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	<title>Blog</title>
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	<description>Institute for Government Blog</description>
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		<title>Government reshuffles</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/4043/government-reshuffles/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/4043/government-reshuffles/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:11:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Jill Rutter</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[A more effective Whitehall]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=4043</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There is a lot of change in Whitehall. The parting of the old guard means that over half of the permanent secretaries in charge of departments were not in post before the election.  The civil service has a new and differently organised leadership (though the merger of the Permanent Secretary at No.10 post with the Cabinet Secretary means there is more continuity than first appears).   At the next rung down, the prime minister’s top foreign affairs team has just changed completely: he has his second National Security Adviser since the election, a post that did not exist before, a new EU/global affairs adviser and a permanent replacement for Alex Allan as Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee has yet to be announced. It is difficult to get a real handle on the extent of churn below the top.  Our latest Whitehall Monitor tracks figures from departments – but that only looks at people moving in and out of departments.  But it shows enormous turnover at the centre with the Cabinet Office and the Treasury leading the way in losing people with turnover rates of 25-30%. This is less unexpected in the Cabinet Office, where many staff come in from departments [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>Consultation on steroids &#8211; or genuine co-creation?</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/4024/consultation-on-steroids-%e2%80%93-or-genuine-co-creation/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/4024/consultation-on-steroids-%e2%80%93-or-genuine-co-creation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:42:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Chris Yiu</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Better policy making]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=4024</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Asking the general public for their views isn&#8217;t normally top of the to-do list in Whitehall. Of course it does have to happen, and there is a time-honoured process: green papers, white papers, calls for evidence and 12-week windows to respond. Times are, however, changing. Back in 2006, the then Labour administration launched the first iteration of the government e-petitions portal. Since coming to power the coalition has gone a step further, inviting the public to participate first in Your Freedom, then the Spending Challenge, and now the Red Tape Challenge. People seem willing to have a go: each of these initiatives has generated tens of thousands of responses. So far, so good. A crowd is definitely involved. But are we really crowdsourcing? The classic applications of crowdsourcing are about pulling together distributed knowledge. Sometimes, taking the average of lots of people&#8217;s (unbiased) estimates is a good way to guess an unknown quantity. Other times, lots of people hold different pieces of a puzzle and, with the right collaboration tools, can assemble something wonderful – think Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. Other times still, it&#8217;s worth giving lots of people the same problem to solve and seeing who does best. Foldit is [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Poor benchmarking data threatens government IT overhaul</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/4017/poor-benchmarking-data-threatens-government-it-overhaul/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/4017/poor-benchmarking-data-threatens-government-it-overhaul/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:02:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gash</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[New models of governance and public services]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=4017</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The call is certainly justified. Without high quality data on what departments are delivering and for how much it will be impossible to know whether Government’s ICT strategy is making any difference and few in the commentariat will be reassured that government has put behind it the calamities of the past. Fortunately, there are examples from which the UK can learn should it want to up its game and demonstrate improvement. Yesterday, the Australian Government released its ICT expenditure report. The detailed department by department data on which it is based provides insight on various splits of expenditure, including splits between hardware, software, outsourced and in-house expenditure and splits of expenditure by ‘service tower’, which allows the Australian Government to report that “the Applications area accounts for over a third of ICT expenditure”. The data even shows ‘the increase in Unix-based services”. Headcount information is provided, split by area of activity, and the overall experience of reviewing the neat spreadsheets provides a sense of reassurance. Australia is not an isolated example of success in this area. The new U.S. IT dashboard arguably has still more bells and whistles, with snappy graphics to tell the story of IT efficiency. The difference [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Bank outsourcing</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3996/bank-outsourcing/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3996/bank-outsourcing/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:54:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Sam Sims</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Better policy making]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=3996</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In June 2010 the Chancellor set up the Banking Commission, with Sir John Vickers as Chair, to solve the &#8216;too big to fail/too big to save&#8217; conundrum while taking into account the need to maintain economic growth. They were given just over a year to prepare their report. The complex nature of banking regulation and the difficult issue of how to manage future risk, without crippling the banking sector and thus the economy, meant that neither the Liberal Democrat nor the Conservative ministers believed they had a complete answer. Both were genuinely looking to the commission to clarify the issues and provide options for reform. This echoes the experience with the Pensions Commission. Tony Blair really was looking to the commission for answers to some complicated questions, as well as to help navigate around Treasury roadblocks. The second consequence was that it made it impossible for the five commissioners to believe that they had the answer to the question before the process began, despite the commissioners being extremely well informed and having strong opinions. They needed to engage in a genuine common learning process. This allowed the commission to come to a unified view on the way forward. This also [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Auditing the future</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3985/auditing-the-future/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3985/auditing-the-future/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:40:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gash</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[New models of governance and public services]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=3985</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Today, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report assessing the value for money of the Government’s new Work Programme. The programme, which pays private and voluntary sector providers for getting the long-term unemployed back into work, was rolled out across the country in June 2011, just a year after the Coalition Government took office. The NAO was impressed by the swiftness of the programme’s implementation and the way in which the department had learned from its previous experience of commissioning employment services. But the Audit Office is worried – and has laid a number of charges at the door of Department of Work and Pensions ministers and civil servants. The first few read like classic change management difficulties of the type that the NAO would usually report on: no alternative policies were considered; IT systems were not fully ready for implementation; the department has been forced to pay off providers who were delivering existing contracts, even when these same providers will continue to provide services under the new arrangements. But it’s the Audit Office’s foray into the realm of prediction that has really upset ministers. As the DWP’s minister of State Chris Grayling put it, &#8220;I&#8217;m really disappointed that [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>When is Whitehall not like a business?