27 March 2007
The Prime Minister has given a speech to the Public Service Reform Conference where he outlined his vision for public services and new proposals on tackling crime. Plans to target offenders and extend public services reform to the criminal justice system are among a raft of measures unveiled by Mr Blair in the second policy review paper.
The proposals form part of the Government’s ongoing policy review. Today’s paper, Building on progress: Security, crime and justice, is the second to be published so far.
- Download Building on progress: Security, crime and justice - pdf 4,198 kbs
- PM praises "dedication and innovation" of front line staff
Parts of this transcript may have been edited
Read the transcript
Prime Minister:
Thank you very much Victor and thank you for the opportunity to come along and say some words about the Public Service Reform programme, and then leave as much time as possible for questions and answers.
Actually a lot of what I wanted to say, John has already said. In fact I got slightly alarmed because there is a sort of countdown clock there, which you won’t be able to see, but it had on it minus four minutes, so I was wondering how I could speak in minus four minutes.
But what I wanted to do is just outline what are the main principles of public service reform. I want to say something particularly about issues to do with criminal justice reform. First of all, as John was just saying a moment or two ago, we need the extra investment and there has been a massive extra investment put into our public services, and incidentally sometimes people say well look all this money that has gone in, nothing has happened. Actually when we look, for example, at Health Service waiting, at the treatment of cancer or heart disease, if we look at the hospital building programme, there has been a huge amount of progress achieved. In our schools we have the best results ever, we have got a massive investment going into every single community in our school system, and across the whole of the public services, whether it is in inner city regeneration, right through to many of the local authority services, the results are there for all to see.
However, as the additional investment goes in, so people’s expectations of the type of service they can have rise. And so what people might have contemplated as adequate when public services first began and in the post-war period where it was very much a case of you know the National Health Service, what a wonderful thing to create it, 50 - 60 years on people now want to say well in every other walk of life I get an increasingly individualised and customised service, how can I have that from the public services?
And really the key to understanding what we are trying to do from government on the public service programme is that we are trying to move from a situation where you have very much a monolithic, very paternalistic service in which the services are handed down to the customer or user of the service, move to a far more personalised service where people feel that they have a far greater say in how the service is done and run, where things are very much more tailored to the individual needs of the user.
Now the key thing is to keep the basic public service ethos, and what is that ethos? That ethos is providing a high quality service irrespective of your wealth; it is not however providing a high quality service irrespective of your wealth in the same way as it has always been done. In other words let’s distinguish between the basic ethos that is about equality of access and the method of delivering that, which is very different and which needs to change if we are to meet the rising expectations of the user of the service.
And I think this is paralleled incidentally by the move away in industry from mass production of goods and services, you know the old factory production line, the fact that people would turn out the same type of consumer product, that has shifted over the past 30 - 40 years to far more customised private services and goods for people. And in exactly the same way what is driving part of the change in public services is that people say look in every other walk of life you know the service runs after me, in the public services, particularly with this new investment, I want the same type of relationship, I want to feel it is a relationship where I, the user of the service, have got some power over it.
So out of that has really arisen what I would say are basically four principles of public service reform. The first is to put more power in the hands of the user. One of the things that I said before coming to office, and which I have regretted since being in office, and you know it is always important to learn from the experience over a period of a decade in office, but I said before we came to power that we had to focus on standards and not structures, and I think truthfully standards and structures go together, that if for example you want a higher standard for the individual user of a service, you also have to have the structure for organising that service in such a way that the person has some power over it. So for example the reason for greater patient choice in the National Health Service, or as I think will happen increasingly, where people have for example a chronic condition that they will have to manage over time, or for example you have an elderly person and a social care budget, increasingly over a period of time people will want the structures in place that allow them the chance to have some say over how the public money spent on them is used.
And you know this also I think applies for example in the criminal justice sphere where I think one of the things that most aggravates feelings about the criminal justice system is where the victim of a crime feels that they have got no power to have any say in how their situation is handled or in how the criminal justice system reacts to them.
And not just incidentally about choice for the individual, but also in respect of local communities as well. One of the things again that I have learnt particularly in relation to things like anti-social behaviour and inner city regeneration is that in today’s world local communities want a say in how their communities are regenerated. They want for example as tenants on a housing estate to have a real input into the way the estate is run, they don’t want somebody sitting in local government, never mind central government, simply saying this is the way it has got to happen, this is what we determine. They want a different relationship.
