HR

The Cabinet Office has backed down over plans to reform the terms and conditions (T&Cs) of all civil servants, CSW has learned. In a letter sent this month to all civil servants, civil service head Sir Bob Kerslake and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: “The proposed changes will apply to new entrants and, potentially, staff on promotion.”

The civil service pay cap will continue for an extra year, and the government will also reform automatic pay rises for all civil servants, chancellor George Osborne announced in his budget today.

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.