The next stage of public service improvement

February 1, 2008

Dick Sorabji, Deputy Director, NLGN
epolitix.com

For ten years government has increased spending on public services while the civil service has delivered reforms to management and accountability. s a result public expectations have been transformed. As NLGN explain in Changing Whitehall’s DNA government cannot meet these higher expectations unless the culture and working assumptions of the central civil service are transformed.

It is no longer enough to provide basic services at a reasonable cost. People want services designed to fit in with their lives; they want them delivered in a way that empowers, involves and respects the user.

To achieve this government has to join up at local level where people actually use public services. Intellectually public servants in local and central government know this. Most of the five year plans produced by the civil service before during 2005 promised joined up services through devolution to local government. Yet progress is too slow.

This is not due to any lack of talent. It is the result of internal dynamics and culture programming the civil service to work in a particular way. At the heart of government the pressure is always to look upward to Ministers immediate wants, not outwards to the citizens that Ministers want to impress; policies are designed to fit departments more than people or projects; the culture respects the quality of disinterested advice more than successful delivery.

The symptoms of this programming are most visible in the scale of national performance frameworks designed by departments. Letting go is just too hard to do at the pace required by public demands. So for instance, in the year that targets on local government are to be cut from 1200 to 200, councils will actually see an increase in the target burden to handle the “transition” to devolved working.

Yet responding to micro-management by calling for civil service reform is a strategy with a disappointing pedigree. The present government has made several attempts.

Modernising Government was one of Labour’s first initiatives. Intended to transform the heart of government, the focus soon moved to the frontline. With a new Cabinet Secretary in 2002 so came a new plan for change. Reform & Delivery was to produce stronger links with the rest of the public sector. In 2004 Delivery & Values was the label on a further package of civil service reforms. During this period the Tony Blair also tried to shape the management of government by creating a range of high profile ‘Units’ including the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and the Social Exclusion Unit.

With the arrival of Sir Gus O’Donnell, Departmental Capability Reviews came closer to using the external challenge which has helped other public services to improve. They revealed a senior civil service that is more comfortable with strategy than delivery.

What is needed is an approach that swiftly changes the environment in which civil servants operate making is possible for them to use their talents to work with the grain of the wider public service reforms that citizens expect. It turns out that the Public Service Agreement (PSA) system may offer that chance.

PSAs were created by Gordon Brown as Chancellor in the first Comprehensive Spending Review. There were 600. They were designed to fit Whitehall Departments. Almost 90% were process or output targets, reinforcing micro-management. A decade of refinement has cut these to 30 built around people or projects, so breaking the link to departments and focussing on delivery rather than micro-management.

Today the PSA regime is too weak to survive Whitehall’s traditional culture. Yet if nurtured it could spread throughout Whitehall changing the pressures on civil service careers and so changing Whitehall’s DNA.

Public Scrutiny and external challenge can build on the new PSAs to drive cultural change and so deliver where past reforms have failed. NLGN have recommended increased scrutiny through Parliamentary Question Times for each PSA; holding Ministers to account for delivery on projects instead of activity within departments. Select Committees and the Liaison Committee, comprised of Chairmen of Select Committees, should scrutinise PSA progress annually. Parliament should hold annual debates on PSA progress led by the Prime Minister.

Public scrutiny increases the political pressure on Ministers to put delivery ahead of activity. A new focus for Ministers’ will reinforce the civil service accountability for outcomes. More can be done. In 2007 Gordon Brown created a new civil service post, the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO), personally charged with delivering each PSA. NLGN propose that SROs should be given a duty, like that of the Principal Accounting Officer, to report annually, irrespective of Ministerial opinion, with their judgement of whether the civil service has done everything possible to maximise PSA progress.

Using PSAs it is possible to distinguish between issues where the government has promised national common standards and those where people expect local choice. External challenge on both local government and Whitehall can be increased by using PSAs and local area agreements (LAAs) to cut back the jungle of national controls.

As councils develop LAAs any proposal to change, or delete, national performance targets for councils, or their public sector partners, should be automatically approved where three conditions have been met. Councils should have local public support; support from the leaders of the local arms of relevant national public services and their proposals must be consistent with relevant PSAs.

There will be genuine disagreements as to whether these conditions are met. This is an opportunity to accelerate improvement in both local and central government through external challenge. Disputes should be referred to the relevant Select Committee of the House of Commons for final arbitration. The National Audit Office and the Audit Commission should offer technical support to these Select Committees.

These reforms support Capability Reviews by replacing checklists of activity with measures of progress that citizens can see. But they will do something more lasting. By changing the pressures on civil service careers they change Whitehall’s DNA, equipping it for the next stage of public service improvement.


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