Change has been coming thick and fast in Whitehall recently. A new cabinet secretary. A new prime minister. Another machinery of government change, and the promise of devolution on the horizon.
I'll tell you what hasn't changed. Security vetting is still a slow and painful process, needlessly holding up appointments and deterring external applicants. The Civil Service Pension Scheme transition is still on fire. And the shared services agenda rumbles on, a gathering storm that threatens to crush the soul out of any civil servant unwise enough to require corporate support during a bedding-in period that I assume will run only slightly shorter than the lifecycle of a red dwarf.
In a way it is comforting to know that however much changes, some things, like subpar corporate support for civil servants, stay the same.
And yet.
The creation of the OneGov Delivery Agency, in the recent machinery of government changes, hints that Whitehall's new reform zeal may finally extend to the parts of the system it usually overlooks: its own internal operations.
By one reading, this is an astute move. Splitting the parts of the Cabinet Office that provide corporate services to civil servants from those that exist to implement the will of the prime minister and cabinet goes some way to easing the identity crisis that has gripped the department in recent years.
There is another reading. Details on the exact remit are light, but we know OneGov will take on vetting, the Government Recruitment Service, civil service pensions and the shared services agenda, alongside other duties such as the Government Car Service. These are not, to put it gently, the most uncontroversial corners of the Cabinet Office. Hiving off the most scandal-prone elements of the portfolio conveniently puts another layer of insulation between Cabinet Office ministers and senior officials – weary of appearing before select committees to account for the failures of their predecessors – and the parts of the portfolio most likely to generate the next one.
Having spent part of my career trying to reform the back-office functions of Whitehall, and what felt like the rest of it trying to secure support from them, I sincerely hope this is a genuine attempt to reform a key piece of the institutional infrastructure.
The OneGov Delivery Agency could play a genuinely vital role: stabilising the troubled parts of the Cabinet Office while providing the dedicated leadership needed to build services that actually support the working lives of ordinary civil servants. But to realise that opportunity, and navigate a rocky landscape, it should consider the following.
First, it needs to clarify which functions it holds and the role it plays across Whitehall.
At the time of writing there is still little detail on exactly which functions will sit inside the new organisation. Press releases reference Shared Services and the Government Recruitment Service making the move, but not the Government People Group, which previously housed them and holds policy and strategy responsibility over them. Likewise, UK Security Vetting has made the move but the Government Security Function has stayed put. The logic seems to be to strip out the operational elements of the corporate functions while keeping the strategic elements housed in the Cabinet Office.
This split needs thinking about. It is hard to see the benefit in erecting an institutional wall between bodies like GPG and the Security Function – headed by directors general, well understood and bedded in across Whitehall – and their own operational arms, particularly when those arms have long been considered troubled parts of the system. The sympathetic reading is that these functions are now housed in an organisation with the dedicated leadership capacity to reform them. But UK Security Vetting was brought into the Cabinet Office, close to the Government Security Function, precisely because its poor performance was thought to stem from years languishing without strategic oversight.
Before OneGov settles its structure, then, it should think hard about whether splitting the operational and strategic halves of corporate functions is the right call. The history of civil service operations suggests it is not.
Second, it must make itself accountable to the departments it serves, with its continued existence contingent on their satisfaction.
Many of the functions moving into OneGov are, in effect, monopoly providers to the rest of the civil service. A department cannot seek security vetting from anyone else, nor is there any other part of the system running the pension transition. That monopoly model is one of the main reasons these services have become so troubled, and customer satisfaction so low: when your customers cannot go elsewhere, there is little to force you to improve.
The restructure is a chance to fix that, by building in a feedback loop that makes customer satisfaction a condition of the organisation's survival. There are three broad ways to do it, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is to give the customer a clearer voice, above all through transparent performance standards, published department by department, so the rest of the system can see who is being served well and who isn't. The second is to build in institutional rewards and penalties: funding that flexes with satisfaction, or senior leader tenure made contingent on service quality. The third, and most radical, is to create the genuine possibility of institutional failure, by granting departments the right to bring a service back in house, or to seek competitive tenders from the market, if quality stays poor. These are not mechanisms you see much in Whitehall. Perhaps it is time to try them.
Third, it needs to future-proof a set of functions that seem ripe for disruption.
OneGov should take a clear-eyed look at what it has inherited and ask which of its capabilities are actually fit for the future, let alone the present. Recent NAO audits suggest the shared services agenda is struggling, and unlikely to offer value for money on its current trajectory.
While other parts of the portfolio also need considering, shared services is particularly in need of scrutiny. It is a hugely expensive and disruptive transformation, and its whole rationale rests on economies of scale: pool users together and the per-head cost of running basic services like payroll, HR and finance comes down.
But we now have a PM who seems set on shrinking Whitehall by devolving key responsibilities to other levels of government. Given that the bulk of the civil service workforce sits in operational delivery, in the very organisations that may find themselves remodelled and downsized, the value-for-money case for shared services begins to diminish just as the model can least afford it.
One option would be simply to reduce the scope of shared services. A better one, serving public servants and citizens alike, would be for OneGov to look to its own name for inspiration. Public servants and the institutions that employ them will still need payroll and vetting, whoever they end up working for. Perhaps OneGov can best protect its long-term future by leaning into the devolved settlement now taking shape, and offering its services to the very organisations that may suddenly find themselves needing to hire and manage burgeoning workforces of their own.
It is too early to say whether the OneGov Delivery Agency is a transformative piece of institutional architecture or a damage limitation exercise. Historically, the latter reading would likely have been the more plausible. But we have a prime minister whose vision for the state is becoming clearer, a cabinet secretary eager to lead, and an energy about Whitehall which suggests reform is now something civil servants do, rather than something done to them. The OneGov Delivery Agency could be the vehicle for bringing that more active leadership to the most troubled elements of the civil service estate.
Joe Martin is a former civil servant with experience in Whitehall reform at the Cabinet Office, as well as in policy and transformation roles across DfT, HMRC, the Home Office and DfE. All views expressed in this article are his own