It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Chope. I am grateful to have the opportunity to debate the effectiveness of management systems at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

My interest in the matter was provoked by the unfortunate case of my constituent, Mr. John Pitman of Trowbridge. I will use his appalling experience to illustrate what I believe to be a wider malaise within the FCO, an organisation that has a formidable reputation for diplomacy but clearly regards management, particularly of its human resources, as being somewhat below the salt.

Mr. Pitman, a former employee of the Foreign Office, has had a long battle to rectify a number of management failings that affected him during his service. The Minister will be aware that I have had an extensive correspondence on behalf of my constituent since 2001, but residual issues and concerns remain that warrant attention and suggest that HR management within the Foreign Office is not done well.

Mr. Pitman, who has spent his life in Her Majesty’s service in the Royal Marines and the FCO, was made redundant from his work as a Foreign Office security officer in 1996. He was re-engaged on a temporary contract between 1998 and 2000 to fill the position in Moscow from which he had been made redundant. At a function in 2000, Mr. Pitman met a senior figure, a non-UK national, in a security company that provided services to the FCO. Potential employment opportunities for my constituent were discussed in the course of the encounter, and a subsequent meeting was held. My constituent became uneasy at the gentleman’s line of questioning and the information that he apparently held and duly reported the encounter officially, as he was bound to do.

In July 2000, after he had left his posting, Mr. Pitman was told by his line manager that he had contravened the terms of his employment, citing the testimony of an unnamed witness who my constituent believes was the gentleman he had met from the security firm. My constituent tells me that his line manager and the security firm official both questioned his integrity, and cites a written report from the latter to the former stating that Mr. Pitman was a security risk and that they should not trust him. My constituent’s line manager reported that opinion to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The upshot of those unsubstantiated allegations from a foreign, unvetted civilian contractor and a junior FCO manager apparently in close contact with the former was the summary removal of my constituent’s security clearance, with no form of investigation and no audit trail worth the name. Mr. Pitman was neither given the opportunity to comment nor informed of the removal of what was effectively his licence to practise, both directly for the FCO and for a range of private operators in the security field. In blissful ignorance, he continued applying for employment within the FCO. Unsurprisingly, given his unwitting lack of security clearance, no work was forthcoming. However, Mr. Pitman was aware that there were plenty of appropriate security opportunities in the FCO, as officers were being brought out of retirement to fill vacancies. Still, nobody told him that his security clearance had been revoked.

Eventually, Mr. Pitman, his lawyer and I fetched up in the office of Mrs. Tessa Redmayne, a senior person in the FCO’s human resources department. We asked why my constituent was being passed over for work that he knew was plentiful. In the course of that extraordinary meeting, it became apparent that the problem was that Mr. Pitman’s security clearance had not been renewed, and that there was no intention to renew it. I expressed surprise, knowing full well from my own service career what a big deal failure to renew security clearance represents and the proper steps that must be taken in connection with it. It is not something to be done on the say-so of a junior official, on the back of hearsay from a foreign national, without any form of investigation.

It seems that, as his contract came to an end, Mr. Pitman was simply not made aware of the security clearance issue. Instead, his clearance was withdrawn without his knowledge. He was told subsequently that the clearance had expired along with his contract, which was simply not true. Only after becoming aware, via a freedom of information request, that his security clearance had been removed was he able to discover, among the heavily weeded and redacted documents made available, the underpinning allegations made against him.

The consequences for my constituent have been profound. He has suffered a substantial loss of earnings in the nearly three years between the loss of his security clearance and its reinstatement. He was unable to secure employment without clearance and now finds that he cannot get clearance without an offer of employment. His strong suspicion is that Foreign Office management are using that to deny him work. Furthermore, his reputation has been traduced and his chances of employment in the tightly knit public and private security world are greatly diminished. It has all taken a heavy toll, as the Minister can imagine.

My constituent received a vague apology for management shortcomings from one of the Minister’s predecessors, and the head of personnel security at the Foreign Office gave an unreserved apology after my intervention in 2004. Mr. Pitman’s security clearance was reinstated to allow him two short-term contracts, which rather vindicates him. However, he believes, and I find it entirely credible, that he has been blacklisted as a troublemaker, which has meant that further work has dried up. He is now told that he cannot have work because his security clearance needs updating. When he asks for his security clearance to be updated, he is refused because he has no offer of work and getting security clearance costs money. It is a complete runaround that encourages my constituent in the belief that he is being deliberately excluded from available work for which he is eminently qualified.

