An internal campaign to fill the newly-created role of permanent secretary of the Office for National Statistics has been launched.
A statement from the Cabinet Office and the ONS said that only civil servants who are permanent secretaries or directors general are eligible to “express interest” in the position.
The campaign – which is open to applications until 21 July – follows Sir Robert Devereux’s damning review into failings at the ONS, which was published at the end of last month.
Devereux said the “deep-seated issues” at ONS meant a new leadership structure was required – principally the separation of the roles of national statistician and permanent secretary.
Devereux is a former perm sec at the Department for Transport and the Department for Work and Pensions. He said that most of the ONS’s problems with core statistics in recent months and years were the result of “inadequacies” in the way it “made decisions, planned and budgeted, and managed risks”.
Devereux recommended the new permanent secretary should be “someone with a track record of leading an operational business, indeed of ‘turning round’ such an organisation”. His report suggested that the standalone national statistician role should have similarities to the position of chief medical officer because of its focus on providing advice to government and professional leadership through the Government Statistical Service.
Devereux said it was possible that the separation of ONS perm sec and national statistician could be a “temporary” arrangement, but seemingly not a short-term move.
He suggested recombining the roles would require “more effort to develop evident talent within the Government Statistical Service” and for the ONS’s core business to have been brought “back on a more stable footing”.
Former ONS perm sec and national statistician Prof Sir Ian Diamond stepped down from the role at the end of May for health reasons. Emma Rourke is currently interim national statistician.
The UK Statistics Authority and the Cabinet Office, which have oversight for the ONS, immediately accepted Devereux’s recommendation for leadership change.
The Cabinet Office said yesterday that an additional permanent secretary would be appointed “temporarily” to lead the day-to-day operations of the ONS, with responsibility for “restoring much needed trust and confidence” in the organisation.
Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden said: “The Devereux Review findings require immediate action to address the challenges identified and rapidly restore confidence in the core statistics produced by ONS that underpin decision-making. New leadership is critical to delivering this outcome and I welcome the launch of that process.”
The Cabinet Office added that work is also under way to recruit the new standalone national statistician, with a “search partner” expected to be appointed shortly.
UKSA chair Sir Robert Chote, meanwhile, is due to leave his post in the coming weeks to become president of Trinity College, Oxford. A campaign to appoint his successor is due to start shortly.
MP deluged with responses from ONS staff
Members of parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee are currently conducting an inquiry into the work of the UKSA – with particular attention being paid to failings at the ONS.
Last week, Rourke told an evidence session the organisation had been lacking a “culture of challenge” and was having to rebuild its capability to listen to staff concerns and act on them from the top down.
Her comments followed Devereux’s observation that many of the witnesses he spoke to reported “a reluctance, at senior levels, to hear and act on difficult news” at the ONS.
Committee chair Simon Hoare said Diamond appeared to have run the ONS “as a hybrid of a Medici Prince and [Bond villain] Blofeld” – and had “seemed unwilling or uninterested in anything anyone had to say”.
Rourke, Chote and head of the Office for Statistics Regulation Ed Humpherson returned to PACAC this morning to continue their evidence.
Hoare started proceedings by telling the session he had received “a large number” of communications from ONS staff in recent days, all echoing concerns expressed at last week’s hearing.
“I think its good that they’ve felt able to comment through to the committee via me. That is, of itself, encouraging,” he said. “But it’s worrying that across the organisation lots of people are saying ‘yes there were problems – there still are problems’, ‘the HR function is wobbly’, ‘complaints and suggestions disappear into the ether’, ‘the organisation is not being run professionally’.”
Hoare added: “I’m told it’s the first time a meeting of PACAC has effectively gone viral.”
Organisation ’failed to recognise challenges’
Humpherson told this morning’s session that while the ONS did really good work, it had “suffered a reputational hit” in relation to the Labour Market Survey and other aspects of its core output.
Mirroring observations in the Devereux Review, Humpherson said his underderstanding was that the demands of Covid-19 had jolted the ONS out of its “traditional” operating model as a “production-focused organisation producing statistics”.
“Along came the pandemic and it was required to be very much more immediate and responsive,” he said. “It produced some new statistics on things like economic activity – called the real-time economic indicators – and a world-leading survey of Covid infection.
“And that agility, that responsiveness – in a sense – gave the organisation the sense that it could do more and do differently.”
Humpherson said driving the ONS to transform was a focus of former national statistician Diamond.
However, he added: “Once the energy of the pandemic subsided, the gap between the ambition and the capability became increasingly exposed.
“Unfortunately, the desire to demonstrate progress, ambition, radicalism – ‘ambitious’ and ‘radical’ were two of the values the ONS had, two of the principles of its strategy – I think it became hard for the organisation to recognise and acknowledge the accumulation of problems.
“There’s a sort of human tragedy here that an organisation that thrived and was led with huge dynamism then wasn’t able to recognise that it was facing challenges.”