How to be a Civil Servant
This is the fourth of four notes about the reform of the UK civil service.
Labour's Civil Service Reform Programme originally supported its wider Modernising Government Initiative which was, from 1997, being taken forward by much of the public sector, including local authorities. The Modernising Government Initiative had three workstreams:-
Another part of this website describes the work on Better Policy Making within the Civil Service. Apart from this, the civil service part of the initiative concentrated on 6 areas:-
Key documents were:-
Like many similar reform intitiatives, "Modernising Government" soon suffered from Civil Service Reform Syndrome and lasted only two or three years before the Government announced that its "priority for this term is [now] to improve public service delivery and reform public services". Individual parts of the intitative were therefore either abandoned or handed over to individual departments to take forward. The spotlight accordingly moved from "Modernising Government" to "delivery":- see further below.
The Civil Service in 2001 felt that it had already implemented a number of "important reforms already" - a quote from the Labour Party Manifesto for the General Election that year. But that comment was overshadowed by the rest of the paragraph which hinted at considerable change to come:-
Despite this manifesto commitment, there were initially no major developments following the 2001 election (although work continued on a possible Civil Service Bill). Then, in June 2002, Sir Andrew Turnbull published a fascinating note** summarising how he intended to take forward Civil Service reform. In particular, he said that he intended to hold Permanent Secretaries to account for bringing about reform in their departments and improving service delivery. This was quite a novel concept, as Sir Andrew's predecessors have always hesitated to assert their authority over Permanent Secretaries who are constitutionally responsible to Departmental Ministers, not the Cabinet Secretary.
Sir Andrew's round robin to staff, on his first day in office on 2 September 2002, included an interesting set of aspirations for the Civil Service of 2005. I particularly like the last one:-
Sir Andrew then created a substantial (if arguably over-complex) Delivery and Reform Team, including:-
The next major development was in early 2003 when it was announced that the Cabinet Office’s Delivery and Reform Team and other central units would work with delivery departments to create Performance Partnership Agreements. The idea was that each department would agree with the Cabinet Office etc. its key priorities such as Public Service Agreement targets and major projects. There would then be an assessment of whether the department had the right leadership, the right strategic focus, the right engagement of delivery stakeholders and the right management of delivery to achieve the priorities. Action to strengthen these areas could be included in the key priorities. The aim was that assessments would involve staff, frontline managers and stakeholders, as well as the department’s top management and the combined centre. The department would then develop a change programme to ensure that the organisation was able to fulfil its purpose and priorities.
There were a series of major announcements in February and March 2004.
Let's look at some of these in more detail.
The Civil Service Reform document is surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly) thin. It seeks to herald major changes in the way the civil service is managed and organised, without going into the sort of detail which would create opposition. The "Outcomes" section is particularly short at around 500 words, all of them uncontroversial and none of them containing a numerical target or date.
Indeed, it is hardly necessary to read beyond the foreword which summarises the reforms as leading to:
But there is one good passage which succinctly explains how the world is changing, and by implication why the civil service, too, needs to change with it:-
"The public has higher expectations than ever before about the service it is entitled to:
The speech by the Prime Minister is a much substantial document, although it, too, avoids controversy. His general thesis, too, was that "The world has changed and the Civil Service must change with it", and that this "requires politicians as well as civil servants to change".
One particularly strong passage incorporated the best definition yet of "delivery":-
"The principal challenge is to shift focus from policy advice to delivery. Delivery means outcomes. It means project management. It means adapting to new situations and altering rules and practice accordingly. It means working not in traditional departmental silos. It means working naturally with partners outside of Government. It's not that many individual civil servants aren't capable of this. It is that doing it requires a change of operation and of culture that goes to the core of the Civil Service."
And then we come to the Gershon (and Gordon Brown) efficiency programme.
Sir Peter Gershon first reported to Cabinet a week or so before the above announcements. Because he expected strong opposition, he did not discuss his recommendations with key members of Cabinet in advance, and indeed his recommendations were not then published. The perhaps inevitable result was that shock value of his comments led to the opposition initially being even stronger than would otherwise be the case.
Sir Peter's report was eventually published on 12 July 2004. It is notable for not including a summary which (deliberately or otherwise) makes it hard for commentators to either attack or support it. In short, however, he recommended that 84,000 civil service jobs might be cut, and £20bn saved each year from 2007-8, as a result of four types of efficiency gain. First, Gershon believed that most "back-office functions" such as personnel management and finance could be contracted out and/or shared with other departments. Second, he thought that significant savings could be made by rationalising the large number of non-departmental public bodies ("quangos"). Third, he wanted to see an overhaul of the way government handles IT. Fourth, he wanted to see major improvements in procurement practices.
Gershon's critics had the following concerns:-
Gordon Brown's Budget Speech on 17 March 2004 announced the first Gershon-style savings. There were to be job losses totalling 40,500 in the Department of Work and Pensions, the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, including some job losses that had been announced previously. The merger of the two tax departments would create a super-department employing about 100,000 staff, 20 per cent of the civil service.
