Legal

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.

Civil servants giving evidence at the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have been treated in an “atrocious” and “outrageous” way in order to further “people’s own political ambition and their own political ends,” FDA general secretary Dave Penman has said in an interview with CSW.

Some ministers are frustrated with civil servants who are slow to implement policies, Richard Heaton, the new permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office, has acknowledged. To overcome this, he said, civil servants must push for more clarity from ministers on whether they have made firm policy decisions, or whether they are waiting for more evidence before proceeding.

Over the past three decades, no government has been able to achieve reductions in the administrative costs of central government equal to those proposed by the coalition, a report from Oxford University said earlier this month.

The think tank contracted by the Cabinet Office to provide external policy advice on the future of civil service accountability has published research setting out its conclusions on the topic, CSW can reveal.

More honours must be awarded for “exceptional service to the community” and fewer should go to politicians, civil servants and celebrities, the chair of the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) has told CSW.

The government’s Civil Service Reform Plan states: “Given ministers’ direct accountability to Parliament for the performance of their departments and for the implementation of their policy priorities, we believe they should have a stronger role in the recruitment of a permanent secretary.”