Archive for June, 2012

Last week, at the Institute for Government (IfG), the trinity of reform leaders Sir Jeremy Heywood, Sir Bob Kerslake and the Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude set out their thinking behind the reform plan. Our first test asked whether the plan set a direction for reform that is relevant to what most...

Labour will support and indeed welcome sensible reforms such as improving management culture, information systems and skills development, but the point of reform after all is to make something better than it was before and until we see more detail it is not clear how far these reforms will move us forward. Let’s be...

First, relax – it’s not only government that experiences IT problems and, indeed, the fact that government keeps big, complex, legacy systems running in areas such as taxes and benefits is in itself quite an achievement. Second, IT matters. When things go wrong with big systems, people’s lives are affected: and when things go...

SpAds hold an anomalous position in government departments, between their minister and the civil service. Their roles can be very demanding and crucial as a buffer against the politicisation of the civil service. They play a vital part in the functioning of modern government. But they don’t have any management structure as most employees...

“It never really works, does it? Whatever they say, leaving is always bad for your career”. The wise words of former cabinet secretary Lord Butler to me at a party after I had returned to the civil service after a stint of six years working at BP – which I had naively thought might...

The IfG has posed the over-arching question of what the Civil Service is for and talks about the importance of positive reasons to change beyond the immediate pressures of cost savings. This is quite right in principle, but in practice, the experience of our 34,000 members in the Civil Service and its agencies over...

For starters, Moran explained, the Australian economy is doing really rather well – at least on conventional measures – with growth of 4%+ and a looming budget surplus. Nonetheless, the population was still grumpy and distrustful of its politicians and official policy makers, despite a deep and enduring attachment to state solutions. First, the...

The scheme is aimed at a real and widely recognised problem (even if many people dispute the statistics the government is basing it on). Government spends huge sums of money providing different interventions to the same families – when an individual service, more tailored to a family’s specific needs could be much more cost...