So that is the first thing, which is the empowerment of the user of the service.
The second thing, and it leads on from that, is then also of course to have a greater diversity of supply and break down some of the barriers between the public and private and voluntary sector. Now what we have actually got here today are some of the interesting examples of where people within the public service have innovated and done public services in a different way, but also we have today a voluntary sector out there, a third sector, that can be brilliant at creating new ways of working. For example with some of the youngsters that are playing truant or getting into trouble it is often a voluntary sector solution that will be better than a traditional public service solution. The providers of services therefore may not necessarily be done or organised in the traditional way, but what you are doing by bringing that greater diversity in is making sure that if the proper service isn’t there, someone else has got the opportunity to come in and do it.
Now we are doing this for example in the under-doctored areas with GP services, foundation hospitals of course operate in a different way, you have city academies and trust schools. In relation for example to the national offender management service, the legislation going through Parliament will allow local probation trusts to commission services from a range of different providers.
So that is the second thing, which is the provider diversity, or diversity of supply.
The third thing is something I was saying a moment or two ago and that is also as part of this personalisation to make sure we recognise the problems of the hardest to reach people. I think one of the things that is interesting about programmes like Sure Start for example in local communities is they have been very successful, but when you come to those right at the very bottom, those that maybe have a multiplicity of problems, the difficulty is they very often won’t go to the Sure Start, so you have got to provide the means by which you can both go out into the community and find those hardest to reach families, and also you need very targeted interventions with them.
So for example the Dundee Family Project which looks at how you combine a fairly disciplined structured housing relationship with families that have got a huge number of problems, that maybe the kids are going off the rails, or the parents have got drug or alcohol problems, you know they are finding new ways to reach those people who are otherwise shut out from society’s mainstream. So that is the third thing.
And the fourth principle is the workforce itself. I mean again if you look at any other walk of life, you know the old demarcations are coming down, and we have got to be doing the same. What we have had here today are examples of people who it is not in their traditional job description or qualification that this is what they should do, but nonetheless they have the ability to do it and what they do improves the service at the frontline.
Now we have got to be breaking down again quite deliberately the old demarcations in the workforce, we have got to be encouraging new types of skill, we have got to be recognising that if you want a quality service then that quality service is not going to be provided by people at the frontline who feel themselves hemmed in and constrained, and everything we were talking about a moment or two ago about liberating the frontline is important. That means incidentally for a school they may decide that instead of another teacher they need a classroom assistant, they might need an IT specialist, it may mean for example in the social services or Jobcentre Plus we should be saying to the frontline staff look let’s change, for example in the Jobcentres, let’s change some of the benefit rules to give you greater discretion as to how you handle the case of an individual which will allow you a better chance of getting them off benefit and into work, or helping them with their problems. Or as we have just heard with some of the frontline services, for example I was very interested in the example for the families whose kids are going to have special needs and helping them during pregnancy, I mean this is not something that fits within the normal way the job is done, but actually what the frontline is doing by being given the freedom to innovate is then delivering a different type of service in a different way.
Now the interesting thing is when you talk about this in relation to health or education or local government, everyone says fine, we understand those principles of public service reform, my point however is that actually in the criminal justice system the same is true. And the paper we are publishing today on Security, Crime and Justice is an attempt to apply those principles of public service reform even to something as difficult as the criminal justice system.
The first point is that if we want a criminal justice system that works, we have to target the offender and not simply the offence. Now we know that the bulk of crime, or at least half of crime, is committed by 100,000 of the most prolific criminals. What we have already done is allow a greater focus on the prolific offenders, but what we also want to do now is to go further and say for those who are the most prolific offenders, when they finish their sentence they can be under licence to limit what they can do, even when released from prison, so that for example we would be able to ensure that somebody who has got a multiple set of problems and who otherwise is going to be turned back out on the street and reoffending again, can be actually looked after, given the proper support but also know that they have got to take advantage of the support that is being given.
This incidentally is not an alternative to prison, it is in addition to prison. There are 20,000 more prison places since 1997, we are building another 8,000, so if people deserve to be in prison, that is where they should be. But where we have tried to target these prolific offenders, and we have done so with several thousand over the past couple of years, there has been a 62% reduction in recorded convictions and over 1,700 of those offenders have been taken off the programme because they are no longer considered to be prolific offenders.
