But Flannery was still more than slightly dismayed to find herself pitched straight into leading the initial round of interviews. ‘Just get the police almanac, call half a dozen chief constables and tell them you’d like to talk to them about criminal investigation’, said Evans helpfully.31 Flannery chose the friendliest of the chief constables she’d met and went off to visit him, in Dorset. It was a measure of the Commission’s reputation that he received her in his office with half a dozen of his most senior colleagues lined up beside him. Bravely, Flannery took a deep breath and dived in. Why was crime going up? Why were detection rates so low and falling? Why did detectives go to the scene of a burglary after uniformed officers had already been there? Their talk lasted for more than two hours.
After she had left, some of the senior officers sat around with a distinct case of shell-shock. As one of them revealed to Flannery a year or so later, after the two of them had worked together for months, many of her questions had left them completely stumped. She was asking for the rationale behind traditional practices that none of them had ever questioned before. Such questions, of course, were the Commission’s real stock-in-trade. The central assumption questioned by Helping with Enquiries was that criminal investigations should start at the scene of the crime and work backwards, as it were, towards a list of suspects. This was the standard approach to most burglaries, for example — with a visit to the crime scene by a uniformed policeman customarily leading to a steady procession of other callers from the detective to the crime-prevention officer. Yet detection rates for all reported burglaries were currently dropping to less than 10 per cent. The study team established that, in line with the usual 80/20 rule, a very large percentage of burglaries were accounted for by a relatively small number of prolific villains. It seemed to Flannery and her colleagues, ignorant of all police traditions, that the obvious thing to do was to concentrate on building up as comprehensive a data-bank as possible of the intelligence on those villains. From this hypothesis, much else flowed. Activity at the scene of the crime, for example, might be codified so that one person could handle most of it in a single visit. More importantly, a premium should be set on IT resources so that all nuggets of random information on a crime could be rapidly assimilated and compared with patterns of behaviour recorded for a known group of individuals in the past. There could be more specialization of roles, too, so that new crimes were not handled by fresh officers in a random fashion (taking cases ‘off the spike’, as it was called) but could be allocated to individual officers with particular expertise.
This ‘intelligence-led policing’, with its focus on a known group of villains as the starting point of any investigation, was in fact the approach already taken in respect of murders and other serious crime. The Home Office, for example, devoted a computerized enquiry system (‘HOLMES’) to it that allowed exactly the kind of IT datamanagement advocated by Flannery and her colleagues. The detection rate for serious crime was very high — almost every murder was solved — and they argued that this was no coincidence. They presented the case for ‘intelligence-led policing’ in a subtle and persuasive text that was widely admired in the police service. Many of its detailed proposals, on the restructuring of investigation procedures and enhancement of computer resources, were painstakingly adopted over the next few years. Indeed, so intent were the police on pursuing the report’s recommendations that Evans and his colleagues were explicitly asked to put a hold on their next big project until Helping with Enquiries had been properly digested.
In the meantime, they produced Cheques and Balances, a much more modest study and a tailored response to the 1994 Police and Magistrates Courts Act. This legislation was ostensibly an attempt by Kenneth Clarke as home secretary (and Michael Howard, who succeeded him during the course of the Act’s passage) to rejuvenate the tripartite structure comprising the Home Office, the forty-three local police forces and their local police authorities. Political opponents of the 1994 legislation, including many Tory peers, rejected the rejuvenation claims as a sham from the start. The Act was widely attacked as a thinly veiled consolidation of the Home Office’s power over the police and a big step down the road towards a nationalized force. But the Commission had itself argued for a genuine revival of the tripartite structure in earlier Police Papers, and now welcomed the 1994 Act a little optimistically as ‘the most far-reaching reform of the management of the police service for 30 years’.32
The 1994 Act had two main objectives: to revive a sense of local ownership of the police, through local policing plans under the control of the authorities; and to widen the scope of financial delegation from the Home Office to local forces, in the belief that more local responsibility for the money would lead to better local use of resources. The report effectively provided a step-by-step approach to both goals. As its political opponents had been quick to point out, the first was probably always a forlorn hope. (Critics blamed the government for the lack of sufficiently committed laymen to give the authorities any real teeth.) But the Commission’s report at least made a big contribution to a successful implementation of the financial reforms. Cheques and Balances was a set text for the next few years on management courses at Bramshill Police Staff College (as it was still known at that time) and would be constantly quoted for years as the reference guide by police forces on the ground.
