Committee for Enterprise,
Trade and Investment

Wednesday 6 February 2002

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

Service Delivery Agreements

Members present:
Mr P Doherty (Chairperson)
Mr Armstrong
Mr Clyde
Mr McClarty
Dr McDonnell
Ms Morrice
Mr Wells

Witnesses:
Mr G McConnell )
Mr W Hamilton ) Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment
Mr T Coyne )

The Chairperson:
Good morning, everyone. I welcome Mr Greg McConnell, Mr Wilfie Hamilton and Mr Terry Coyne of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. We were concerned to hear of your inability to give an oral response to certain of the written questions which the Committee Clerk sent you on our behalf. Perhaps you might explain. We have spent some time on the matter, and we have a great many questions. We shall not get through them all in the hour allocated, but we shall write to you on those which we do not reach. When we receive all the responses, we shall be able to deal with the matter more holistically.

Mr W Hamilton:
Before I pick up on your comments, I wish to mention one or two matters. We are happy to comment on any questions you have, including those where the detail involved precluded our going as far as we should have liked. We are happy to discuss those and follow them up in writing along with any other questions which might emerge.

The service delivery agreement (SDA) follows on from the public service agreement (PSA), and it is a very detailed document. The bottom-up detail meets the top-down element of high-level targets set in the PSA. It is therefore a document which reaches out and touches every corner of the Department, and that is why, when we enter into the specifics of certain of your questions, we must seek further information. That is not all to hand, but we are happy to deal with what we have. Such detailed documents raise the question of how best to deal with a Committee, since we wish to be as helpful as possible. I have told the Committee Clerk that I should prefer more substantive written responses before the evidence session or official meetings with your researchers or staff. That would be helpful in some of the very detailed areas, though we recognise that the Committee is under great pressure of work. From the current process we shall attempt to find a better way of dealing with detailed matters.

The SDAs are a work in progress, for it is the first time we have dealt with them, though they already exist in Great Britain. The Department of Finance and Personnel has set the format, and we are working towards publication in March. We welcome the Committee's views, whether on specifics or on the structure of the document, which has been presented to us. If the Committee finds it deficient or feels it could be improved in some way, we are quite happy to examine that.

The document falls into three main sections: PSA targets; levels of customer services; and how to improve Government standards. Unfortunately, since we are just entering into the full processes of government, we have corporate planning cycles, PSAs, the Programme for Government, spending reviews and SDAs, which are not synchronised with each other. The SDA is quite detailed, yet the Department's corporate plans for Invest Northern Ireland (INI) and others are not set. I do not know if we could examine synchronisation in the future, but we must deal with it now. This is a first for us; the SDAs are a work in progress, and we must refine them.

I should like to introduce Mr Greg McConnell, who is active in the policy section of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, also working with the economists and statisticians, and Terry Coyne from the Department's financial management team. He has been co-ordinating with the other branches and businesses on the detail of the document.

Mr Wells:
I shall apologise in advance, as I must leave for a television interview. You were last with us on 3 October 2001, and I am sure that you have received and had a chance to examine the minutes of that meeting. I warn you that we shall hold you to what you said that day. I raised the issue of venture capital, expressing the concern that very few Northern Ireland companies were accessing that form of finance for expansion. There was a concern that it put us at a disadvantage to other parts of the UK and Europe. My point was that only 3% of our firms seek that type of investment. When I raised the question on 3 October 2001, Mr W Hamilton made the interesting comment that venture capital must be considered with more explicit targets. That has not happened, and I should like to know what he meant.

Mr McConnell:
You are absolutely right, and we were at an advantage when we last appeared before you, since we knew that the SDA was coming. We directed you to several points in the SDA. Unfortunately, it has not been as good as we should have liked. The basic point concerns what we are doing on venture capital and why that is not reflected in the SDA.

Yesterday the Minister sent you the Department's draft corporate plan, but you may not have received that yet. It will go out for eight weeks' consultation. You will also shortly receive the INI corporate plan. That will also go out for consultation. There is an increased emphasis on venture capital in those documents, and there is no doubt, the Department and INI have got the message that much more must be done.