A sum was paid to Mr. Pitman to cover some of the earnings lost to the wrongful withdrawal of his security clearance, but it has not compensated him for the loss of his residual career, his earnings, his pension and, crucially, his sense of well-being and worth. A loyal and hard-working public servant has been badly let down by shoddy, shameful and frankly chaotic middle management in the FCO.

My constituent’s case touches on issues of wider public interest, on a number of which I have kept up a correspondence with Ministers. Mr. Pitman remains concerned that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is completely incapable of controlling its costs, citing by way of example its failure to undertake full comparative costings for the employment of security firm contractors.

When Mr. Pitman completed his contract as an overseas security manager in Kabul in July 2005, he was replaced by an individual from one such security company. In July 2006, my constituent applied to work for the individual who had replaced him in Kabul, who was now working on his own account as a contractor to the FCO. Mr. Pitman was told that the post offered £400 a day, tax-free. That equates to £146,000 a year, a significant multiple of the cost of my constituent’s direct employment even before the contractor takes his slice. One does not have to be a cost-management accountant to appreciate that that is unlikely to offer good value for money for hard-pressed taxpayers.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has a public service agreement to improve its value for money. The comprehensive spending review commits the Department to achieving 2.5 per cent. efficiency savings year on year over the review period. Yet we find the FCO in the dock for squandering millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, with lurid headlines last month that highlighted diplomatic excess.

We in this place must show a little humility when discussing excess, given our recent history. However, I hope that the Minister is able to comment on reports that officials are able to book business or first-class transport but to travel economy and use the balance for their private travel and that of their families. An insider said:

“This is a multi-million pound rip-off and the loophole should be closed immediately… Management at the Foreign Office are very weak and terrified of upsetting the diplomats so they give them whatever they want, which is huge amounts of public money.”

All hon. Members are now unhappy experts in loopholes, highly permissive rule books and management who are not sufficiently empowered. I hope that the Minister is taking a look at all those matters in his Department in the light of the Commons’ fall from grace and the dawning of the new age of austerity.

Another insider said:

“There is complete apathy about this reckless spending, while a silent minority within the FCO rage and fume about this gross extravagance.”

I strongly suspect that that is just the tip of the iceberg. That is certainly the belief of my constituent, who can be counted among the instinctively silent minority, but who has been provoked by the extraordinarily poor way in which he has been handled.

We are indebted to people, such as the insider quoted in the press recently and my constituent, who from time to time raise examples of apparent excess in organisations of which they have experience. It is often such grass-roots experiences being brought to MPs as Mr. Pitman’s case has been brought to me that shine light on areas where previously there had been darkness. We in this place have suffered because of such issues in recent weeks and it behoves those in the rest of the public sector to look at their practices to see how things could be improved. It would be naive to suppose that problems of wastefulness are confined to the Palace of Westminster. From recent press reports, it appears that the FCO is a prime candidate for a little light to be shone on darkness.

The Government’s propensity for hiring expensive consultants to tell them what they should be capable of determining for themselves led them to commission Collinson Grant Ltd to produce a report in two phases in 2004 and 2005. The second is by far the most interesting. Its somewhat provocative title, “Efficiency, effectiveness and the control of costs in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office”, holds much promise. However, that report rowed back considerably on the savings identified by the initial findings, which is disappointing. It concluded that, managerially, the FCO is too deep and too narrow. According to Collinson Grant, that fosters organisational torpor; insufficient delegation; poor accountability; middle managers obsessed with the monitoring, review and repetition of the work of juniors to justify their existence; senior officials conducting themselves as desk officers; and an overall lack of understanding of how to manage a team.

Of direct relevance to my constituent’s case, Collinson Grant found that the finance and human resources departments saw themselves as providing advice, rather than mandating adherence to good practice. Furthermore, the short tenure in key positions, such as those within the finance and human resources departments, combined with a lack of professional experience in those specialist disciplines, was found to limit effectiveness.

Collinson Grant concluded that although the entire organisation needed to be challenged and reformed, its leadership lacked the skills and the will to challenge the status quo. The report makes for deeply depressing reading. Four years on, I and my constituent are left with no sense that matters have improved significantly.

