Good Governance and Civil Service Reform

Written evidence submitted by Matthew Cocks (GG 01)

Summary

· Reform efforts should focus on enabling the Civil Service to excel in its core areas of work, namely policy advice to Ministers and the delivery of agreed programmes

· There should be a radical reduction and simplification of other, non-core Civil Service processes

· The best people to come up with workable reform ideas are Civil Servants themselves. These ideas should be collected through a series of powerful but non-hierarchical Action Committees – one in each Department – reporting to the Permanent Secretary and a Minister charged with overseeing the simplification process

· Good governance can best be measured by looking at the outcomes of the Civil Service’s policymaking and programme delivery activities.

The focus for Civil Service reform

1. I suggest that the two core Civil Service functions are:

· policy advice to Ministers, and

· delivery of agreed programmes.

2. Policy thinking in the Civil Service plays a vital part in ensuring the effectiveness of Government action. The Civil Service’s involvement is equally essential in delivering agreed programmes.

3. However, other non-core processes, low pay-off activities and cumbersome internal interactions could be radically reduced or even abolished in order to allow the Civil Service to focus on these core tasks. It is a common perception in the public sector, including the central Civil Service, that there is too much paperwork and internal bureaucracy. Some of the areas which could profitably be examined are recruitment and promotion procedures, annual staff reporting and pay reward structures, business and contingency planning, reporting against targets, and the process of drafting, amending and seeking approval for internal and external documents.

Involving the Civil Service itself

4. The best people to identify ideas for reform of such processes are Civil Servants themselves, especially those who have joined relatively recently. It is often newcomers to an organisation who can most easily identify areas which could be improved. The Civil Service includes a wide range of individuals with different experiences and approaches. Many of them would like to initiate change but they need to be empowered to do so.

5. One approach would be for their ideas to be collected through a series of powerful but non-hierarchical Action Committees – one in each Department – who would report jointly direct to the Permanent Secretary and a Minister charged with overseeing the simplification process. The membership of such Committees should be limited to a relatively small number of volunteers, covering as much of the Department's work as possible, with a skilled chair. The Committee would in turn seek suggestions from across the Department. Each Committee would be given a deadline by which to present a list of recommendations jointly to the departmental Permanent Secretary and the responsible departmental Minister. The most workable and effective suggestions would then be put into practice, again within a tight deadline.

6. The Committees would not simply disappear at that stage but would remain in existence for long enough to evaluate the effects of implementing their suggestions.

Key measures of good governance

7. The problem with creating a global list of good governance measures is that it risks being so general that it is of limited use in assessing the performance of the Department concerned.

8. A better approach could be to look for outcome measures for good governance. To return to the two core tasks of the Civil Service, policymaking and programme delivery, the outcomes of good governance could be measured by:

· the quality of policy advice to Ministers, as perceived by peer review and Ministers themselves, and

· the effectiveness of programmes, as measured both by agreed targets and by the experience of the beneficiaries of those programmes.

9. Measuring the quality of policy advice should include the extent to which it takes into the modern realities of policymaking. These include looking beyond traditional policy approaches, such as proposing new legislation and new publicly-funded programmes, to non-legislative and low cost alternatives. There is already a line of thinking on this within Whitehall, encouraged by the Better Regulation Executive and Regulatory Policy Committee, which includes challenging the need for regulation and looking at alternatives. This is also very much in line with the idea of less central bureaucracy and greater local control.

10. There are of course many other targets and measures which could be added under the heading of good governance – but many of these are in place already, and many would fall into the trap of creating yet more internal processes without adding significant value. I believe instead that the focus should be on best practice in relation to the key Civil Service outputs I have described, and that this will in turn help focus internal reform efforts.

January 2011