The corporate plans of both the Department and INI are thin on targets, so the specific point that there should be firm targets to address will not be satisfied this time, either in the SDA or the two corporate plans, but, as we said in both corporate plans, we shall do more on targets during the consultation process. The documents for the final corporate plans to be published in April must be much sharper on targeting.

Mr W Hamilton:
That certainly puts the matter in context, but you are right to underline the significance of targeting, since it is important for us. Since we last spoke, the Viridian fund has been formally launched. We are taking steps to develop another fund, and we must examine how venture capital will appear alongside our incentives package. However, you are right to highlight its absence. In the SDA we should be better placed to include an entry along those lines. As I said circuitously in my introduction, the document is similar to what a committee would produce - everyone from all arts and parts of the Department has contributed. Venture capital will necessarily feature strongly in the corporate plans, and it may well be an oversight that it is not reflected. We are quite happy to take that on board.

Mr Wells:
It is not good having phrases like "priority will be given" or "good emphasis will be given to LEDU capital". You must be able to say, "We anticipate that, by the end of the next financial year, between 7% and 10% of the companies in Northern Ireland will have access to this type of capital". We cannot measure your success or failure in any other way. Had we not spotted the problem, it might have been left so by default.

Mr W Hamilton:
I welcome your highlighting such matters. There is however a whole section on financial infrastructure and financial engineering in the corporate plan. That is at the heart of what we are doing, so there is no question of the action being left out by default.

We must ascertain the best type of target to set ourselves. We accept that the public sector must take an initial lead in rectifying the venture deficiency. We have been investing in the funds along with our colleagues on the Continent, and there has been good co-operation from the structural funds and the European Investment Bank.

However, the European venture ideal is that the private sector raises those funds, with no public-sector engagement at all. If the public sector invests, they will ask if it is doing so on different terms from private-sector investors, and if that type of investment distorts the market. That is why we need European endorsement of our investments.

We accept that, in the meantime, we shall continue to take an interest in leveraging and sponsoring such funds, but ultimately we should like to reach the stage where we shall stimulate more and more from the private sector independently, as has happened elsewhere.

Mr McConnell:
We accept your point; we need a proper target for that.

Mr Wells:
I should like to return and question the three gentlemen later on their targets for employment in the top industrial companies.

Mr W Hamilton:
We regard what has been said as very much in the essence of partnership and building the right document, so we welcome such comments.

Dr McDonnell:
That last comment about partnership will be tested. We are in partnership, and we wish to ensure that it is a two-way process. We are examining all aspects.

Mr W Hamilton:
I am sure there is evidence in many places.

Dr McDonnell:
The evidence it is scant enough at times. There is a great deal of very good material, but much could be seen as a little platitudinous in some ways. There is the question of engaging 500 businesses in monitoring activities through the Northstar programme. Can you provide us with some details of the programme? How do you engage businesses in monitoring activities?

Mr McConnell:
I shall kick off with a confession: there is a typographical error, and the word should be "mentoring" rather than "monitoring". Matters will make more sense once you know that vital piece of information.

Northstar is a programme for LEDU clients who seek to improve their competitiveness, optimise their performance and overcome obstacles to growth and expansion into new markets. The idea is that Northstar is a sort of guiding star leading them forward. It works through experienced businesspeople acting as mentors. It is free to LEDU clients, and they get 10 separate sessions of up to half a day's duration over a 12-month period. I apologise profusely for the error.

Dr McDonnell:
It makes perfect sense when you introduce the word "mentoring". I could not figure out what sort of policing arrangement you had for the 500 businesses to be monitored. Thank you.

My other point concerns the target of getting representatives from 1,000 companies to attend innovation seminars, workshops and events. A target of encouraging 90% of those companies to take innovative action has been set. How do you intend to dictate or benchmark "innovative action"?