By the start of 1995, the Commission was ready to take on another ambitious study. To pick a suitable topic, the team decided to follow the money. Just a handful of activities accounted for the lion’s share of police expenditure. Criminal investigation, for example, represented about 20 per cent of the budget. The largest portion of all, about 30 per cent, went on the activity that was most visible to the general public: patrolling the streets. So Steve Evans assigned the same team that had produced Cheques and Balances – led again by Kate Flannery, assisted by a secondee from DA, Steve Jackson — to ask another round of naive questions about police patrols. What, in particular, was the point of them?
Some excellent (and, as usual, scarcely noticed) research within the Home Office had shown very persuasively what patrols were not about — catching criminals. It was a blue moon indeed that shone down on a uniformed bobby catching anyone in the act of committing a crime. In this respect, patrols were a massive waste of money. (Indignant critics of the subsequent report usually stopped reading at this point.) On the other hand, of course, it seemed incontrovertible that patrols were highly valued by the public. Asked by a specially commissioned MORI poll whether they found the sight of a patrol officer reassuring, 72 per cent of respondents answered ‘always’. The same poll found that three out of five respondents said they would be willing to pay more tax in order to fund more patrols.33 The challenge, therefore, was to identify ways in which patrolling could be made as effective as possible — and to eliminate those aspects that were essentially random (or, as Flannery recalled it, ‘making sure that officers were not just running round like scalded cats’).34 Reviewed in this light, there turned out to be many ways in which patrolling could be systematized and dovetailed into more sophisticated crime-prevention activities. The report, Streetwise: Effective Police Patrol, set them out with fifty pages of compelling evidence for its findings.
Unfortunately, the reception for the report was badly compromised by a leak at the draft stage. Almost all good reports were the product of substantial consultation with selected advisers, of course. But for good reason, the Commission (unlike the NAO) had no obligation to expose the draft of any final report to an audited body. Steve Evans, against his better judgement, allowed himself to be persuaded to make an exception for Streetwise. The Association of Chief Police Officers had given Flannery and her team a huge amount of help. To acknowledge this, Flannery sent copies of the first draft to a number of ACPO’s leading officials. It was the week before the start of the 1995 Conservative Party conference. In the aftermath of the bitter debates over the 1994 Act, interest in the police was as great as ever and ranked high on every party conference’s agenda that autumn — and every newspaper editor’s, too. Early on the Thursday evening, Flannery got a call from the Commission’s PR team to say that a journalist from the Guardian had just telephoned. The paper had a copy of the draft report. A story was being prepared for the next day. Would the Commission like to comment? Flannery confirmed the inevitable answer (no) and then rang the president of ACPO, Merseyside’s chief constable, Jim Sharples, to warn him. They consoled themselves that it would probably be only a short article. With luck it might be tucked away at the bottom of an inside page where few readers would notice it.
As she often did, Flannery then sat down to watch BBC television’s current affairs programme Newsnight before heading off for bed. It ended as usual with a review of the next day’s press — and the anchorman held up a copy of the Guardian. The lead story on the front page was all too plain to see. Its headline was ‘Police Chaos Exposed’. And it ran over, viewers were told, to extend across most of page two, as well. The article, which Flannery finally read in the morning after an anxious night, extracted some colourful evidence from Streetwise for concluding that police patrols were often staggeringly inefficient. With only 5 per cent of all police officers actually available for patrolling at any one time, it was an activity that needed careful direction. Instead, it was too often ill-prepared, random in nature and rarely subject to proper debriefing. Officers sent to incidents of domestic violence, for example, commonly set off with no access at all to background information about the family involved. Yet Home Office research showed that ‘90 per cent of known domestic violence involves systematic, repeated assault’.35
All this naturally elicited a fiercely defensive reaction from the police. A deputation of four rather irate chief constables descended on Vincent Square a few weeks later for a discussion with the chairman and controller, who were accompanied to the meeting by Peter Wilkinson (as the director responsible for the team behind the report) and Kate Flannery. It was a delicate occasion, but some plain speaking cleared the air. ACPO and the Police Federation then responded in quite measured terms to the publication of the finished report in March 1996 – as, indeed, did the Guardian, too.