I am sure that the Minister will pray in aid the formation of FCO Services, an Executive agency of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that was created following the Lyons and Gershon reviews. It holds some prospect of an improvement in infrastructure, facilities management, security and training—the unglamorous nuts and bolts of the FCO that are apparently spurned by the organisation’s mainstream to the detriment of people such as Mr. Pitman.

I seek three things from the Minister. The first is a comprehensive re-examination of the way in which my constituent has been handled and the Minister’s guarantee that he will be considered fairly for the overseas security work that we know exists, without being given the runaround as he has been or any more spurious pretexts being deployed to keep him out. Secondly, what is the Minister’s plan to resolve the ongoing management inadequacies within his Department highlighted by the Collinson Grant report, which has apparently been left to gather dust, as the case of Mr. Pitman so graphically illustrates? Finally, I would like an account of what will be done to get a grip on the Foreign Office wastefulness that was identified recently by the media and to which my constituent bears witness.

It is a delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Chope, because I have never done so before. I have sat on many Committees with you, in which we have taken a different view on almost every issue. Perhaps your Whips and mine took a particular delight in putting us on the same Committees. However, I know that you have to be impartial this afternoon, so it is a great joy to serve under your chairmanship and I might tease you a little later.

The hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) raises some serious matters. His first concerns relate to his constituent. I spoke to the hon. Gentleman earlier on the telephone and know that he has a large amount of correspondence on this case. He will understand that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has a similarly large amount of correspondence.

I want to make it clear from the outset that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office apologises fully and unreservedly. If the hon. Gentleman thinks that there have been any reservations in the way in which the apology has been proffered so far, I hope that he will accept that there is no reservation in the apology I offer now for the way in which his constituent was dealt with. We accept fully that there were failings in the way we went about this matter, which is why we provided compensation. I hope that Mr. Pitman understands that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office takes its management responsibilities seriously and takes responsibility for any failings there have been.

If I may, I will correct a few things that the hon. Gentleman said. First, he referred to the summary removal of Mr. Pitman’s security clearance. The truth is that nobody removed his security clearance, because that does not happen, except in exceptional cases. Mr. Pitman’s security clearance lapsed when he finished his tour. That might seem to be a nit-picking distinction, but it is an important one. The allegation is really of incompetence, because we allowed the security clearance to lapse, rather than there being a process of removal.

The hon. Gentleman outlined his firm view that Mr. Pitman is not currently able to apply for jobs and secure employment without security clearance. That is the standard procedure that applies to absolutely everybody. If everyone who applied for a job were to have security clearance before they were appointed, that would involve the FCO and many other agencies in vast expenditure to an unnecessary degree.

Is the Minister aware that people with lapsed security clearance are being brought out of retirement, and that security clearance is then given to them following the necessary checks? It is not the case that jobs are not offered to individuals in the absence of security clearance. That rather confounds what he has just said.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I was going to make that point. Once someone has applied for and secured a job, we take them through the security clearance process, and that is when Mr. Pitman would go through the process. I assure the hon. Gentleman that there is no bar to someone securing a job because they do not yet have security clearance. Clearly, some of the people who apply for jobs already have security clearance, which continues for six months after a tour. That was the problem in Mr. Pitman’s case—his was allowed to lapse.

I can assure the hon. Gentleman absolutely, and I can assure Mr. Pitman that he is free to apply for jobs, and that whether or not he has security clearance at the moment is not a material matter that would affect whether he can or cannot be employed—or whether an application by him would be successful. That was outlined to the hon. Gentleman in a letter of late last year from one of my predecessors, in which the FCO made it clear that it would be perfectly possible for Mr. Pitman to apply. Indeed, it also gave details of how he could do so.

The hon. Gentleman has said that the whole process, at the beginning of this century, took a heavy toll on Mr. Pitman. We fully understand that, which is why I have made a full and unconditional apology. The hon. Gentleman said that Mr. Pitman’s reputation has been traduced, but I assure him that in the eyes of the FCO, Mr. Pitman’s reputation has not been tarnished in any sense at all. The hon. Gentleman suggested, rather dismissively, that there had been some sort of apology from my predecessor, but I am sure that she thought she had given a full and unreserved apology. In whatever sense that did not seem sufficient, I hope that I have met what the hon. Gentleman requested this afternoon. The original letter offering a full and unreserved apology was sent on 19 May 2004.

