Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has fought many political battles in his long career – and now he’s picking up a familiar set of themes for a reformist tussle with the civil service. Matt Ross catches up with him.
“I’m still struggling learning the new job titles. I was used to grade numbers and old nomenclature,” says Francis Maude (pictured above). A veteran of the Thatcher and Major governments, he lost his seat in ’92 and didn’t have a desk in Whitehall again until he became minister for the Cabinet Office last May. By that time, of course, the civil service had changed a fair bit – but in Maude’s view, such outward changes don’t mean that the service has fully adapted to governance in the 21st century.
“When I came back and found [the grades] called different things, I assumed it was a different structure,” he recalls. “But it’s not. It’s exactly the same structure, with different names. We need a flatter hierarchy; it’s difficult, but at some stage you have to bite the bullet.”
The aim of reducing the number of ranks in the civil service was one of eight key reforms set out by Maude in his speech at Civil Service Live (see news, p3). Experienced civil servants will have found much of the speech familiar; for while some of the reforms are quite ambitious, many closely follow existing patterns of change whose roots lie far back in the Labour administration – and even, in the professionalisation agenda and the need for more contract and project management skills, the previous Tory government.
Much of the speech, then, was not controversial: Maude’s days as an ardent Thatcherite are long behind him. Some was, however, new: Maude referred to the planned Project Management Academy, and afterwards tells CSW that “it’ll be done in partnership with one of the big universities.” While it falls under the auspices of Major Projects Authority chief David Pitchford, he adds, the academy is being championed in Whitehall by the government’s lead non-executive director Lord Browne. When Browne led BP, Maude points out, the energy firm established its own in-house academy and “all senior managers had to go through it.”
Even Maude’s aims around culture change sound very familiar: the civil service must become “pacier, less paper-driven, less imprisoned by process; more entrepreneurial and innovative; less risk-averse,” he told Civil Service Live. How will these culture changes be achieved? “I take the view that you don’t change the culture by trying to change the culture,” he replies. “You change the culture by changing behaviour, by changing expectations and changing the norms – and that gradually changes the culture.”
There is no public plan setting out how Maude’s reforms will be achieved: the non-executive directors on departmental boards will play a role in changing attitudes, he says, as will the civil service professions and “a number of senior civil servants, both from the policy stream and the other streams”. The non-execs will also help reformulate the civil service’s approach to risk, he adds.
The government handles risk very badly, Maude told the conference. “We’re too ready to take huge risk, but not ready enough to take working level, micro-risk,” he said. “We’ve had a bit of a tendency – and politicians are as much as anyone to blame for this, if not more so – to pile up macro risk: to pile policy risk on restructuring risk on financial risk on technology risk, in a way that multiplies those risks.” Departmental boards, he added, will “be looking at the risk map and will blow the whistle if the risk is piling up too high.”
On the micro-risk side, though, Maude argues that civil servants must be freer to conduct experiments and take calculated risks to test new ideas and approaches. “It’s about saying: ‘This is what we want you to achieve, but you’ve got much more latitude about how you achieve it, so try new things. We won’t kill you if they don’t all work, because they won’t all work’,” Maude says. “I believe passionately – I know – that the best organisations are those where people are encouraged to try new things, but to be very open and stop them if they’re not working, and to learn from them.”