Legal

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”.

The ‘bureaucrat bashers’ are only making things worse

Finance professionals believe that the senior management teams of their organisations have a “deep understanding” or are “aware of the importance” of the finance function, a CSW survey has found.

The Ministry of Defence is struggling to build a financial management system that determines a “single version of the financial truth” and there is a “high risk to delivery” of the department’s strategy for setting out clear management information (MI), according to the Defence Review Annual Report published yesterday by Lord Levene.

The commission created to investigate the possible replacement of the Human Rights Act with a UK Bill of Rights has failed to reach unanimous conclusions, it was announced yesterday.

The prime minister has intervened to block the appointment of David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, as the new permanent secretary of the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

MPs have rejected the ‘Osmotherly’ rules, which dictate how and when civil servants can be called in front of select committees, and have called for a new settlement that gives them the power to summon officials to committee hearings.

A further £22bn in spending cuts or tax rises will be required in the period of the next spending review to 2017-18 if the government is to achieve its goal of eradicating the structural deficit, new analysis says.

The proportion of women taking new public appointments is “not good enough”, public appointments commissioner Sir David Normington has said.

“Irregular” voluntary redundancy payments made by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to its former chief executive officer Phillippa Williamson have led the National Audit Office (NAO) to qualify its audit opinion on the SFO’s 2011-12 accounts.