The Week 13 December 2024

This was the week the new Government got serious about Whitehall reform, and there’s much to like.

On Monday, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and minister for making government work, Pat McFadden, gave a very encouraging?speech?on reforming the State: “the size of the budget is not the only question. It’s what are you using it for, what will the outcome be, how will you organise people to make sure it happens”. Amen.

Its central theme — as?Reform?Senior Researcher and Whitehall afficionado Patrick King wrote in his?snap blog?— was innovation. Not in the sense that technologists create completely new products, but in embracing a totally different way of working, which takes specific problems, tests different solutions with no prior prescription (”We’re not going to dictate how they do that”), sometimes fails, and scales success.

And to actually achieve that, McFadden wants to use the ‘No.10 Innovation Fellows programme’ to bring in “innovators, disruptors and original thinkers” for “Tours of Duty”.

“My message to creative thinkers is this is your chance to serve your country. Use your brainpower and tech talents to fix some of the biggest problems we face today. Britain needs you. And if you choose to serve, I want government to empower you to help us deliver better - to move fast and build things.”

Getting talent in, boosting cognitive diversity, breaking down siloed working by building multi-disciplinary teams, sacrificing process in favour of creativity, a laser focus on outcomes, all this is?exactly?what our ‘Reimagining Whitehall’ work has been calling for and we couldn’t be more delighted to see the new Government commit to implementing it.

Then on Thursday Cabinet Office Perm Sec and Civil Service COO, Cat Little, announced big changes to her department. In?‘Breaking down the barriers: why Whitehall is so hard to reform’, the Cabinet Office was frequently criticised by former perm secs, senior officials and ministers. Perhaps the most succinct quote, from a former perm sec, is “The Cabinet Office is a uniquely dysfunctional organisation.” People talked about PMs putting every pet project into the Cabinet Office, helping to explain its explosion in headcount (to around 10,000), and its “split personality” in both serving the PM and Cabinet, and acting as a corporate HQ.

Little has promised a total rethink, to create a smaller, more strategic Cabinet Office, and is proposing to hive off some of the operational functions into an arms length body. This makes?total sense, though we have some questions about whether new ALBs are the best answer. There will also be a voluntary redundancy programme to reduce core headcount by 400 — which is fine, as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. Here’s Patrick’s take in his?second snap blog?of the week.

And, as if we Whitehall reformers were not already in fine festive mood, the Government also this week published their submission to the Review Body on Senior Salaries in which they promised to overhaul SCS performance management to grip poor performance. In May we published a?major report on performance management, and were inundated with civil servants getting in touch to tell us their horror stories and frustrations with Whitehall’s failure to act.

It only applies to SCS, but now there will be minimum standards that you either meet or don’t (no, that isn’t currently the case!), there will be greater standardisation across departments, and departments will have to report on poor performance with data collected centrally. All things we recommended in?‘Making the grade’, and while we would like to see these applied to all grades, it’s a great start.

We’ll be raising a glass to Pat McFadden and Cat Little this Christmas.

In terms of my read of the week, I’ve already given you several — we really do recommend giving McFadden’s speech a read in full. So I won’t add to the list.