Streetwise went on for years being misconstrued by some as an attack on the general competence of the police. This put a dent in the goodwill enjoyed by the Commission with many of the rank and file. It probably also helped explain the cool response to a number of innovative ideas included in the report, which now needed a long gestation. These included, for example, introducing a non-emergency number to complement the 999 system. This would reduce the pressure on the 999 system and allow for a more graded response to reflect the fact that fewer than a third of calls concerned genuine emergencies. It would be another nine years before this could be piloted. A second idea was that the service should add to patrol resources by using auxiliary officers without the powers of a fully qualified constable. The Police Federation was implacably opposed to this. But one senior officer, an assistant chief constable of Thames Valley police, worked closely with Flannery’s team on the idea. This was Ian Blair, who was instrumental eight years later in the successful introduction of Police Community Support Officers all over the country and who was appointed commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 2005.
Despite mixed reviews in the months leading up to its publication, though, Streetwise did nothing to harm the Commission’s relationships with HMIC and the Home Office that by now were growing steadily closer. Both of them actively collaborated with Vincent Square, as did ACPO, on the production in 1996 of two management handbooks. These took the content of Helping with Enquiries and Streetwise and effectively turned them into detailed operational manuals, copies of which were despatched to all police forces in the country. Flannery recalled: ‘Those handbooks were real breakthroughs, in terms of getting us working together and pooling the reports’ ideas into more practicable action steps.’ 36
This happy outcome for the Commission had very nearly been aborted at the outset by a clash with the home secretary, Michael Howard. He was sent a final draft of Streetwise a few days before its despatch to the printers. The next morning, the Commission’s controller was summoned with his team to Queen Anne’s Gate. Andrew Foster, Peter Wilkinson and Kate Flannery were received by Howard sitting behind a table, in a chair the size of a throne, obviously angry and flanked by half a dozen of his most senior officials. Here was the downside, of course, of the policy favoured by Foster of disclosing final drafts to government ministers and their shadow counterparts. A fierce objection by a secretary of state would be impossible to ignore without risking a nasty Whitehall battle with unpredictable consequences.
Sure enough, Howard had a problem with an exhibit at the start of the report which he insisted they remove. It showed that the number of police officers available per head of the population in the UK compared unfavourably with the corresponding number in several other EU countries. This was a bogus comparison, insisted Howard, and it drew on a line of academic research that had been completely discredited. Fortunately, the Commission team had anticipated that this point might stick in the ministerial craw. They had agreed among themselves beforehand that it could easily be jettisoned without any damage to the report. The point was therefore quite solemnly conceded — after which, Howard visibly relaxed.
The episode turned out, though, to be the prologue to a bigger drama. One of the Commission members, Tony Christopher, had insisted throughout 1994 that youth justice in England and Wales should be investigated as a priority. He believed with a passion (and quite correctly, as it turned out) that the system was a scandalous mess. A study had been launched in 1995, and assigned to the health directorate as part of its brief to watch over the social services. Under Boyce’s overall direction, it was managed by David Browning, whose team included Judy Renshaw and a secondee from the Treasury, Mark Perfect. (David Browning had led the team responsible for an influential report on the criminal justice system that had been published back in 1989, The Probation Service: Promoting Value for Money.) Oversight was provided by a steering panel that included Peter Wilkinson (and Bob Chilton after his return from the LGCE) as well as Kate Flannery.
The resulting national report, Misspent Youth, was another in the long line of titles from the Commission that seemed to emerge with magical timing: it caught a mounting wave of public concern. This was focused in 1996 on the level of crime against individuals, especially in the inner cities. It was suddenly seen to be rising uncontrollably. (In fact it had risen 73 per cent between 1981 and 1995.) And almost as alarming to the general public was the fact that a quarter of all known offenders were under the age of 18. Misspent Youth set out to analyse how this disastrous trend might best be reversed. It looked not only at better ways of dealing with those young people brought before the courts, but at the steps needed to develop a strategy that could reduce the rate of re-offending.
This was in one respect a return to territory already explored by the Commission: it had produced a powerful analysis in 1989 of the improvements that were urgently needed, even then, to the probation service. Ministers had responded positively at the time, but few if any effective improvements had followed for the youth justice system. Above all, it had continued to suffer from a crippling lack of coordination among the many public services that dealt with young offenders — including health, leisure and employment agencies as well as the probation service and the whole gamut of youth justice services. There was a conspicuous absence of what came to be known within the next few years as ‘joined-up government’.