Mr McConnell:
The first performance measure of a workshop or seminar is the number who attend. Second comes the percentage of the audience who were real businesspeople able to do something. On leaving the workshop or seminar, those who attended fill in a questionnaire to find out if it was useful and whether they will take action on the strength of it. A commitment is given to ask them at a later date if any action was taken. We try to promote the use of some technology or other in all those promotional events. However, it is extremely difficult to measure effectiveness.

Mr W Hamilton:
The innovation strategy is coming forward, and it all fits in that context. The information coming into the Department and that which we gave to the Committee is very much a first draft. We have already identified that we must look carefully at what is coming forward in research and development and from the Industrial Research Technology Unit. There is a great deal there. We must ask if it is all useful or if an item should be dropped in favour of something else. There is a genuine debate in our own minds as to the most meaningful questions to include.

Mr McConnell:
In that area we have the top-level PSA target. That came in response to points made by the Committee at our last meeting on our research and development target, which was weak. It concerned the number of applications for grants. The target which we produced in response calls for a 25% increase in private-sector research and development over the period. That is a good, hard output target, and it will be extremely challenging to achieve. Some of the targets, such as that which Dr McDonnell mentioned, are lower-level, softer targets. I have no doubt that that top one is firm, measurable and challenging.

Dr McDonnell:
Innovation fascinates the Committee, and through your personal background, Mr McConnell, you are well tuned in. We must break open the area of innovation, but there is the question of how we do it. I am not sure that it can be descriptive. By its very nature, there is a degree of spontaneity, which is why it catches my eye.

How does Northern Ireland relate to UK standards and requirements on innovation seminars and benchmarking?

Mr McConnell:
Traditionally, we have tried to get the best of both worlds by latching on to national initiatives, such as microelectronics and biotechnology, and trying to pick up national seminars doing the rounds. We add more tailored local events on top. There is no doubt that there is less promotional activity in innovation in other UK regions. It is significantly more intense here, and rightly so. For example, the target for private-sector research and development is 25%. If you take an absolute figure for our current position, we are significantly behind the UK average.

The figures are a little distorted by the amount of research and development done by the major pharmaceutical companies in south-east England. However, even if you discount those, as a region we are not doing as well as we should. There are many reasons for that, but the figures justify the significant promotional effort in the area.

Dr McDonnell:
Do we use the United Kingdom's benchmarking indices in such matters or set our own?

Mr McConnell:
The figures on which a 25% increase in private-sector research and development will be based came from our own statistics branch, but it reflects others provided by the Office of National Statistics which collects such private-sector research and development figures across the United Kingdom. The statistics are therefore comparable.

A few years ago, we spent about 0·5% of our gross domestic product on research and development, while the national average was about 1·3% or 1·4%. Our level was therefore slightly more than a third of the average. I do not have up-to-date figures, but I can get them for you.

Dr McDonnell:
That would be significant. We should like to think that we were on a par with the United Kingdom average.

Mr W Hamilton:
As you say, the key thing is to understand what is achievable. Things have been said in the past about gross domestic product, and a difficult set of circumstances lay behind that. We must understand those issues and set targets which will stretch us but are achievable.

Ms Morrice:
I wish to concentrate on the improvement of performance in the Department. Can you give us some details of the performance management system and how it operates? I understand that there was supposed to have been an evaluation by 31 December 2001. Is that correct? What was the outcome?

Mr W Hamilton:
We wish to unite the competence-linked performance management system with the objectives of the Department. We examine individuals and jobs and fit those into the Department's role and what it is trying to achieve. We wish to ensure that staff competencies are such that they can deliver the objectives of the Department. That is the essence of the system.

It is based around several elements, such as the specification of job plans and the identification of personal development plans for all staff, so that they know exactly what their job entails and what skills they should develop in order to deliver. Following that, there are in-year and end-year performance reviews, which are formalised so that outcomes are noted. There are written reviews and a formal interview at the end of the period. The essence of the process is to tie together several elements into a formal system and make the evaluation of individual training for personal development much more formal.

