A more effective Whitehall

The National Archives have today shed more light on the UK’s sometimes murky intelligence history with the release of further files from the FCO’s Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department (PUSD) and from the files of the Cabinet Secretary. The latest releases include juicy stories on the bugging of Edward VIII, an excellent account of a drunken...

Property moves seeing smaller departments leave their current homes and squeeze into the buildings of bigger departments have already been widely publicised, including DCMS having moved in with HM Revenue and Customs and DCLG preparing to join the Home Office. What is largely unreported however is the effect of such moves on the morale...

David Miliband headed the No.10 Policy Unit before he went off to be MP for South Shields and then start his rise to Foreign Secretary. Andrew Adonis headed the No.10 Policy Unit before moving as a Lords Minister to the Department of Education and becoming the most enthusiastic ever Transport Secretary. In an earlier...

Sir Bob at the Public Accounts Committee last Monday reiterated that if the Civil Service is going to become more skilled, less bureaucratic and more unified ‘you have to change what you define as a department’. This may sound innocuous, even offhand, but it fits within a consistent direction of travel that the Head...

Awaiting the minister in the department will be a private office, a ‘life support machine’ that sustains each minister from the minute they arrive. This small group of officials plays a key role in helping each minister to carry out his or her role effectively, yet its own basic structure and role is rarely...

In 1994 John Major’s Government published The Civil Service: Continuity and Change, a white paper taking stock of the Service after a period of significant upheaval. It is a title that could have been used at any point in the last 150 years. The story of our public administration is precisely one of the...

The government has a potential treasure trove of previous experience at its disposal if it chooses to use it – whether on the role of the Cabinet Office in trying to improve efficiency (Thatcher), ministerial v Treasury relations over public spending cuts (see past governments ad nauseum), or the implications of military intervention abroad...

Interchange sounds great in theory. But our politics, and media, doesn’t like the ‘revolving door’. And the civil service has a cultural problem with it too; it feels that civil servants who leave have betrayed the public ethos, and outsiders who have come remain that, outsiders. I am parti pris on this having left...

After a decade of steadily rising budgets, the 2010 Spending Review set out spending cuts on a scale greater than anything since demobilisation. Still relatively fresh in post, ministers were generally ready and willing to cut public spending dramatically in their departments as a contribution to cutting the deficit. Some went further, wanting to...

But, as we know, it was a huge success. Of course, that is first of all down to the athletes and then to the volunteers, who made it such a welcoming and exhilarating event to be part of. But just as critical to success was an unseen army – many of them civil or...