Public Servant Lifestyle

Civil Service chief Sir Gus O’Donnell has unveiled a performance and people skills review of all Government Departments.

“I feel that we need to enhance central government departments' capability to deliver policies,” Sir Gus (Cabinet Secretary and Head Of The Home Civil Service) told Parliament’s Public Administration Committee.

The programme will be led by the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit – which current looks at delivery in the sense of achievement of PSA (Public Service Agreement) targets.

“What I want the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit to do is to enhance its role by looking at the capability of departments to deliver. The idea of this would be capability reviews run out of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit but using external people as well - people like, for example, the private sector, the Audit Commission, people who have been good at these from the Audit Commission with experience of comprehensive performance assessments (CPAs), and use them to assess departments' capabilities on a range of functions like HR, finance, ability to run IT projects, with the idea that we would publish the results of the performance of departments in specific categories.

“That seems to me the right way to do it, because for CPAs you can have an ‘excellent’ rating for local authority A versus ‘weak’ for local authority B, but we have only got one Ministry of Defence, so I cannot do that. If I had ten I could do that.

“What you can do, though, is compare the capabilities of, say, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Health to, for example, conduct financial management. How good are they at that? How good are they at the HR function?

“In some departments, it will be more important that they are good at that particular function than others. The idea is that we would do these reviews - and with external input - publish the results and then there will be an action plan to ensure that the permanent secretary and I were happy about and agreed on what the steps forward were, and I would then hold the permanent secretary to account for improvements in that department.

“I have put this idea to my permanent secretary colleagues - and to the Prime Minister - and received enthusiastic support; so I am pleased to say that everybody is behind this, and we will now start to consult on how to do it, with a view to getting the first pilot departments around December or January (of 2006).

“I would really like to roll this out across the whole of central government departments over the next couple of years - 2006/2007. I just wanted to explain that that is where my thinking has gone on all of that and I think these capability reviews will help us to assess how best to improve the way in which central government departments operate.”

Committee chairman Dr Tony Wright MP asked Sir Gus: “But you know what people are going to say. They are going to say, "Are we going to have league tables? Are we going to have naming and shaming? Are we going to have failing departments? Are we going to have special measures? Are we going to get some departments taken over by other departments? How far is this going to go?"

Sir Gus replied: “...The point is that what we can do is assess the different functions and capabilities within them, so if we take the HR capability, we could look at the HR capabilities across a range of different departments and then we will publish an assessment which is comparable across departments where it says this department is particularly good at HR, this one is particularly weak at HR.

“It may be that that is not a problem. If you are running a very, very large department, the HR requirements may be rather different from running one that is rather smaller. In the Treasury, for example, when you are talking about around 1,000 people, you want an HR function that is very good at trying to sort out people who are very good at policy and policy implementation (deliverable policies I mean).

“When you are talking about the Department of Work and Pensions, with 130,000 staff, the HR function that you need for running a department like that is very different and it is a very different challenge. I am hoping that these external teams will be able to assess how good departments are at these different things but, yes, there will be comparable measures which we will publish.”

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