Now that is an example of how a public service is being changed so that it is personalised, in this case actually around the offender, to make sure that the public is protected on the one hand, and we have the best chance of making sure that those prolific offenders who may have multiple drug problems, they have been in organised crime, they have maybe been in prison for a long period of time, that even after they leave and after they have served their sentence, then we are able to make sure again that the public is properly protected but they are also given the chance to change and reform their lives.
In addition to that we are also introducing an extension of the powers in respect of the seizure of assets, because one of the difficulties is, and this again is part of the changing nature of public service, the criminal justice system today has to deal with completely different types of criminal offence - terrorism, organised crime, anti-social behaviour. What we are trying to do is to make sure that those things are dealt with in different ways because they are part of a changing pattern of crime where the old methods, a uniform method of dealing with these things, doesn’t work. So for example on the seizure of assets the police can already when they raid a house that has been used for drug dealing, they can seize the money, they should also be able to seize the car of the drug dealer or the jewellery and other assets that the drug dealer may have.
Now what is all this about therefore? It is about, one, accepting that in public services today there is a completely different and changing context in which those services are being implemented, it is changing because expectations are changing and rising, it is changing because the world is changing and the public services are subject to different pressures, it is changing because of technology. And our response therefore has to be to get the right structures in government that focus on empowering the user, opening up the service to a diversity of supply, making sure we get to the hardest to reach and allowing the workforce the innovation and creativity that they want and need in order to create a service that is genuinely fair to all, but personal to each.
Now I believe that those changes that have been in part, the foundations that have been laid in these past few years, I think frankly, and this is honestly I think almost outside the party political or ideological battle today, I think whatever happens people are going to want that type of service more and more in the future. And if we want to be able to get the consent of people for continuing to resource public services properly and invest in them, then we are going to have to show that these services are ever more responsive to the changing needs that people have.
But finally there is this. None of that works unless there is a proper partnership with the frontline and in a sense what we need to get right, which is one of the reasons for the conference today, is we need to be able to understand from you what is holding you back, to be able to make the changes that you want to see in order that you can deliver the very best service and make sure that we in government have if you like the right relationship with you for the future. Because just as what I am saying is that for the user of the service the old paternalistic top-down method won’t work, there has to be a relationship today between the user of the service and the provider of the service, so in the same way the old top-down approach from central government to the frontline won’t work either, we need a partnership with you. And so the reason for having the conference today and the reason for the engagement with you is so that we get back from you what is necessary to make your life not necessarily easier but certainly more fulfilling, and a better service for the public.
And I think you know that one of the things that just occasionally we should reflect on, and it came home to me when I was talking to a friend of mine who runs a major business in the country and he had a problem with part of his business, and when they were all sitting around in his boardroom worrying about how they would deal with this problem, one of them said: "You know we have got a problem with these several thousand customers, but imagine if you were running the National Health Service." And sometimes I don’t think we realise just how difficult running a public service is, it is a fantastic challenge. And therefore it is not surprising that a lot of the focus is on the negative, but actually what has happened over these past years has been a process of immense improvement in our public services, and what we have got to do now is to learn the lessons of that and apply them with ever greater vigour in the years ahead.
Thank you.
Chairman:
Thank you Prime Minister. Now we have got some questions. I am going to do them in groups of three and hopefully we can get through a couple of sets before the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have to leave.
Question:
Thank you. At least you had forewarning. What message can the Prime Minister give today to the millions of civil and public sector workers, many of whom are currently facing pay cuts, job losses and transfers to the private or so-called third sector? And will the Prime Minister actually give a message to those public sector workers today that the contribution they are currently making has been a key factor in delivering the improvements in public services you have just referred to?
Question:
Prime Minister if Parliament and the press control the public services by focusing on failures and mistakes, how can you expect public servants not to be risk averse?
Question:
I am the General Secretary of Prospect, the trade union, not the magazine. The experience I would say of many public sector workers is that they have to operate in target-driven, centralised, controlling, budget restrained ways of working. How can they be expected to innovate in those circumstances?
Chairman:
OK, well we have got three chunky questions there to you Prime Minister, but I guess you could refer them to any of us if you wish. What do you think?
