One permanent secretary said “appearing before the PAC doesn’t change the price of fish”. Officials at HMRC and the Care Quality Commission may take a different view but it remains a fair question. Would defining better the respective roles of ministers and civil servants transform things? Will the latest civil service reforms make all...
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...
Managers then had to produce ten-point action plans on how to implement innovations that they had picked up on their secondments. This example is one amongst many of how organisations share knowledge to improve performance. Inspiration can come from unlikely sources and I find that by looking beyond your department you can often find...
Last week’s decision by the prime minister to block the appointment of David Kennedy as Permanent Secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change has rekindled the debate on the role of ministers in civil service appointments. The debate was initially sparked by the Civil Service Reform Plan, published in June 2012, which...
The 2012 Civil Service People Survey results, published today, provide the most comprehensive and up to date picture of how ‘engaged’ civil servants currently feel at work. The survey had 297,000 responses across 97 departments and agencies. It asks over 50 questions building up a detailed picture of what civil servants think about issues...
The Antipodes provide two models. In New Zealand the State Services Commission (SSC) provides recommendations to cabinet for the appointment of departmental secretaries. Its chair will have held discussions, often with the relevant minsters; it would not recommend a person with whom the minsters felt they could not work. However the final recommendation is...
