Sir Amyas Morse: Prioritisation, prioritisation, prioritisation

The importance of prioritisation Morse believes there are too many government projects – that even the recently-reduced government portfolio of 143 major projects was ‘enormous’. Transformation projects with a large digital element posed particular challenges: ‘doing things well is much more complicated than it used to be’, involving technological as well as organisational change, and where ‘failure does much more damage to public value’. Morse wondered whether the public sector could deliver so many big projects, such as Hinkley Point C, a third runway at Heathrow, the HS2 rail link, a northern powerhouse, nuclear decommissioning, Trident renewal and the renewal of the Palace of Westminster, at the same time. The solution was ‘to lighten the load’, which meant ‘stopping doing things’, whether ‘not adding projects, or by cancelling existing ones. Prioritising is about making these choices intelligently.’ Civil servants needed to be able to say ‘no’, especially since they were being asked to deliver more projects when staff numbers have fallen by almost a fifth since 2010. The ‘heroic, go-for-it’ approach needed to be replaced with making more limited resources count. A lot of this over-commitment was driven by ministers, who ‘often have eyes too big for their stomachs’. Given these dynamics, departments were ‘unlikely to reduce these commitments under their own steam’; it would, therefore, need to be part of ‘a wider, overarching and imposed approach.’ Frameworks: the Spending Review and SDPs The National Audit Office (NAO) published two new reports showing how some of these overarching approaches could be improved. The first, on the 2015 Spending Review, showed ‘there is no overarching strategic framework for [government] spending’, a point the IfG has previously made. The second, on departments’ Single Departmental Plans (SDPs), found that they were not yet ‘a credible framework’. Associating the use of resources with the intended outcomes was positive, but it was a ‘pity’ that more parts of the plans had not been published. As we commented at the time, the public versions of the SDPs are unimpressive. Capability The NAO plan to publish a report later this year on capability, and whether the Government has a coherent plan for closing the current gap. Morse’s sense was that there was a plan, but it was not comprehensive and based on ‘growing organically’ within the Civil Service, which would take time. He highlighted a recent NAO report on digital skills that said that Government would need to find 2,800 staff with digital skills over the next five years. If all of those were permanent civil servants, it would cost £213m to fill the gap, though Morse also saw a role for the ‘marketplace’ and external expertise. There needed to be the right balance between that marketplace and having your own team that could challenge it, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to control something that was under your own name. Brexit (and Scotxit) Making all of these issues more urgent was Brexit. Morse underlined that Brexit is a job for every department, not just the new Department for Exiting the European Union (DEEU), with every one needing to take stock of its interactions with the EU and think about new systems and operations. But he also pointed out that Brexit could be an opportunity to ’change the way we manage government and plan on a holistic basis so that Ministers and civil servants can look across the whole of government activities and decide what is essential and what is not.” Brexit also brings with it the possibility of ‘Scotxit’ (a portmanteau Morse was keen to patent). If that were added to Brexit and existing major projects, ‘the system could come to a halt under its own weight. We will have set civil servants a Herculean task and set them up to fail. And none of us can afford that.’ Despite all that has happened in British politics over the past few weeks, many of the points raised at the event were about future work of the NAO: supporting select committees, adjusting to further English devolution, looking at tax reliefs, and continuing a ‘degree of intelligent correlation’ with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority. Morse said he would continue to ‘follow where the public value is’. As the 17th holder of a post founded by Gladstone in 1866, Morse noted that some senior civil servants had a ‘vampiric view’ of his role, while a few others compared it to James Bond, renewing every ten years or so. In his speech, he certainly regarded the multiplication of government projects with a view to a kill, especially with the Civil Service haunted by the spectre of Brexit.