Prime Minister:
Well first of all in response to Charlie, I mean the contribution of public service workers is immense, of course, and the public services depend on those workers. And I, every time I ever speak about public services I pay tribute to it and to the dedication and commitment of the people that work in the public services. It is important to realise that the numbers of people employed in the public services have actually expanded significantly, indeed sometimes when you know people talk about the National Health Service recently and job cuts, I mean there are 300,000 extra people employed in the Health Service in the last ten years. But the fact is, and this is part of the problem I am afraid, because this is where you know the difficulty arises, is that actually I can’t guarantee that everyone is employed in exactly the same way, in the same position, forever more. It is not the way life works any more and I think we have got to be honest with people about that because otherwise the public service isn’t adapting and changing in the way that every other walk of life does. And that is why for example when we transfer out into primary care some of the services that used to be in the acute sector, you will get people complaining that obviously their jobs then change and so on, but on the other hand for the actual user of the service it is better to have it out in the community.
So I think these things are always, always difficult to do but there is no doubt at all, I mean the public services depend on the dedication and commitment of people, but part of that commitment I think has to be to accept that there will be processes of change that the public services go through.
I think, I will just come back to the second question, I think Paul’s question is very much along the same lines. Here is the problem from our point of view on targets. When we came to office the biggest problem in the National Health Service was the length of time people waited for their operations. I used to get letters from people saying their relatives had died waiting for heart treatment. And we introduced a series of waiting lists and waiting time targets. Now there are a lot of people in the Health Service who resent that and they resented it for example on the Accident and Emergency Department, you put in the target for when people are treated, but I also think we wouldn’t have got the changes unless there had been as well as change at the frontline, some really tough targets in order to focus people’s minds. And actually if you look at the complaints that people have about the Health Service today, yes occasionally we get complaints about waiting, but it is not the problem, and actually in the next couple of years if we complete the 18 week maximum in-patient and out-patient and diagnostics all rolled into one with an average of 8 weeks, you will have effectively ended traditional waiting inside the National Health Service.
Now the trouble with, and this is part of why should we complain, it is life, but I mean the problem is you solve one problem and then you move on to something else. So now you would find far more publicity for example for MRSA than you would for waiting in the Health Service, but believe me 10 years ago, in fact if you think back that was the issue, and maximum people waiting over 18 months and so on, to bring that down progressively has been a huge thing. And the trouble is I can’t say it would have been done without the target.
Chairman:
Do you think targets are always with us?
Prime Minister:
No, I think what you can do, and this was the point that John was making, is that over time as you devolve more power to a system where the money can follow the patient and you have a different range of choices for people, I think over time you can then go, as John was saying, from the 80% at the centre, 20% at the frontline, to the 20/80 situation. And actually we should be able now to strip down those targets and make them very much smaller in number and less bureaucratic, and also only do the things that you know focus on the outcomes and only do the things that really matter. But I think you would find it very difficult if you got rid altogether for example the target that allows people suspected with cancer to have seen the specialists within a limited period of time, because it has made a difference to people.
Now finally on the point that the gentleman made from the ESRC, look I totally agree with you, if all we ever focus on are the failures and mistakes you know it does make people risk averse. And I think simply the most frustrating part of being engaged in public services, and counting you know in a sense myself as part of this as well, is that the media will always focus on the things that go wrong, rather than the success stories and the things that go right, and it drives you absolutely nuts because there are so many really good things that are happening. But I think I would be giving you a commitment too far if I thought I could change that. But I think what is important occasionally is actually that the frontline comes out and speaks for itself and says what we are actually doing is worthwhile and successful and good, and believe you me from our perspective we would want to back that up 100%.
Chairman:
Just before I go back to the audience, I just want to check actually, I just want to ask you a question from some of the frontline people here, what motivated you, was it with all due respect to the Prime Minister’s point about targets, but what, was targeting in your mind Anne at all in terms of the innovations that you made?
Anne:
No, I think for us to have an outcome of seeing a baby born full term and not premature, and of a good weight and staying in the care of the parents, that is a good outcome for us. And even if we only get a small amount, that is what makes my job worthwhile, and I think the staff that I work with also. But yes there will always, I mean within social work services we are constantly faced with targets and performance indicators driving through the Scottish Exec, and we need to benchmark, we need to know where we are.