</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3972/when-is-whitehall-not-like-a-business/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3972/when-is-whitehall-not-like-a-business/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:27:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Page</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Parliament and the political process]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=3972</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[PASC has been running a fascinating series of inquiries focusing on leadership and change in Government, covering Civil Service reform, the role of the new Head of the Civil Service and a call for shrinking the number of ministers. Yesterday PASC published the Government’s response. There is some common ground and several valuable ‘wins’ for PASC: Government has accepted in principle that the size of the executive should be reviewed when the Commons shrinks in 2015 and Francis Maude has set out a high level vision for Civil Service reform. Lying underneath, however, is an absorbing tussle between two fundamentally different views on leading change and how these apply to Whitehall as it implements a truly historic programme of cuts and reforms. PASC is calling for “a comprehensive change programme” led by Government, with elements overseen and enforced by Cabinet Office. PASC’s approach reflects a leaning towards the ‘expert’ view contained in much of the business literature on change: have clear leadership from the centre, be explicit about the change being sought and what the new organisation looks like. Government, on the other hand, rejects this approach, so for example it has “no plans to impose central direction from the [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>The end of the phoney war</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3960/the-end-of-the-phony-war/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3960/the-end-of-the-phony-war/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:51:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Akash Paun</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Parliament and the political process]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=3960</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The battle over Scotland’s constitutional future stepped up a gear or three this week, with the UK Government declaring that a “legal, fair and decisive” independence referendum can be held only with explicit backing from Westminster. The SNP, unsurprisingly, demurs. A legal referendum? The Scotland Act of 1998 makes plain that the Scottish Parliament cannot pass legislation that “relates to” a list of specified exemptions (the “reserved matters”), including “the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England”. The Whitehall interpretation – set out in a new consultation paper – is that even a non-binding referendum asking voters about independence would “relate to” this reserved matter. Therefore, an Act of the Scottish Parliament authorising such a poll would be unlawful. Included in the UK government’s consultation paper is a draft piece of legislation that would place an independence referendum held by the Scottish Parliament on an unambiguous legal footing. But with a number of strings attached, which the SNP rejects. The SNP claims that holding a merely “advisory” referendum asking, for instance, whether “the powers of the Scottish Parliament should be extended to enable independence to be achieved” (the wording in the SNP’s 2010 draft bill) would not be unlawful [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>New Year&#8217;s resolution: Make policy better</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3949/new-years-resolution-make-policy-better/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3949/new-years-resolution-make-policy-better/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:32:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Jill Rutter</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Better policy making]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=3949</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An optimistic start for the New Year – policies can work and governments can make a difference. Not a headline you would expect to see – but the subject of our new report. Success means that policies survive changes of government, become part of the status quo and the starting point for new policy. Over the past fifty years, government policy has helped reshape attitudes to smoking – such that in 2007 a ban on smoking in public places could be imposed with widespread popular support. We have seen a decisive shift in the way Scotland and Wales are governed through successful devolution – so successful in fact that the impetus is now for more devolution rather than less. The redrawing of the boundaries of the state under Mrs Thatcher made privatisation into a word and a successful UK export: now the idea that the telephone system would be run by the state and you would have to be on a waiting list for a phone – as opposed to a queue in a mobile phone shop – is unthinkable. There is now broad acceptance from both “sides” of industry that a minimum wage not only protects workers but also [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3949/new-years-resolution-make-policy-better/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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		<title>Breaking the granite ceiling</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3946/breaking-the-granite-ceiling/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3946/breaking-the-granite-ceiling/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:29:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Jill Rutter</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[A more effective Whitehall]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=3946</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Departing Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell likes to claim one of his big achievements was getting to a point where 50% of major government departments were headed by women. But in his previous job as Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, he was much less successful in getting women into the most senior ranks. Indeed the Treasury’s record on appointing women as DGs and permanent secretaries has been lamentable. While there have been women in charge of Customs (Dame Valerie Strachan in the late 1980s) and HMRC (Dame Lesley Strathie and now Lin Homer) there has been no woman in a mainstream policy DG role in the Treasury since Rachel Lomax left for the Cabinet Office in 1994. And before that the only woman ever to have a role on the Treasury management board (or Policy Coordinating Committee as it was then known) was Dame Anne Mueller whom the Treasury inherited by accident when the Office for Management and Personnel (the rump civil service department) was absorbed by the Treasury in 1987. She was there until 1990. Dame Mary Keegan was on the Board more recently – but as head of the government finance profession rather than in one of the [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
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		<title>The big show (still) in town</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3943/the-big-show-still-in-town/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3943/the-big-show-still-in-town/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:00:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gash</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[New models of governance and public services]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=3943</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The phrase may not have got a mention in July&#8217;s Open Public Services white paper but the public administration select committee (Pasc) today released its second report on the subject, suggesting that those in Parliament at least still take the idea seriously. To recap, there are three big ideas underpinning the concept, according to government speeches and documents: first, a focus on enabling civic action; second, a focus on &#8216;empowering communities&#8217;; and, third, the opening up of public services, allowing a wider range of organisations (private and voluntary) to deliver services. As in its previous report on the subject, Pasc is demanding more clarity about exactly what the Big Society is trying to achieve and a clearer roadmap on how to get there. Rightly, the committee calls for government to demonstrate its commitment to involving a wider range of smaller organisations, and particularly charities, in public service delivery. They highlight particularly the concern that if those awarding government contracts focus on cost rather than effectiveness then smaller providers (who may lack economies of scale but might offer advantages such as innovation or better quality relationships with service users) will lose out. But some of the solutions that Pasc offers to [...]]]></description>
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