It might be helpful if I discuss compensation, because that is an important matter, which was debated considerably from 2004 onwards. On 8 September 2006, a letter from Andrew Noble to Mr. Pitman offered compensation of £50,593.15. That was followed up with a reminder to Mr. Pitman of the offer, giving a deadline by which it had to be accepted—22 February 2007. An FCO Minister wrote to the hon. Gentleman on 28 February 2007 to say that the deadline was being extended to 15 March, and on 18 April, the hon. Gentleman wrote to the FCO on behalf of Mr. Pitman to say that the compensation offer had been accepted. I must offer another apology, because there was then a mistake in the way in which the money was paid into Mr. Pitman’s account in July, for which my predecessor but two apologised fully. The hon. Gentleman then wrote in October to say that he did not believe that the compensation was a full and final settlement, despite the fact that his letter of 18 April confirmed that the compensation was a full and final settlement. I am afraid that, in terms of compensation, we believe this matter to be closed.

The Minister is incorrect to suggest that either Mr. Pitman or I wrote to the FCO to say that the settlement that was offered by the FCO was considered by us to be full and final. I hope that my second letter clarified that point beyond any fear of peradventure.

I am sorry, but the letter of 18 April accepted the compensation offer on behalf of Mr. Pitman, and the payment was made on that basis. As far as the FCO is concerned, that draws a line under the issue of compensation. I am afraid that I am unable to offer the hon. Gentleman any further help on that.

The hon. Gentleman then discussed a series of issues relating to what he called lurid headlines in the press, but I think he meant lurid headlines in the Daily Mail; often, when people talk about lurid headlines in the press, those headlines are in the Daily Mail. I think he was referring to the matter that he raised, of whether foreign diplomats are able to claim the cost of business flights and keep the extra money if they do not travel business class. I assure him that that is completely and utterly not the case. There is a travel package, which is provided to all foreign diplomats. We have to understand that many of the people who work on behalf of the FCO do so in far-flung places, and that family arrangements are much more difficult now than they were 40 years ago when female diplomats had to resign from the Foreign Office when they married. The expectation then was that there would be a man and his wife. Today, our staff are just as likely to be women as men, and a couple may work in two different places. We believe that in the modern working environment it is important to offer staff a sensible, but not disproportionate, package.

The travel package that we provide is an allowance for staff to use for travel on substantive postings overseas—in other words, not just temporary ones. The funds cover the cost of transfer to and from a posting and, on top of that, an annual leave journey to the UK in postings of two years or more. The package gives staff flexibility in how and when they travel during a posting within the ceiling that is fixed by the cost of their official travel entitlements on approved routes and carriers. The maximum that they may spend on travel is therefore the precise amount that the Department would have had to pay to get them to post and back and to bring them home once a year, as happened when flights were booked centrally before the scheme was introduced. There is no amount of money that suddenly goes into a diplomat’s pocket simply because they have not travelled in a particular class. There are fixed routes, but people are allowed to change the route as long as they stay within the amount of money that we have already ascertained would be the best value for them. It is important that we have flexibility, and that system is not disproportionate to what other people would do in other areas of work for which they are required to work away from their home for a substantial period.

At the beginning of his speech, the hon. Gentleman said, again dismissively, that management in the FCO was an idea that was rather below the salt. That was a rather de haut en bas comment, suggesting that the FCO has a rather de haut en bas attitude. It may be that in the 1960s and 1970s, despite the considerable effectiveness that the Foreign Office has always had, for which it is renowned around the world, some of our management practices were lax. We have been keen to ensure that we constantly learn how we can improve our management practices. He is right that there are times when individual cases shine light on particular problems that may be endemic across an organisation, but in the brief time in which I have worked at the FCO, it has been my experience that management takes very seriously issues such as how best to manage people to develop change so that we can be the most effective organisation possible, and the most cost-effective organisation possible, and that Ministers are keen to drive those issues forward.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his debate. Some of his comments have been well placed, and I hope that I have been able to reassure him on the issue of whether Mr. Pitman is able to apply for jobs and on the issue of security clearance. I hope, too, that I have reassured him regarding the full and unreserved apology that we have already expressed.