Doing what matters with less: the Fast Stream conference 2015

Last week I was invited to take part in a ‘Dragons’ Den’ session at the Civil Service Fast Stream Conference, a gathering of over 250 fast streamers. Luckily for me, I wasn’t to be roasted or grilled – instead, I was a Welsh dragon alongside Irish Ambassador Daniel Mulhall, Greek Ambassador Konstantinos Bikas, and the Public Accounts Committee’s Richard Bacon MP. Although sadly lacking in Reggae Reggae Sauce, we dragons were given plenty of food for thought as three teams of civil servants presented their ideas for improving civil service efficiency. The winning team’s suggestions encompassed increasing efficiency and bringing in revenue, and included:

• Centralising functional expertise at the Cabinet Office, which would become both a ‘roaming consultancy’ across government and a hot-bed for growing and sharing talent
• Using government’s clout to renegotiate rents with landlords, with a view to cutting the housing benefit bill by 10% (which they said some councils had already done)
• Using gain-sharing rather than grants to profit from successful ideas
• Rationalising the estate – not only physical, but digital (such as selling off IP addresses)
• Extended the privatisation of parts of the MoD.

In the ideas presented five themes stood out for me: Cross-government working All of the teams made some reference to breaking down departmental silos and getting civil servants from different departments to work together, a problem the Institute has previously highlighted. Many said that teams should be led by the policy they were working on, not departmental structures. All of this would also involve some concentration of functional leadership in somewhere like the Cabinet Office, which would act either as an internal consultancy for government or allow ‘bids’ for experts. To a certain extent this reflects what has happened since 2010 through units such as the Major Projects Authority and the Government Digital Service. One consequence of this could be to ‘merge and destroy’ various government departments through machinery of government changes. This is not as straightforward as supposed, as we wrote in Making and Breaking Whitehall Departments in 2010 and will revisit shortly: there are costs to mergers and abolitions (such as redundancies and restructuring costs), savings may not be as high as hoped (especially if departments are already sharing office space or back-office functions) and there may be political barriers (can any Prime Minister after May 2015 afford to diminish their power of patronage through reducing the seats around the Cabinet table?) As we suggested in Whitehall Monitor 2014, some departments have already experienced heavy staff reductions and any further cuts should force Whitehall to think more radically about new ways of working. Another consequence is likely to be the changing roles of some departments – it’s important that such departments make sure they have the right capabilities and skills to deal with their new functions (as we discovered in our report on public service markets). Thinking about government assets Many suggestions revolved around rationalising the estate (which has shrunk in cost and size over this parliament) and in trying to get more value from it (some suggested using buildings for conferences and other events). Paying attention to getting more from governmental and departmental assets is welcome – there is often such a focus on the myriad controls around public spending that the management of assets and liabilities can be forgotten. Thinking about the long term A number of the proposed solutions focused on transforming government over time – such as better careers advice and building up a highly skilled workforce that would benefit government (and the private sector) over a much longer period. The focus on the long term is welcome – our Programme for Effective Government found that the public wants politicians to focus on long-term challenges and suggested some ways to address these. Focusing on outcomes The presentations discussed policy teams working across departments to ensure policies were successful and got results. As we found in our Doing Them Justice report on policy implementation and on our visit to Maryland’s Governor O’Malley in December 2014, being clear about priorities and outcomes and relentlessly pursuing them matters. Our polling also suggests that the British public values politicians who can show how they would implement their policies, with nearly two-thirds agreeing or strongly agreeing that they would be more likely to vote for them. An emphasis on policy Cross-departmental co-operation was mainly discussed through merging policy teams. Even where the Government Digital Service was mentioned, the example given was policy pages on GOV.UK. This seemed interesting in light of a discussion which has played out at the Institute for Government over the last eight months following a speech on the policy role of a permanent Civil Service by BIS permanent secretary Martin Donnelly. We published a number of responses, but the most detailed critique was a speech by GDS head Mike Bracken. In the speech, entitled ‘From policy to delivery – changing the organising principle of the Civil Service’, Bracken argued that although the binary policy/delivery argument was a false one, a modern Civil Service should be organised around delivery of services to users. The Civil Service will face considerable challenges whoever ends up in government after the May 2015 election. It’s reassuring that senior civil servants of the future are already thinking through some of the solutions and their consequences.