The Chancellor also announced, around the same time, that he intended to require departments to achieve a 5% cut in their administrative costs over the next two years, whilst the entire public sector was to be set a target of 2.5 per cent efficiency savings per year - money to come from a mix of savings on back office functions and more productive use of the time of front line staff. His plans had firmed up by July 2004 when he announced that he intended to cut c.84,150 civil service posts, whilst creating a number of new posts in the front line so that the net reduction would be c.70,600. Further savings, especially in the Department for Work and Pensions and the now-merged HM Revenue and Customs, were announced in the 2006 Budget.
The National Audit Office reported on the efficiency programme in February 2006, and said that:
The NAO went on to point out that there were in some areas significant delays in obtaining data, especially on the impact of efficiency gains on service quality. Other departments had not established baselines against which savings could be established nad/or taken account of the additional costs incurred in achieving the reported efficency savings. In other words, many departments were not able to demonstrate that they were delivering efficiencies and not just spending cuts. This is important because reductions in service quality are always going to be the biggest risk with programmes of this kind.
Those of a cynical disposition might like to read Sir Humphrey Appleby's advice to a colleague concerned about possible job losses.
Actual changes in civil service numbers are charted here.
Professional Skills for Government: Sir Andrew Turnbull, Head of the Civil Service, announced on 20 October 2004 a programme to "ensure that those with the potential to reach the Senior Civil Service have a consistent level of skills and experience in three broad categories". The programme was subsequently developed so as to provide a framework for the whole of the civil service at all grades. It was, however, made clear that "PSG is not a dramatic departure", and it is probably wrong to treat it as part of a serious reform programme. Indeed, sceptics regard it as little more than yet another exercise in box-ticking and/or a displacement activity so as to avoid tackling more deep-rooted problems. Others noted its similarity to the changes recommended by the 1968 Fulton Report, whilst the LSE's George Jones argued that the programme missed the real need in the civil service which was in his view rather more, not less, policy analysis expertise.
The structure of the programme is as follows. At Grade 7 and above, civil servants are required to demonstrate skills and expertise in four areas in relation to their job and career grouping. Below G7, departments are developing their own bespoke programmes.
The four skill/expertise areas are:
The three career groupings are:
"Delivery & Values" - a civil service reform progress report - was published in June 2005. It certainly reported good progress on a number of fronts, but did not contain anything which good be classified as major reform of the whole civil service.
Departmental Capability Reviews were announced by the incoming new Head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O'Donnell in late 2005. They would examine:
Like Sir Andrew's Professional Skills for Government (see above), the reviews were not expected to have a profound effect on civil service behaviour, even in the limited areas they cover. There would be no external assessment, nor any assessment of wider departmental performance. The review teams consisted of "safe pairs of hands". And there would be no "turnaround teams" like those which had been sent into local authorities subject to similar reviews, reflecting the fact that the Head of the Civil Service has precious little command and control powers at all.
The results of the first four reviews were announced in July 2006, and further reviews have been completed since then. According to Sir Gus: "What we have done is ask: 'Do we have the right capacity to meet future challenges? Do we have the right structures? What is the relationship between civil service and Ministerial accountabilty? Should we have agency status for the big delivery vehicles?" And the Government's summary of the findings of the reviews identified four common themes: Improving leadership from the centre of each department, improving the way the department delivers its services, responding more effectively to the demands of the public, and improving skills, capacity and capability. But there was no attempt to hide the guiding hand of the Treasury. The first action points in three out of the four resulting departmental plans focussed on "reduc[ing central] costs by 40%", "reducing the size of the centre" or "saving £xxx million in headquarters' costs".
There was an interesting comment in the magazine Public in October 2006:
The IPPR commented on the results of the first few capability reviews in a report published in December 2006:- see further below.
In August 2006 the IPPR published a powerful and persuasive report suggesting that the constitutional conventions governing the civil service, and regulating its relationship with Ministers and Parliament, are now anachronistic and inadequate. They argued that UK government would be more effective if lines of accountability were less confused, and civil servants made more responsible for clearly defined operational decisions. Click here to read a summary.
The IPPR followed this report with another in December 2006 entitled Is Whitehall Fit For Purpose? An Analysis of the Capability Reviews. (See above for more information about capability reviews.) This second IPPR report specifically recommended:
The first few days of Gordon Brown's premiership surprised most civil service watchers. He was not known, when in the Treasury, to be a fan of the upper ranks of the civil service, preferring to deal with a small number of trusted advisers, and refusing to let them communicate openly with colleagues elsewhere in Whitehall. I would not have be surprised if he were to announce something pretty dramatic in his first few days in office, perhaps along the lines of the IPPR's recommendations - above. But he in fact seemed to move towards more traditional ground, announcing a Civil Service Bill and abolishing the power of a small number of Special Advisers to give instructions to civil servants.
... can be found on the Civil Service Delivery and Reform web site.
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