HR

Civil servants across the Department of Health (DH) will be sent on regular work placements at hospitals, care homes and charities, in a bid to give them frontline experience of the NHS.

Hilary Reynolds will step down as programme director for Universal Credit, after it emerged that new UC chief executive David Pitchford will take on her duties. She will move to another role in the department.

Former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell used the second part of his Radio 4 documentary on Tuesday, In Defence of Bureaucracy, to call for the retention of an impartial civil service, and to argue that the “occasionally intemperate tone” taken by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has “not helped” the “unusually strained” relationship between ministers and civil servants.

The PCS union has called a three-month programme of industrial action, starting with a one-day strike on Budget day: 20 March.

Whitehall experts have backed former cabinet secretary Lord Butler in calling for all departments to appoint historical advisers, CSW can reveal.

Ministers & officials must also put those lessons into practice.

The Cabinet Office has published a new competency framework which will apply to all civil servants from 1 April. The framework lists a set of attributes and behaviours which all 420,000 civil servants should aspire to, and breaks down how these could be demonstrated at every grade across the service.

The government has signed an agreement with private-sector partner arvato to manage an independently-run shared service centre, which will run back-office transactions to government departments. The move is intended to create savings of up to £600m a year over seven years.

Former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell is to present two programmes on Radio 4 in a bid to defend the work of the civil service.

Government must be prepared to pay higher salaries if it is to attract top talent from the private and wider public sectors, first civil service commissioner Sir David Normington told the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) last week.

Government must be prepared to pay higher salaries and consider more effective systems of performance related pay if it is to attract top talent from the private and wider public sectors, first civil service commissioner Sir David Normington told the Public Administration Select Committee today.

Even without ‘impact assessments’, impacts need assessing.

The government's outgoing equalities chief has expressed his disappointment at the Cabinet Office’s work to improve diversity in public appointments, and called for the publication of a new diversity strategy to reinvigorate efforts to increase the number of women, disabled people and ethnic minorities in top civil service jobs.

Commissioners from across the public sector can now apply to join a virtual Commissioning Academy, launched last week.

It is the duty of civil servants to challenge weak policy ideas, the director general of civil service reform, Katherine Kerswell, has told Civil Service World – even if officials risk being seen as “obstructive”.

Senior civil servants have become even more dissatisfied with their pay arrangements, are more inclined to leave the civil service, and less inclined to work extra hours than they were a year ago, according to a survey carried out by the FDA and Prospect trade unions.

Stephen Lovegrove, chief executive at the Shareholder Executive since 2007, has been appointed permanent secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. He will take up his new post on 4 February. The role was originally set to be taken by David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, but prime minister David Cameron vetoed Kennedy’s appointment last year.

Most Whitehall departments will have to move their transaction services – meaning HR, payroll, and accounts processes – into a shared service project by 2014, according to the Cabinet Office’s shared services strategy, published in December.