Ms Morrice:
Are those the recommendations from the evaluation exercise, or has what you mentioned already been evaluated?

Mr W Hamilton:
That is the process. Several issues arose from its evaluation, for example, whether it worked and if we could improve it. There were some important findings. There should be more guidance and support for managers. As you will appreciate, it is very important for managers to be aware of the need for, and the scope of, development to assess the worth of training and ensure that staff receive on-the-job interest from them. Managers must be more aware of the process and ensure that it is maximised to the benefit of the organisation.

More time should be spent on staff performance management. There was a sense that, while these things were happening, they were perhaps more incidental than necessary. We needed to mainstream it more and introduce control mechanisms to ensure that everything they said would happen actually occurred. It is easy to say that, in a personal development plan, a certain person will do something in six months, but did it happen? Was the goal achieved? It is an embedding -

Ms Morrice:
Are you now working on recommendations such as a better control mechanism? What about the work carried out by Dr Byron Grote of the Public Services Productivity Panel? Have you been incorporating that work?

Mr W Hamilton:
You are dying to talk about Byron Grote.

Mr McConnell:
Byron Grote is - or was - the chief executive of BP Amoco plc. He chaired a performance management panel for the Department of Trade and Industry. In BP he had a sophisticated and well-respected performance management system. His task was to see to what extent that could be applied to aspects of the Department of Trade and Industry's work. His review panel examined the application of that private-sector approach to two of the energy divisions in the Department of Trade and Industry. As in all such areas of performance management, the key is the clarity of the objectives you wish to achieve. Know what you want to do and where you want to go, and you might get there.

Ms Morrice:
Are your objectives clear?

Mr McConnell:
Yes. That is what his work in BP was about. That is what he was applying to the Department of Trade and Industry. It echoes the points Mr Hamilton was making at the outset about the importance of understanding individual objectives. We have taken account of what he was doing in our approach. I am not saying that we read it and then decided to do it, but we are satisfied that what we were doing is in line with his actions.

Ms Morrice:
You said that one of the actions will be to implement the suite of training programmes to underpin Departments' core competencies, against which staff are appraised, and that targets are to be developed. Are those targets already set? What is the situation on training targets?

Mr Coyne:
They are currently still under development. It is hoped that they will be finalised by the end of this year as a start for next year's suite of programmes.

Ms Morrice:
Are there no training targets in the system yet?

Mr Coyne:
There are training targets in the system for the existing suite of courses. The courses in question are new and are being developed to underpin the core competence framework.

Ms Morrice:
What about the gender balance? There is obviously still a problem with male/female recruitment at higher levels. What is being done in training to promote women's access to the higher echelons of the Department?

Mr W Hamilton:
The document is largely silent on personnel management, since it is not one of the areas identified in the Department of Finance and Personnel structure. That type of work is clearly important to us, not least in our pursuit of equality. There is a fair amount being done in the senior Civil Service now on managing diversity, and the agenda has been ratcheted up a great deal. We recently attended a half-day seminar reporting on the work being promoted by the Permanent Secretary Group. It has several working groups examining various aspects, and the senior Civil Service attended the seminar to learn and embed the concepts in our work. We also have the prospect of the Ousley Report, and a much more formal approach will come from that type of work. It is currently a powerful agenda.

Ms Morrice:
Will there be targets and so on? I am interested in the gender aspect.

Mr McConnell:
We look forward to the Ousley Report. We expect it to say much on that, setting the high-level policy for the entire Civil Service. We shall automatically fall in behind it. That was fundamental to the terms of reference.

Ms Morrice:
There is no reason why you should not start acting now without waiting for a report.

Mr McConnell:
We have been doing so. We can offer a note on what we have been doing over the years concerning gender balance.

Ms Morrice:
I should appreciate that, thank you. Does the Department's SDA reflect the initiatives of the Civil Service reforms outlined in the Department of Trade and Industry's SDA?

