Policy

Good ideas on policymaking meet risky ones on accountability

Civil servants in the Department of Health (DH) have raised concerns over its approach to policymaking, its risk-assessment skills and its effectiveness at consulting stakeholders, an exclusive opinion poll for CSW has found.

Civil servants support moves to increase the transparency of government and to devolve powers down to local government and communities, but are strongly opposed to outsourcing delivery to the private and voluntary sectors, an exclusive poll by CSW has found.

The Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) is in competition with ministers’ special advisers, friends, think tanks and other groups, NICS permanent secretary Malcolm McKibbin has said, and must demonstrate to politicians that its advice is the highest quality if ministers “are to properly value our information and our service.”

Performance measurements will always be contested. Recently, Professor Nick Black of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a paper in The Lancet arguing that productivity in the NHS has increased in recent years. This conflicts with health secretary Andrew Lansley’s claim that it has fallen by 15 per cent. For some, such arguments demonstrate only that you can prove anything with statistics – but the fact that people disagree over how to measure something isn’t a good argument against measurement. In fact, the only way that we can estimate productivity is by proper measurement.

Public service targets still have a role to play in improving outcomes, Sir Suma Chakrabarti, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice has said.

Select committees are looking for a proper argument

When I joined the CSW team in June 2010, the Efficiency and Reform Group had just been created, the civil service had 43,000 more employees, and IT contract renegotiations were but a glint in Francis Maude’s eye. Since then the civil service has – while developing a brand new set of policies – experienced wholesale reforms in fields such as pensions, redundancy pay, training and HR, and the ERG has delivered £8.75bn of savings. Even if you don’t agree with everything that’s being done, the pace of change is impressive.

The civil service does not run sufficiently rigorous pilots before it implements policy, a leading policy researcher and former British civil servant has claimed.

Departmental select committee chairs have provided mixed reviews of the departments they scrutinise for a Civil Service World Special Report, which has found that 40 per cent of them are dissatisfied with departments’ responses to their reports.

Officials must fulfil their duty to challenge poor policies

Like his secretary of state Iain Duncan Smith, DWP permanent secretary Robert Devereux has a quiet manner. This cannot, however, conceal the vast scale and ambition of the organisational change and policy delivery projects that he’s pursuing. Matt Ross meets him.

Which exclusive club contains the PM, the chancellor, the leader of the opposition and the shadow chancellor, the business secretary and, via its affiliated European arm, the deputy prime minister? Some may think of the freemasons, but others will identify a far more shadowy and secretive bunch: special advisers.