Legal

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.