Darren Jones, chief secretary to the prime minister and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster had his big moment yesterday, with a speech hosted at the global mapping company what3words, to give it a techy vibe.
For those still unfamiliar with their product, they’ve mapped the world in 2m squares and given each one a three-word designation. Their HQ in west London, behind some flats and under a flyover felt designed to test the limits of the system, which everyone attending was wisely advised to use to find it.
Surprisingly their location is designated by ///filled.count.soap. That got me thinking. Surely if you could decide which three words to use then you’d use ///what.three.words as the location of the HQ for what3words? They’ve missed a trick here. They could monetise this by allowing companies to designate their own location. So, FDA HQ could be ///fastest.growing.union. Sadly, I never got the chance to use my practised elevator pitch of the idea to the CEO, inevitably dressed like Steve Jobs, who introduced the minister. My IPO application is in the post though.
The speech, titled Move fast and fix things, modernising Whitehall to deliver for Britain, contained many of the themes civil servants will be familiar with – including pace and delivery. The disrupters are at the door and if this government can’t show that they are able to address the legitimate concerns of the voters in making things better, then there’s a roll of the electoral dice coming like no other.
Much of the speech closely followed the tone of Wes Streeting’s widely reported on speech at Institute for Government last week. Streeting attacked the “excuses culture” and those who blame Whitehall for failures of government. Jones’s speech yesterday acknowledged that the “public, politicians and civil servants are all frustrated by the pace of change” and speaking directly about civil servants, that “too often they have been scapegoats for political failure.” He addressed this point again during questions when asked about Michael Gove’s now infamous reference to “the blob”. That was, he said with a cheeky smile, because he wasn’t a very good minister.
On substance he announced the widely trailed re-introduction of the National School for Government and Public Service. Details are still to be published and I’m sure they won’t be buying a campus by a golf course in leafy Berkshire. A real sense though that the government want greater capacity and capability in-house. Combining the disparate spend on learning and development across the service in a more efficient and coordinated way is a no brainer. The National School for Government’s demise under the coalition government was nothing short of an act of vandalism driven by short-term budget cutting and a hair-shirt mentality.
There was a plan to reduce levels of bureaucracy and extolling the success of trials in delayering decision making. It’s an issue that frustrates many a civil servant and it’s not always clear why it happens, but if they can crack it then it should really help with pace.
Like many ministers, they ponder why something like the Vaccine Taskforce can’t be replicated to quickly solve thorny problems. Their model to replicate it is intended to focus resource and political capital on a problem to solve it quickly, encouraging more agile use of recruitment on short-term appointments with key skills and direct ministerial sponsorship.
The Vaccine Taskforce was a very public success, delivering a world leading outcome in record time, but it did have almost unlimited resource and political will. At a time of national crisis, those things are easier to come by. The challenge for government is encapsulating those methods when it is not in crisis, when there are competing priorities for money and political capital, and the risks of failure come with political consequences.
Jones had earlier acknowledged that the public and private sectors are different. I referenced this in my question to him. Companies fail in private but government fails in public. Civil servants have previously heard ministers publicly express their appetite for risk, but then privately blame the civil service when the going gets tough. How will Jones convince civil servants that this time it’s different?
He was convincing in his own appetite for those political risks, but also said that a minister from the Cabinet Office will be directly responsible for each taskforce and they have to own those risks together. Time will tell, but at least it’s a government and minister acknowledging those challenges head on and publicly.
Jones and Streeting’s political analysis that blaming the civil service only plays in to the hands of Reform UK, as well as the more detailed and thoughtful conclusions on how to get the system working better, suggests we’ll see less of the unjustified criticism of the civil service.
There was, inevitably, the focus on carrots and sticks. Ministers can’t help themselves but focus on performance management and bonuses. It’s not to say it isn’t an issue that needs attention or reform, but ultimately it gets far more bandwidth than it deserves and feels like a bit of red meat being thrown to sections of the press. We’ve still to see the details on changes to performance bonuses for the SCS, but it looks like the same pot but with fewer, and, therefore larger rewards.
Jones said he cannot believe that out of over 6,600 senior civil servants, only seven were on performance improvement plans and only two were sacked. He was asked one of those questions that when you hear it, you wish you were clever enough to come up with it yourself. If two was too few, what was the right number of sackings? His response demonstrates that he is indeed a thoughtful minister. There was no number, he wants civil servants to succeed and be supported, but ultimately poor performance needs to be addressed. The right answer and said with the same wry smile.