Mr McConnell:
The Department of Trade and Industry is our nearest parallel in Whitehall, but it employs 9,500 people and has a budget of £3 billion. It also covers many areas which we do not, for example, the Office of Science and Technology, which provides Research Council funding for universities. There are aspects that mirror our work, but it is not possible to read directly from the Department of Trade and Industry's SDA into ours.

Mr W Hamilton:
There is a format point here. The Department of Trade and Industry chose to include a section on personnel management in its SDA. Our SDA does not include that owing to its structure. However, that does not mean that we do things differently. For example, we have debates on corporate plans. A company's corporate plan focuses more on policies, products and the customer market. It would include exports, sales and manufacturing, but would focus less on personnel policies. There is always a debate about the contents of such documents, but that does not mean that day-to-day management does not match up to best practice.

Ms Morrice:
That information is of interest to us, although perhaps not to the public.

Mr W Hamilton:
You may feel that it would be better to include a section on personnel management in the Department's SDA, and you are in the best position to comment on that.

Ms Morrice:
I am interested in your recruitment practices. You mentioned the improvement of manpower availability and the introduction of new talent by directly recruiting a limited number of staff officers and executive officers, but to ensure recruitment of the best talent, should it not be policy to recruit through open competition, as the European Commission does, for example?

Mr W Hamilton:
There have been specific initiatives, such as the executive officer scheme and the graduate trainee schemes, because we felt that there were deficits. However, totally open recruitment would mean massive commitment and significant changes to the structure of the organisation. Whole units would have to be developed and the impact on personal development examined.

Ms Morrice:
It certainly would mean massive change, but would that not be a more transparent and inclusive positive approach?

Mr McConnell:
I agree with regard to equality, but there would have to be a driver because recruitment is a very expensive process. Equality could be considered as a driver, but the Department monitors equality, and we are satisfied that there is no justification for that except at senior level where things become more difficult. However, the feeder groups are well balanced, so equality cannot be a driver. We are not going down that road because of the expense.

Ms Morrice:
I heard recently that travel costs are paid for people who come from outside Northern Ireland to sit an aptitude test. Are you aware of that?

Mr W Hamilton:
I am not specifically aware of the situation to which you refer. However, if, in a recruitment process, it is deemed appropriate to interview candidates from elsewhere or for them to sit part of a competition, possibly an aptitude test, it is, as anywhere, normal practice to meet the acceptable travel costs of a potential employee.

Mr Armstrong:
How do you see electronic Government developing? For instance, what are the 25% of key services to be delivered by 2002 and the 100% by 2005? How far do you want to go?

Mr W Hamilton:
This is part of our e-business strategy. Documentation in the current system is heavy and mainly dealt with in hard copy. Increasingly we have e-mails and e-communications. Moving from one to the other is part of our electronic Government strategy and is the Department's attempt to come up with a system to allow us to create and control records without having to keep huge files.

What in this case is a document? What must be retained? How can that be done sensibly? What services should and should not be covered? We are working with the Public Records Office on this, and a pilot scheme aims to find a practical, safe and sure way to keep proper records - it will have implications across the public sector.

Mr McConnell:
Looking at our Department from a customer's point of view, the first key service is providing information. Traditionally we did that on paper in response to telephone calls. Our website is now under continual development, and our aim is to put more information on that so that anyone can get access to it 24 hours day, seven days a week. Our agencies, IDB, LEDU and the Industrial Research and Technology Unit (IRTU), have developed their own websites to also to provide information. LEDU's website, Ednet (Economic Development Net), has won awards as a comprehensive source of economic development information. Our next step is to enable customers to carry out electronic transactions. In IDB, LEDU and to some extent IRTU companies can now apply on line for grants.
We have not yet reached fully electronic interchange with companies - we still have to exchange paper for contractual information. However, through e-business we hope to reach a point where customers can communicate with us electronically. That will cut out a lot of paper and speed matters up. Similarly, inside the Department we aim to make more internal processes electronic to speed up the flow. Our key services are interaction with companies, applications for grants and the provision of information.