To prepare the way for the publication of Misspent Youth in November, the controller decided to invite a number of senior Whitehall officials to a briefing on its contents — including the permanent secretary from the Home Office. This lit the end of a very short fuse, and a loud bang followed inside Queen Anne’s Gate soon afterwards. Why working drafts of the report had not prompted a stronger response earlier in the usual consultation process was not entirely clear. But there was no mistaking the reaction now. Officials warned Flannery that the home secretary was ‘absolutely livid’.37 Foster was summoned once again, and Howard read him the riot act. The report quite clearly implied that different parts of the Home Office were in effect failing to communicate with each other. This was obviously untrue and a wholly unacceptable allegation. The report, said Howard, would have to be substantially rewritten.
With just days to go before the scheduled publication date, this posed an obvious problem. It might have been a bigger dilemma for Commission members, though, if the home secretary and his officials had chosen to find fault with specific facts in the report. Instead, as the controller now reported back, they had in effect put up nakedly political objections. Foster explained to the members that there was a great deal of disquiet at government level; he pointed out that the home secretary had himself been remarkably exercised about it; he dutifully relayed Howard’s demand that the report be significantly redrafted — and the members, with one voice, agreed they would not change a word.38
When this was communicated back to Queen Anne’s Gate, there followed a memorable row. Once the lines had been drawn on political grounds, though, there was no realistic way that the Commission could possibly accommodate the home secretary’s objections. Both sides prepared for a battle royal. The first clash came on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on the morning of the report’s publication, with a blunt attack on it by one of Howard’s junior ministers. It proved, however, to be a short-lived offensive. In the Commons later that day, scenting a potential embarrassment for the government, Paddy Ashdown for the Liberal Democrats laid into John Major at prime minister’s questions. ‘The Audit Commission said today that we are now less effective on tackling youth crime than we were 10 years ago… and that the Government’s programmes are ineffective, inefficient and wasteful. Given the fact that the Government have been in power for 17 years, whom do they blame for that?’
The response was unexpected. ‘The right honourable gentleman would do well to read the Audit Commission report in full’, replied the prime minister. ‘He will find that it endorses our strategy…’ 39 It was a less than Churchillian dismissal of the Liberal Democrats, but the Commission heard no more complaints from Queen Anne’s Gate.
While the Tories tripped over themselves, Labour’s attitude was unequivocal. The shadow home secretary, Jack Straw, had been invited by Boyce to Vincent Square to talk about the report some weeks earlier. He took a genuine interest in it and came a second time for a further discussion — not just about Misspent Youth but Streetwise, too, and all of the other reports produced by the Commission on the police since the early 1990s. Straw was already sure in his own mind that police reforms would be a principal theme of Labour’s first term in office, assuming that it won the 1997 election. He was impressed with the Commission’s work — and its workers, too. Six months later, and newly installed as Howard’s successor in Queen Anne’s Gate, Straw acted immediately to set up a working group to look at police efficiency and ways of improving it. He personally invited Kate Flannery to join it.
From this moment, Flannery was increasingly to be seen by HMIC and the Home Office as almost an in-house adviser. Back in September, a newly installed chief inspector at HMIC, David O’Dowd, had told her that his ambition was to put the Audit Commission out of business. It was meant as a flattering observation, not a threat: he wanted to re-create, within the Inspectorate, the kind of analytical resources resident in Vincent Square. Inevitably, one step in that direction involved co-opting Flannery herself. She assisted with two further, relatively modest Commission reports on the police over the next couple of years – The Doctor’s Bill (1998) looked at the provision of forensic medical services to police forces and Action Stations (1999) examined the management by police forces of their land and buildings — but she effectively departed for a career with HMIC from August 2000.
It was a neat reversal of the usual process by which talented individuals from Whitehall had been lured away to Vincent Square over the years. Nor was Flannery the only loss to the Commission. Under legislation passed in 1998, the Labour government set up a Youth Justice Board that was quite specifically designed to address many of the issues identified in Misspent Youth. To run it, they hired the Commission’s Treasury secondee, Mark Perfect. And within months of his installation, he was writing to Jonty Boyce to clear the way for his recruitment of Judy Renshaw.
As such staff moves suggested, the distance between Vincent Square and Whitehall — whether in the context of police work, social services, education or housing — was no longer quite as it had been in the 1980s. Nor, perhaps, did it offer the cordon sanitaire it had provided a decade earlier. While its closer involvement with central government had helped to enrich the work of the Commission in many ways by 1997, it had also left it a great deal more vulnerable to whatever passing political initiatives happened to be fashionable at any moment. How problematic this might be in the future would depend, of course, on the new Labour government. Perhaps it would set its face firmly against passing initiatives, only exposing the Commission to the most prudent and carefully prepared extensions of its existing franchise. Anything less measured, though, might spell trouble.