Emergent Ministerial Offices

A new role at the Department of Work and Pensions is currently being advertised on the Civil Service recruitment website – for a deputy director in the “Ministerial Policy and Delivery Unit”. The specification reads:

“This new role is going to be at the heart of [DWP’s] agenda. The successful candidate will support the department and ministers directly on policy development and delivery across the full range of issues that the department deals with. This is not a traditional policy role though but one which is at the leading edge of civil service reform.”

The creation of a ministerial policy and delivery unit under the director of strategy and private office is similar to a model a number of departments are adopting, seemingly at the behest of ministers. In our October report, Organising Policy we noted that this model had already been adopted in Defra and the Department for Education, and some others were thinking of following suit. Creating capacity to align the department with ministerial priorities, and quality assure and progress chase, was identified as a need in our 2011 report Making Policy Better that reflected a criticism from ministers in the previous administration that they felt departments did policy to them, rather than for them. In their initial incarnations these offices were peopled by insiders – although the heads tended to be people who had already worked closely with the secretary of state. In the DWP case the role of strategy director is combined with principal private secretary (PPS). In the Defra and DfE cases the original appointment was a move up for the former PPS. The DWP are clearly willing to appoint from outside to this role. More eyebrows have been raised about the choice of Tom Shinner as successor to head the Department for Education’s directorate of strategy, performance and analysis, a job he combines with being “senior policy adviser”. He has attracted attention not least because he is only 28 – but also because he has exceptional Govian credentials as an ex-McKinsey consultant and co-founder of Greenwich Free School (which the Economist raved about last year). So far we have seen no formal “EMOs” on the Maude model, and although the DWP appointment has many of the characteristics, it does not seem to be branded as such. The Cabinet Office guidance on EMOs makes clear that one member of the EMO would have a line into the Cabinet Office Implementation Unit as well and that, any proposal to establish an EMO for a Secretary of State must also offer greater support to junior ministers within the department from the other coalition party. In October 2013, the Civil Service Commission published new guidelines to allow exceptional recruitment into EMOs – which depart from normal civil service rules by allowing a secretary of state to personally appoint civil servants into his or her office for a fixed term of up to five years “without a fair and open competition”, although the permanent secretary must agree that anyone appointed in this way has relevant expertise. But what recent developments show is that ministers don’t have to wait for the centre to reshape the support they receive. And if you want to be part of this wave of civil service reform, the salary on offer is c. £80K and the closing date is 10 a.m. on 10 March.