Richard:
The Fire and Rescue Service is a [INAUDIBLE] organisation, I can’t remember the last fire that I went to that I couldn’t put out. We deal with problems. If a building goes up we will put it out, it might take us a bit longer than others, but that is with the resources that we have got. So that philosophy of moving from a blazing building to social exclusion, whether it be to children and young people, maybe it is to elderly people isolated within their community, whether it be schools that have got antisocial behaviour in them so we get fire-fighters going to work in one of those schools, that is a problem, we can help to deliver a solution and at the same time meeting the targets which we have reduced by half, the number of people dying in house fires in Merseyside, and by 30% the number of antisocial fire-related behaviour. So targets work, but so does innovation, and it is celebrating that innovation.
Chairman:
Venuta - targets.
Venuta:
No, with caring, it is caring for the boys, one minute he is playing with a Playstation, the next minute he is going to be a dad, and teaching them, or trying to …
Platform Member:
No, I have got targets as a group manager on frontline services. Learning was all about the softer outcomes, the improved health and safety record, the reduced short term absenteeism and releasing people’s potential within the workforce.
Geoff:
Well really local authorities and public authorities have got their targets and so we say to them look we can help you meet your targets, you know we can reduce social exclusion through the use of our service.
Prime Minister:
I think on this issue of targets, I would say that for what Venuta is doing or in relation to special needs in the care of people during pregnancy, I think targets have got no application there to be honest. But I think what they can do is two things: one, in very specific circumstances, for example the length of time you wait, I mean that is something that is more amenable to setting a target for; and the other point is the point that Geoff was just making there, which is that sometimes by setting a target you do incentivise an organisation to look at how they may innovate in order to meet the target using outside expertise. But I think the truth is we should probably not demonise targets, but neither rely exclusively on them, I think that is really the sensible balance.
Chairman:
A response from you Home Secretary?
John Reid:
Yes, I think twofold on targets, the first is as I said, I think that you have to recognise, look there is no institution, there is no organisation which is worth its salt on anything that does not have aims and objectives, and you can call them aims, you can call them objectives, you can call them aspirations, you can call them standards, you can call them targets, but you have to have something to earmark. So the question is getting the balance on them, and I have made my view known that you place a greater reliance on targets at the beginning of a massive transformation, and make no doubt about it, what we are doing to the Health Service in this country for instance is the most massive institutional reform and cultural reform of any organisation that I am aware of short of the state, short of changing the state, because this is the third or fourth biggest organisation in the world, we all know that, behind the Indian railroads and the Chinese army, and probably has more of an independent mind than either of those organisations, certainly I can say as Secretary of State for Health formerly. I mean this is massive, what we are doing there, and you cannot do it just by saying well let’s have a sort of anarchists convention, what do you think we should do with this and just continually go on, you have to have some direction from the centre, but it doesn’t become sustainable unless at some stage within that ten year plan we have laid out, half-way through it you start passing more and more power down to the front, that is the good news. The bad news is actually it goes beyond providers, it goes to the people who own it - and that is the public.
So you know I have to say that that is going to be the reality of life for all of us. I hate to be undiplomatic because I am normally extremely sensitive and diplomatic on everything I say, as you know, but the reality is people get more power and they get more influence and control over their life in the whole of the private sector. It would be bizarre if we were to say the only area they are not going to have that in is the public sector, that is down to politicians and to the providers.
The second thing is this, if I can be as honest with you as you will be with me on these matters, when it was said at the back you know that Parliament and the press constantly talking of failures, look I will take this head-on because I have identified the failures in my own department. And incidentally I found it rather ironic that one question was Parliament and the press concentrating on the failures, and the other two questions were well how can we get on with a cut-ridden, budget constrained, demoralised slashed public services? That wasn’t exactly a picture of a public services where in Health for instance we have got 250,000 more people, with the biggest wage increases they have ever had, 19% increases for those on the lowest wages, and politicians getting hammered because of the money we are giving to doctors and to consultants.
So we are all guilty in our own way of stressing the downside of life, and it is absolutely true that it is not only those who are defending the position of workers and their conditions who do that, the press do that. So for instance when I say there are inadequacies in my own department, I also say but let’s remember we turned round the Passport Service from being the archetypal failure of the public service to being an organisation with a better consumer satisfaction record than Tesco. It doesn’t appear. When I say we are now dealing with asylum claims in 2 months rather than 22 months, it doesn’t appear in the press. And the question we have got is because the press convey one side of the story, should we as politicians play the same game and only put out there the other bright side of the story? Let me tell you that is why the public don’t trust politicians because they think we always tell them just what is going well from our point of view, and I for one think that politicians should say what they think.