Mr W Hamilton:
It is important in electronic dealing that records are properly preserved as part of the legal record. We are also active with the Companies Registry - its system is antiquated. With e-business we aim to enable people to search the companies' register electronically.

Mr Armstrong:
Are you first in the field? Does no one else in the world have that system?

Mr McConnell:
First would be too strong a word.

Mr W Hamilton:
The funding for the Electronic Records Document Management (ERDM) has come from the Executive programme funds, which were set up to fund innovative and cross-departmental projects. This is an innovative study in the Northern Ireland public sector. However, I do not claim that it is not being done elsewhere - that would be going too far.

Mr Armstrong:
Does the Department produce a quarterly strategic information report?

Mr McConnell:
The Department has sent the new three-year corporate plan to the Committee. It will be developing a one-year business plan, which will contain the targets that are in the SDA and other targets. Quarterly reports are produced for the departmental management board, which show the progress being made against our targets so that we can monitor how plans are progressing during the year. It is part of the planning and reporting system, which is becoming more sophisticated, from the Programme for Government to the corporate plans. As Mr Hamilton said, there is performance management, which includes individual job plans for monitoring people's progress. We monitor performance against targets at all levels.

Mr Armstrong:
Is it not published for the Committee?

Mr McConnell:
No. However, as with Invest Northern Ireland and the existing agencies, the Department produces an operating plan or a three-year corporate plan at the beginning of the year, which details what it is going to do. At the end of the year, an annual report details what has been done in comparison with the plan. The Committee will get both reports. It is fair that the Department should report to the Committee annually, but it should be given enough leeway to get on with its job for a year, and it will own up to anything it gets wrong.

Mr W Hamilton:
The quarterly report gives information on progress that can be measured in the quarter; however, quarterly updates are not available in every area. For example, a quarterly report on a plan that has 100 targets might come before the departmental board, but it might not include reports on everything, because the information simply is not there at that time.

Mr McConnell:
Those reports tend to be input measures, such as the amount of money being spent and the number of grant applications, rather than the sort of targets and output measures that you are seeing here. We do not know the level of R&D on a monthly basis or the number of jobs created on a monthly or quarterly basis. Those are measured by annual surveys.

Mr Armstrong:
However, the Department works to a target every three or four months.

Mr McConnell:
The whole Department's performance is closely monitored quarterly. We are confidant that the measures that are monitored in the quarterly reports will come together and produce the results that we committed to at the beginning of the year and that the annual report will show that we have achieved our intended targets. It is not a shot in the dark. We do not establish targets at the beginning of the year, forget them and hope that it will be all right in the annual report at the end of the year.

Mr Armstrong:
OK. I will take your word for it.

Mr W Hamilton:
Targets are funny things. Mr McConnell referred to an article in 'The Economist' and to the fact that some Administrations have thousands and thousands of targets. That does not mean that they deliver results. There is a difference between having strategies and getting results.

Mr McClarty:
The Department's actions are for key services. What does the Department mean by key, and who designates services as key for electronic delivery?

Mr McConnell:
There are two sides to the provision of information, applications for grants and the Companies Registry project. We have used consultants on our e-business strategy, and one project coming out of that is to identify customers' needs, what they consider to be key services and what they would like to have delivered electronically. That is the demand side. There is also the supply side - what customers want to be supplied electronically are extremely difficult and expensive to provide.

LEDU has been able to provide information to its clients who can log in with passwords and get the exact state of their offers, how much money they have claimed, how much has been paid and the position of their applications. LEDU felt that the service was practical and useful for its customers rather than something the customers were requesting. Our e-business strategy is to approach it from the other way by identifying customers' needs.

Mr McClarty:
Why does this target differ from the UK target, which refers to all services rather than just key services? Does the Department have a target for delivering all services electronically?

