COMMENT
© mrgarethm Civil Service Reform – a progress update
PSE’s Sam McCaffrey was in Whitehall for the launch of the latest update on Civil Service reform, with Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude MP.
In
June 2012 David Cameron wrote in the foreword to the government’s Civil Service
Reform Plan that it was about “harnessing the world-beating talents of those who work in our Civil Service and making sure they aren’t held back by a system that can be sclerotic and slow”.
A year after that, the “sclerotic” system proved just how difficult it would be to change. In a 2013 report looking at how the past year had gone, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and the then head of the Civil Service, Sir Bob Kerslake, found that reform was being held up by some of the very things that they were trying to change: weakness in capability and lack of clear accountability and delivery discipline.
After that frank self-appraisal of how they had failed to deliver change, the Whitehall leaders set out with a renewed purpose to push the reforms over the last year. This month they released their second year report card: so how have they done?
In the 2013 report, of the 18 areas identified for reform, only six were found to be on track. Four
areas, such as creating a modern workplace and increasing private sector secondments, were found to be significantly off-track or delayed.
Happily, the latest update flags only two areas as seriously delayed (evidence-based policy-making and upgrading government IT equipment), and many of the priorities outlined in the ‘One Year On’ 2013 report have been implemented.
Real progress
PSE attended the Whitehall briefing with Maude and Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to get the latest update. Maude said the pace of reform has quickened and that real progress has been made.
“We saved over £14bn in efficiencies in the previous year. Our digital exemplars are now live and there are many other [area] where we have made real progress,” he said.
The 2013 commitment to develop a model for conducting policy audits has not yet been done. However in the new report they ‘recommit’ to this goal, saying that a “rigorous policy audit framework” will be agreed and a number of actual policy audits will be completed by Christmas.
Sir Jeremy Heywood, co-author of the new report, also suggested that the approach being taken on digital development could be applied to policy making.
“The iterative, agile methodology of testing things out and getting feedback applies as much to policy development as it does to delivering services,” he said.
18 | public sector executive Oct/Nov 14
He went on to suggest that this could be one of the most important ways to cut costs over the next five years. Earlier this year 45% of civil servants identified “better computer equipment” as the single thing that would most improve the way they work, but progress has been slow.
Maude and Heywood say in this new report: “Progress on replacing IT equipment is at a slower pace than we would like; the cost of exiting legacy contracts however means we have had to take hard decisions about how quickly we can deliver change.”
‘I’m a big fan of outsourcing’ Maude expanded on this at the briefing.
“I’m a big fan of outsourcing in general,” he said. “But actually we outsource too much IT in too big and impenetrable blocks and one of the things we’re doing is insourcing and bringing back some IT and digital.”
The ultimate aim of upgrading IT is to provide
© Rob Thom
© AP Photo Kirsty Wiggleswort
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76