Chief secretary to the prime minister sets out plans for civil service change, arguing that the current system can't be fixed
Darren Jones has pledged to dismiss underperforming senior officials who don’t improve, promote more “doers”, and give bigger but fewer cash bonuses in a speech setting out his plans to rewire the state.
The chief secretary to the prime minister promised this morning that the government will “move fast and fix things" after years of low public sector productivity.
Other reforms he announced included bringing back the National School of Government and plans for “peacetime” taskforces to “bulldoze delivery problems”.
SCS: Hiring, firing and rewarding
Jones said hiring criteria for senior civil servants will will be altered to “promote the doers, not just the talkers”.
“This means that with time at the top of the civil service, we will have less experience of writing policy papers, but more experience at frontline delivery, innovation and from the private sector,” Jones said.
He also pledged that senior officials assessed as under-performing who fail to improve will be dismissed using a performance KPI system.
Jones said only seven in 7,000 senior civil servants were reported to be on a development plan for underperformance last year, and only two of them were dismissed for poor performance.
”Given the number of problems we face, I just fail to believe that that can be true. And so quite frankly it's ridiculous we have a system where this poor performance is just not dealt with,” he said. ”So from now on, top senior civil servants will have their performance marked against KPIs directly set by ministers, and those underdelivering will be held to account. Instead of the so-called sideways shimmy to another team or another department if you are not performing, if you fail to perform, I'm afraid you will be sacked.”
Asked by former senior civil servant Tim Leunig what number of firings would make him think he's ”achieved something worthwhile”, Jones said he wouldn't be setting a target but that he needs ”people to know there's a bit of jeopardy”.
Jones also promised changes to the bonus system for senior leaders in the civil service to ”reward the doers”.
Currently, 55% of senior civil servants receive some form of a bonus. Jones said this means bonuses are spread too thinly among officials ”for generally doing your job”.
”That's what your salary is for,” he said. ”So from now on, we will award higher but fewer bonuses to those exceptional civil servants who are delivering, innovating and going above and beyond.”
Under this change, the total bonus pot is expected to remain the same.
National School of Government returns
In the speech, Jones also announced the return of a national school for civil servants, to be called the National School of Government and Public Services.
Jones said the school will be a ”new centre of world class learning and development within the Cabinet Office” and is being paid for from existing budgets ”and crucially savings recently agreed across government to end expensive outsourced contracts training”.
He said the school will bring high quality training in-house with a proper curriculum that will boost the state capacity and give the skills needed to civil servants on technology and AI and strategic thinking ”that's needed to build the state of the future”.
”In the process, we'll not only establish the new school, but we'll save tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money too,” Jones said.
New ‘peace time’ taskforces
The chief secretary to the prime minister also announced that new “peace time” taskforces will be created across Whitehall to replicate the success of the Passport Office in tackling its backlog crisis and the Vaccine Task Force in developing and rolling out Covid jabs quickly.
Jones said those crisis teams succeeded by receiving quicker spending decisions, gaining more autonomy to make well informed but higher risk bets than would normally be tolerated, and being staffed at pace with people that were really needed, as well as getting direct access to ministers with the ability to bypass slower departmental processes.
”We will apply the Vaccine Task Force model in peacetime, not just in a crisis,” Jones said. ”These will be focused on prime ministerial priorities. And they will be tasked with bulldozing delivery obstacles, not spending time thinking up policy answers.”
Jones said the taskforces will get:
- The authority to ”move fast and fix things”
- The freedom to hire the best talent from within the civil service at pace
- Expedited approvals for short-term appointments of external expertise
- The freedom to procure with faster decision making than is normally the case.
- Freedom to ”get on with the job”, with prioritised business case approvals and increased delegated authority limits from the Treasury
- Freedom and instruction for greater risk taking
- A direct line to the top of government within No.10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, and with direct ministerial sponsorship at taskforce level ”to get the job done”
No.10 Innovation Fellows programme to be expanded
The No.10 Innovation Fellows programme will be expanded to 30 fellows to bring in more external talent.
Jones said this followed a highly competitive recruitment campaign based on problem solving and coding which had a success rate of 0.7%.
”We've secured talent from the likes of CERN, NASA, and Y Combinator, bringing in the best and brightest in data science and AI to tackle problems in a completely new way,” Jones said. ”By deploying these fellows into parts of government from justice to health, we're building in-house solutions with a data first, digital first approach.
”This is not how government has traditionally worked, but it is now how government will. Our innovation fellows will be deployed on tours of duty lasting between six to 18 months, working on a project by project basis. They will be able to break out of the normal rigid hierarchies of Whitehall. And allow us to gain from their expertise, whilst not increasing the overall size of the permanent civil service.”
Slashing bureaucratic checks
Expanding on his pledge last week to “empower” civil servants to fix problems by streamlining the number of permissions or checks needed to get things done, Jones said a new framework will be rolled out across government in April, which would mean ”fewer forms, more results, less talking, more doing”.
”From April this year, there will be fewer repeated commissions required, giving those closer to real decision making more freedom and autonomy in return for more accountability,” Jones said.
He noted that a pilot applied to HM Revenue and Customs’ plans to modernise the tech they use to crack down on tax evasion and let people file their taxes digitally cut the necessary approval processes from 40 to just two and saved an estimated three months in the delivery timeline.
We can't fix the current state – we have to build a new one
Asked why these civil service reforms will deliver when the plans of his predecessors haven't, Jones said: ”The reason I think this is different is because all the previous speeches think you can fix the current state. I'm saying you can't.”
He added: ”I agree with the public that the state is broken and that's one of the reasons why we're not able to deliver on all of the expectations of the public. So the distinction I'm making today is that I'm not interested in tweaking and patching up the current state 'cos it's not worked. What I'm interested in is building a new consensus and investing in the foundations for a new digital state. That's a very different offer to what all of my predecessors have offered the public in the past and that's the distinction I'm trying to make.”
Jones was also asked how he and the prime minister will hold ministers, permanent secretaries, and the cabinet secretary to account for delivering these reforms.
Jones said: “I think a big part of that question is on me, actually. I think maybe too often in politics, a politician will give a speech and feel like they've done the job, and then move on to the next thing. That's not how you get anything done, that's being the talker not the doer.
“So it's my job to make sure that all of the things I've announced in this speech today, I make very clear to the system, including the cabinet secretary and the permanent secretary in the Cabinet Office, [and] across government, that I'm going to keep coming back to these things and making sure that they're being implemented and delivered, and I don't get distracted by the next speech or the next political moment.”
He added: “And my great hope, and this was always my hope when I was at the Treasury as well and the reforms I made there, is that the changes I make become so blindingly obvious that whoever takes over for me just thinks of course we should be doing that.
“That is the test for me, and that's what I'm going to try and remember.”