Legal

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has denied telling its employees how to vote in the Scottish referendum, after its permanent secretary Robert Devereux issued department-wide guidance on the topic.

Civil servants responsible for running major projects will be able to tell parliament when ministers directed them to make particular decisions, under proposals published by the government.

A lack of clarity on pre-election rules are causing officials to “do things on the sly for ministers”, according to the Institute for Government (IfG), which has this week published a report into the final year of the coalition government.

Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood (pictured) and Treasury permanent secretary Sir Nicholas Macpherson are to investigate whether the prime minister broke government rules by writing an official letter to nearly two million businesses on the eve of European elections.

Michael Barber, the former head of Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit, has told CSW he is “tempted” by the idea of a commission on civil service reform, as long as it’s able to build cross-party consensus.

The Serious Fraud Office has asked for emergency funding of £19m to pay for higher than expected expenditure on a series of big investigations.

The government seems to be presiding over the “creeping politicisation” of the civil service, a number of high-profile peers have warned. Speaking in a debate held today in the House of Lords, peers from all parties also called on the government to set up a parliamentary commission on the future of the civil service.

Three-quarters of former secretaries of state surveyed by Civil Service World support the calls for a commission to consider how the civil service should develop and reform.

The Home Affairs select committee is today calling on the home secretary to rethink her decision to ban khat – a plant which has a stimulant effect when chewed – and warns that the decision has “not been taken on the basis of evidence or consultation”.

David Thomas (pictured), commerical director at HMRC and a crown representative, will leave government in mid-December. He resigned his post in September.

The Civil Service Commission has published the rules under which individuals can be appointed as civil servants providing support in Extended Ministerial Offices (EMOs). The rules, welcomed by the FDA trade union, set out a number of safeguards designed to ensure that appointments do not compromise the independence of the civil service.

The Cabinet was deliberately not kept as well-informed as the prime minister, defence secretary and foreign secretary in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, former cabinet secretary Lord Butler has said.

Sharon White, currently director general for public services, has been appointed as the second permanent secretary at HM Treasury.

One of the architects of the Freedom of Information Act has told Civil Service World that this “very radical policy” is “capable of being expensive and burdensome”, and suggested that the rules governing disclosure require departments to make very complex – and thus expensive – decisions.

Civil service structures are preventing open debates about government policy, and stopping senior officials speaking truth to power, two select committee chairs have told Civil Service World.

The Home Office has outsourced its payments processing to NS&I, the state-owned savings bank, it was announced earlier this month.

Treasury permanent secretary Nick Macpherson has called on government departments to improve their institutional memory.

Civil service project leaders – ‘Senior Responsible Owners’ (SROs) – are to be held directly accountable to parliamentary select committees, Sir Bob Kerslake announced today.

Any reforms to the permanent secretary appointments process should meet three tests, first civil service commissioner Sir David Normington has said today in an article published in CSW.

The efforts of Companies House (CH) to tackle fraud should be based on “strengthening the current model rather than radically changing company law”, its chief executive has told CSW, to ensure that anti-fraud work doesn’t weaken transparency in business information or create additional burdens on business.

Politicians should not use cabinet secretaries as arbiters to judge disputed issues, Lord Armstrong has warned in a video interview produced by Queen Mary University of London.

The government is likely to implement a further set of civil service reforms soon, the head of the civil service Sir Bob Kerslake has told CSW, as it pursues “unfinished business” that didn’t make it into last year’s Civil Service Reform Plan (CSRP).

Permanent secretary appointment processes should result in ministers being given the right to choose their favourite candidate from a shortlist, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said last week – and Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, appeared to go still further in her response.

Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood and head of the civil service Sir Bob Kerslake have told MPs they do not believe there is a need for a royal commission to examine the future of the civil service and its relationship with ministers and Parliament.