And the second reason, whether it is personal, managerial or political, unless you acknowledge a problem, you don’t start to solve the problem. You will know that with offenders, you will know it with the likes of your background where you were saying earlier on, yes the first step you had to take was say I have got a problem here, and if you don’t say I have got a problem you are not going to resolve it. And that is why I think, let me share that with you honestly, that we must get the best of the public sector ethos, but we must also say that the aspirations and expectations of the public service from today’s ordinary Joe Public are higher than ever and they are higher than the service we are providing. And therefore we have to meet those aspirations, and if we don’t meet them the public will go elsewhere, it will go and buy private education, it will go and buy private health, it will increasingly get private protection services, so when we are asking to work in partnership to change it, it is not because we don’t like the public service, it is because we love the public service and we want it to be maintained in the affections and in the efficacy of the public of this country by continually improving and moving towards their level of aspirations. That is what I feel as delicately as I …
Chairman:
Thank you very much. I have got four minutes left and I am determined to give the last word to the frontline workers. So I want to ask the Prime Minister I guess, rumour has it that you might be moving on and I just want to ask you, what do you want your legacy to be as far as public services are concerned, what do you want us to remember I guess, what do you want to leave behind?
Prime Minister:
Well the most important thing is that we have a situation where public services improve, and that is about the investment but it is also about the change, and you have got to have the two together. And you won’t get public services improving unless you put the investment in, although there will always be limits to the amount of money that any government can put in. But there has been a massive expansion in that public investment but it has got to be matched by the change, which is all about making sure that you personalise the service and meet those rising expectations. I think we have come a long way in that agenda and frankly the important thing now is to have it pushed forward for the future and also to make sure that the people who are working at the frontline do get the chance to innovate and create the new services in the way that they want.
Chairman:
OK, 30 seconds each and I am going to be really strict here. What have you learnt from hearing each of the stories, hearing from the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, what are you going to take away from this event from what you have heard?
Geoff:
From the fire services point of view we are going to carry on doing what we have been doing in Merseyside and it is about sweating the asset and it is about getting on with it, not forming another committee, not forming another focus group, not saying mmm, maybe or leave that one with me I will have a little think about it. No, we are just going to do it, we are going to get on with it, and then we will do some evaluation at the end of it. But that is what it is about, sweating the asset. A fire station isn’t just a place where you park fire engines, it is a place right in the middle of communities, right in the middle of what are often the most disadvantaged, dislocated communities. Think of a fire station as a resource and the place where if you are willing to do good work and share a message, we can help you share it.
Chairman:
… speak for the kids of Merseyside.
Platform Speaker:
There was a question I got asked a few weeks ago about my position as a fire-fighter and they said: "What do you do on station?". And I explained a few things to him, I said the one thing that I know from my perspective is that there are a lot of young people, a lot of kids in my area and in a lot of other areas that are walking round and the role models that they have got are drug dealers, they see them as role models, and for me my role as a fire-fighter, I want to change that and I want to break that mould and show them that there is another tunnel to go down.
Anne:
We keep working away hard and I think one of the messages we would take is that the families that people think are difficult to engage with, parents involved in substance misuse, is that they are not difficult to engage with if you use creative services, that you give commitment and have tenacity and you keep on in there and you don’t give up on people.
Venuta:
There are many major causes of crime, but one cause is inconsistent parenting, and through what I am doing, I can’t change their past but I can try and help change their future so they become consistent parents and don’t reoffend.
Micky:
Yes at Dagenham we will continue to obviously drive the learning agenda into the community for marginalised groups, but I think under Rob Wightman, our Chief Exec, at the moment the whole ethos is about empowering people and giving people the confidence to actually take risks, take chances and think outside the box.
Geoff:
Right, my message is about partnership. I think often the public and private sectors see each other as potential rivals. I think we shouldn’t go along with that. And just a final thing to say, because you don’t see people it doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and so it is a question of how you involve people, those very marginalised people.
Chairman:
Thank you very much. Can I thank the Prime Minister Tony Blair, can I thank the Home Secretary John Reid, can I thank all 19 of our frontline innovators, I think they have been brilliant. They have been rehearsed within an inch of their lives, they have been up every morning, they have focused on what they need to tell you in order that you can change the lives of people out there. I think they deserve your gratitude and a round of applause.