Briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: Targets, Drugs, RAF Lyneham and BBC.
Targets
Asked if the Prime Minister agreed with Patricia Hewitt’s comments with regard to the Government’s over-emphasis on targets the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that the speech was essentially a Party speech. In his speech this morning the Prime Minister had said that sometimes the Government’s language could appear overly managerial. The Government had never said that setting targets was the totality of its approach to public service reform. That had never been the case. Equally if you took for instance NHS waiting times, it was the issue in all patient surveys that mattered most to the public. By setting targets we were able to deliver downward pressure in the system, but obviously within a framework which underlined and respected the importance of quality of care as well.
Asked what the Prime Minister’s response was to the charge by the think-tank Catalyst that Foundation Hospitals turned hospitals into a business without properly safeguarding the public the PMOS said that the Government believed our proposals for Foundation Hospitals were right. They were good for the NHS and good for patients. This was about giving hospitals more autonomy, freeing them up from Whitehall, but still ensuring they remained part of the NHS family. We didn’t believe that devolving to a local level would do anything other then raise standards of patient care. Put to him that they would no longer be part of the NHS the PMOS said he would dispute that absolutely. They still had NHS funds, treating NHS patients, with NHS principles and values. The Prime Minister had talked about Foundation Hospitals in his speech.
Asked if the Government was moving away from delivery and targets the PMOS referred journalists to the Prime Minister’s speech earlier today where he had spoken about those issues, journalists should use his words. The PMOS repeated that target setting had never been the be all and end all of the Government’s public services reform programme. They were however a lever for change. So the NHS plan had a commitment that no patient should wait more than 6 months for treatment by 2005 and he repeated that if you looked at all patient surveys this was the one issue which came up time and time again. But policies were underpinned by values which was what this was all about.
Asked if the public was much more interested in delivery than ideology the PMOS said that the idea that you couldn’t have a discussion about values in the context of politics and policy was simply wrong. The latter flowed from the former. Clearly everything the Government was trying to do in terms of its public service reform agenda was to improve public services. It went without saying. It was not a simple exercise in political ideology, it was about making real improvements to people’s lives. Asked if this was merely trying to distract people from the Government’s failure on delivery the PMOS said that no one was under any illusion that when the public come to make a rounded judgement about a Government they would make that judgment based on the experiences they had had in their own lives and how Government policies had impacted on them. The Government believed it had a record it could be proud of; economic stability; Britain’s place in the World; Britain’s role in Europe and the improvements we were making in public services but there was lot more to do. However it was important to go back and give people explanations in terms of some of the values that underpinned this. The fact that opportunity, responsibility and fairness underpinned policy. Talking about values and focusing on public service reform were not mutually exclusive.
Asked if the Prime Minister recognised that there were many Labour members who were disenchanted with the Government’s policies the PMOS said that he was not a Party spokesman, if there was some static around at the moment it was because the Government was making difficult decisions and seeing through policies which were controversial but we believed were right. In the end the public would make a rounded judgment as to whether the decisions on Foundation Hospitals, on Higher Education finance, on Iraq, on Europe were the right things for the country. It was a consequence of effecting change.
Asked if we would see less targets in future the PMOS said he thought we already had to be honest. There was a constant process of refinement and he wasn’t going to say that would not continue. There were considerably fewer targets now then there were a few years ago.
Asked to clarify what was meant by "static" the PMOS said that it was a reference to disquiet or opposition in relation to some of the decisions the Government was making. The reason for that was because the Government was making changes and if you were taking difficult decisions and doing things you thought were right, you would not end up necessarily with everyone agreeing with you. What guided the Government was doing what it thought was right for the country.
Drugs
Asked if the Government was moving away from its responsibilities, in terms of David Blunkett’s comments concerning the "war on drugs" the PMOS said that he didn’t think that was what was being said in any interpretation. David Blunkett was talking about the difficulties that Government’s had with stopping the flow of drugs into their countries. The whole focus of the Government’s approach to drugs was to target the hardest Class A drugs. There was a realism about the challenge that faced us but there was an iron determination to do something about it. The Government had a number of strategy’s in this area which were we believed were starting to bite. The point David Blunkett had made was that with globalisation, increased travel and so forth, to say that you could stop all drugs coming into this country was simply not realistic. The PMOS said he would totally disagree with the claim that the Government was saying it was not facing up to its responsibilities, quite the contrary.
RAF Lyneham
Asked about RAF Lyneham the PMOS said that by 2012 the RAF’s transport and refuelling fleets would move to Brize Norton. Adam Ingram had acknowledged in his press statement the fact that this had been a difficult decision and would be disappointing for people in the area. However the Government and the MOD obviously had to make judgements about how it could best use its resources.
BBC
The PMOS told journalists that it was a shame that the Today Programme having put a bid in for Geoff Hoon yesterday to discuss the situation in Iraq, in the end had chosen not to have him on the programme because he had expressed a desire to answer a couple of questions on the allegation that the claims about 45-minutes were put to the MOD before being broadcast. As we had made clear, we had not had the right of reply on this. By the end of the discussion the MOD were told that the Today Programme only liked to have one issue running in a single interview, which the PMOS questioned was the same guideline that had been operating on previous occasions. On a more general point - and he believed this was very important in the run up to Monday’s report from the FAC - no matter how much the BBC wanted these allegations to be different, and no matter how hard they tried to redefine them, and however much they might not wish to repeat them, they had not changed and they could not be wished away or be air-brushed out of this episode. They were quite specific - that we "sexed up" the dossier, inserting intelligence against the wishes of the intelligence community which we knew to be wrong. The claims now being ventilated on the BBC airwaves seemed to have morphed into "we gave this undue prominence" or even "simply that it had been inserted late in the process" as had been said yesterday. They were quite specific, very serious, which is why we had taken them so seriously. The BBC couldn’t shift the goal posts or wriggle away from these claims. The PMOS also observed that you were clearly going to have a tension when one of the protagonists of this story also acted as the purveyor in how this was reported, but he didn’t think it was fair to claim that the allegations were now different to those which were originally broadcast. They were not. Asked for a response to the BBC inquiry into how the allegations had first been put to Government, the PMOS said that in so far as it went we would wait for its outcome. We were now 37 days on and the BBC still hadn’t answered the very simple question; were the allegations true or false? Yes or no?
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