Mr W Hamilton:
Perhaps this fits into what I was saying about targets and delivery. It is extremely resource intensive to move from our present systems towards an electronically based service. You could say that you will take a quarter of the Department and dedicate it to converting from manual to electronic. We have very serious resources committed to this and a dedicated project team working on meeting the commitment to modern services. We have a steering group overseeing that work and, with consultancy help, we have produced a strategy which has been agreed by the Office of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister. It is committed to building things around electronic data management, which will be of interest to the rest of the Civil Service. However, we need to focus on it from the customers' viewpoint.
As part of that, the Companies Registry appeared to be something very specific that absolutely had to be changed. There is major interaction between our Department and the public through the Companies Registry. People want to examine the register, and that jumped out as part of this work. There is a commitment to do that, but it will be done incrementally on a project by project basis. This is about having the competence and resources and managing the risk.

Mr McClarty:
Is there a specific answer to why we say key and they say -

Mr Coyne:
We are consistent with the DTI's service delivery agreement, which is committed to making its key services available electronically by 2005.

Mr W Hamilton:
Tony Blair gave commitments that by such and such date there should be 70% and 100%.

Mr McConnell:
He made those statements as Prime Minister, but it is very tricky to define those services.

Mr W Hamilton:
The key point is managing the services, the conversion and the risks. It is about having the resources to move from one management system to another, which is very complex. That is why it is being done incrementally.

Mr McClarty:
Do you know how the Department's targets compare with those, for example, for the Government in the Republic of Ireland?

Mr Coyne:
No. I know only how they compare with the GB figures from the DTI. GB is ahead of us with SDAs so we studied documents from there, although our SDAs are in slightly different form.

Mr W Hamilton:
We will examine the figures from the Republic and see if there is anything that would be helpful. We commit to looking at that.

Mr Clyde:
Under devolution, to ensure efficiency, effectiveness and best practice, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment agreed to benchmark against other Government Departments and at least one other Administration, such as Scotland or Wales. What were the results of the most recent benchmarking exercise?

Mr W Hamilton:
I will have to get back to the Committee on that. I do not have the information to hand. The Department is committed to quality and to keeping pace with best practice. It does a great deal through Investors in People to maintain continuous improvement. We use the European quality model, and benchmarking is done against others, but not necessarily across the board. I will come back to you on that and provide you with the results.

The Chairperson:
This has stimulated a great deal of debate in the Committee and raised more questions than we have managed to ask today, so the Committee will be writing to the Department. One criticism is that the paragraphs in the document are not numbered. That would have allowed us to refer to it easily and helped you to answer questions. Will you note that for the future?

Mr W Hamilton:
Before the meeting, I said that I wished that the pages were numbered so that Mr Coyne could direct me to the right place when someone asked a question.

The Chairperson:
The paragraphs and sections must also be numbered so that we can discuss the detail of the document. This is a crucial for the Committee and the Department.

Mr W Hamilton:
The Department has received some specific challenges about this and omissions, such as the one relating to venture capital and some others. That is important to us. Getting the right balance is the key. We do not want to go overboard in one area and miss something in another. We welcome the Committee's contribution greatly.

The Chairperson:
The Committee has a number of questions for the department to answer. Is there time?

Mr W Hamilton:
No, that is fine. March is the estimated deadline for publication.

The Committee Clerk:
Is that the beginning or end of March?

Mr W Hamilton:
That is a hard question. The Office of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister set that deadline. Are we supposed to respond this month?

Mr Coyne:
Yes.

Mr McConnell:
Look at this in the context of the corporate plan that you will receive and the Invest Northern Ireland corporate plan because they will put a great deal of flesh on the bones and give the Committee a better understanding.

The Committee Clerk:
The Committee may not be able to respond until about 27 February. Will that be a problem?

Mr W Hamilton:
It may, but we will liaise on that. If a formal response causes a problem and we have to submit a report, one option would be for us to meet and discuss the essence of your response. If any issues arise from that, we could try to amend the document at publication stage. We are happy to work with the Committee on that.

The Chairperson:
Thank you for your attendance.

30 January 2002 / Menu / 6 February 2002 (part ii)