News

Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood and Sir John Chilcot have reached an agreement on the publication of classified memos from the lead up to Britain’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to newspaper reports.

The government is to hand additional powers to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to oversee departments’ contract management plans and “step in” when it sees fit, after it accepted all recommendations made by chief procurement officer Bill Crothers in a review of major government contracts.

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The government is to strengthen the finance profession and hand its leadership to the Treasury's director-general of public spending, after it accepted recommendations by Treasury second permanent secretary Sharon White.

Mark Lowcock

Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development

Paul Leinster faces growing threats, a declining budget, and objectives that don’t always line up – but the Environment Agency chief seems thoroughly at home. Matt Ross meets a man coping with complexity

Paul Leinster faces growing threats, a declining budget, and objectives that don’t always line up – but the Environment Agency chief seems thoroughly at home. Matt Ross meets a man coping with complexity

Recruitment to the public sector looks set to flatline in the next three months, according to the Manpower Employment Outlook survey published on Tuesday, after rising earlier this year.

Home Affairs committee chair Keith Vaz has thanked Home Office permanent secretary Mark Sedwill for his “extremely positive” interventions to help the committee secure information from his department, but raised concerns about officials’ willingness to supply data in some of the department’s directorates.

Governments must ensure that growth is shared by all citizens and that policy outcomes seem fair, otherwise they risk facing mass protests, leading academics warned this week.

Making public servants more accountable and paying them for results reduces both their motivation and the quality of their work, leading academics have warned.

Departments are submitting key documents to the Public Accounts Committee at the last minute, and this is “just not satisfactory”, PAC chair Margaret Hodge has told CSW.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) is the only department that hasn’t published information setting out its progress against the government’s digital strategy.

Lord Levene, the former MoD permanent secretary who advises government on defence reform, has mapped out a way forward for Defence Equipment & Support. Meanwhile, defence secretary Philip Hammond this week scrapped the ‘Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated’ (GoCo) model of defence procurement reform.

The Commons’ Liaison Committee is today calling for an independent commission into the future of the civil service, and in a report published today raises concerns that the government’s reform plan is not based on a “strategic consideration of the future of the civil service”.

The government’s vision for local growth, as set out in its 2010 white paper ‘Local growth: realising every place’s potential’, has “not been translated into measurable objectives against which to judge achievement and hold departments to account”, a report by the National Audit Office has warned.

Universal Credit (UC) director general Howard Shiplee has blamed a “mantra of digital by default” for some of the problems in the government’s flagship programme.

Mark Lowcock, permanent secretary of the Department for International Development, this week apologised to Parliament after one of DfID’s programmes failed to make use of millions of pounds.

The education department has “achieved clear progress on a policy priority” by opening 174 free schools since 2010, and has used new approaches to deliver “much lower average construction costs than in previous programmes,” according to a National Audit Office report published today.

The Institute for Government (IfG) has called on the government to provide greater openness about the reasons for permanent secretary departures and moves in a report on accountability in Whitehall.

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The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is creating a digital academy to develop the skills to use a range of new technologies, the department’s chief information officer Andy Nelson, has said.

Departments are set to lose £1bn out of their combined contingency reserves this year and will have their budgets cut by a total of £1bn each year until 2015-16, chancellor George Osborne has announced in his Autumn Statement today.