The Darlington Economic Campus: a new approach?

Last week I visited the Darlington Economic Campus (DEC), where HM Treasury, the Department for Education, and seven other departments have staff co-located. It was fascinating to visit DEC two and a half years since I was last there, right after the campus opened. I met Beth Russell, Second Permanent Secretary at HMT and Head of DEC, and we talked about her team’s work.

Here are my three reflections on how much has changed since I was last there.

1) Is it easier to be ‘one Whitehall’ outside of Whitehall?

Plenty of leaders in the civil service have had the ambition to break down the siloes of different departments and encourage collaboration. It seems easier to foster this attitude outside of SW1. Not just because of co-location (departments in Westminster are also much more tightly packed together than they were when I joined), but because outside of Whitehall the scale is small enough that there’s a shared leadership team and cultural functions like shared talent schemes (including other local employers) to break down the barriers.

2) Recruitment is different.

Particularly for early career talent, in London there is fierce competition between departments and there is a larger pool of people who are aware of the civil service. In regional offices the competition is with local employers, with DEC trying to attract candidates who haven’t previously considered the civil service. What assumptions do we need to upend about recruitment to make that work? We recommended scrapping ‘Behaviours’ and other competency-based questions in our paper Making the grade earlier this year. And to avoid competing with each other in that smaller pool, departments need to find ways of making cross-departmental recruitment work. For example, reserve lists currently cannot be used across departments to place candidates who were ‘above the bar’ (but weren’t the best candidate) into another vacant role. Finally, does recruitment language need to change? Does ‘policy’ carry the same connotations of working with Ministers in regional offices, or does it sound more like legal/procedural casework?

3) Building local capacity.

The DEC is made up of central government departments working on national programmes, and Treasury policy (for example) is not a devolved area. But over time, the presence of Places for Growth offices in towns and cities across England can build more policymaking capacity in the regions to resource authorities as more power is devolved from Westminster. The devolution revolution we argued for in What powers where??won’t work without enough local talent to deliver newly-devolved responsibilities.