04 August 2006
Having been quick to judge the rest of the public sector, Whitehall now faces similar scrutiny. And it hasn't fared well. Colin Talbot looks at the impact of capability reviews and applies his own star rating system
It's official – Whitehall is mediocre at best and in need of urgent reform at worst.
Despite my own and many others misgivings, the Departmental Capability Reviews turned out to have teeth after all. Perhaps it was the high level of scepticism when they were announced which spurred them to be rather more objective than they might have been otherwise, but whatever the reason, they paint a sorry picture of the first four departments to be scrutinised.
Let's look at the headlines first. I thought it would be fun to do to government departments what they have so long done to others – give them 'star ratings'.
So I went through the reviews, added a scoring system and calculated what star rating should be awarded to each department. A five-star department would have received an average of 4.6 points or above across the ten criteria the reviews used to judge departmental capability. The lowest would be a one-star department (1.5 or less average score).
Using their own definitions, this means a department with:
- 5 stars is 'strong' on average across all ten areas.
- 4 stars is 'well placed' to address any gaps
- 3 stars means overall it needs 'development'
- 2 stars means it needs 'urgent development' and
- 1 star means 'serious concerns'
The Department for Education and Skills comes out best, with a three-star rating (average 3.5). Next, the Department for Constitutional Affairs also gets three stars (3.3) and so does the Department for Work and Pensions (3.1). Bottom of the lot is the Home Office, with only two stars (2.4 to be precise). So we have three three-star departments in need of 'development', and one two-star in need of 'urgent development'.
After 20 years or more of 'Whitehall knows best' public management reform in the UK, public service managers across the country won't know whether to laugh out loud or bury their heads in despair.
These results are truly appalling. Not one of the four departments can really be described as 'fit for purpose' on these scores. Anything less than a four- or five-star score means they are clearly not functioning as they should. They all need substantial remedial work at best.
A closer look at the figures and reports highlights the main problem areas. The reviews concentrated on three areas: leadership; strategy and delivery. Incidentally, it is worth wondering why they didn't look at policy capacity, given it is a large chunk of what departments do.
Of these, strategy fared best, getting an average score of 3.8 points across the four departments, or being on average 'well placed'. This is hardly surprising: since New Labour came to power in 1997 there have been numerous attempts to implement 'strategic' systems in Whitehall, not least the whole Spending Review and Public Service Agreements regime (which we'll come back to later).
On leadership, the departments seem in need of some. All four departments score at best three stars and at worst – the poor old Home Office again – only two stars. As senior civil servants have hardly stopped crowing about the excellence of leadership in Whitehall over recent years, these assessments must have come as a real shock.
But it is in the delivery area – the thing which has been closest to Tony Blair's heart in public management reform – that the departments score worst. Three out of four are rated at only two stars – in need of urgent development action.
The Home Office again, of course, but also Constitutional Affairs and Work and Pensions, are rated as having 'significant weaknesses in capability that require urgent action.
Moreover, this category is 'not well placed to deliver improvement over the medium term', so there will be no 'quick fixes'. One is left wondering what on earth Whitehall has been doing for the past nine years when the prime minister had delivery so high up his agenda?
The above analysis will probably provoke anguish from various quarters in Whitehall. Well, the rest of the public sector has been subject to this sort of crude analysis for years, so perhaps now they may have some inkling of what it is like.
Because, of course, the above analysis is crude, that is the whole point. It gives us a pointer that some things are clearly going badly wrong in Whitehall, but not much more than that.
The whole methodology on which the DCRs are based is not exactly transparent or, from what has been published, terribly robust. So there may be some justified howls of rage from these departments (privately and discreetly, of course). And of course the results tell us nothing about why these apparent problems are happening – but we will leave the 'blame game' until the end of this piece.
First, let's put the reviews into a wider context.
These were, as the name suggest, reviews of departmental 'capability' – they were forward looking, as both Tony Blair and Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, the head of the civil service, emphasised in the documents. So they do not judge actual departmental performance.
There is an assumption that the ratings were about performance and results – they weren't, they were just about capacity. It is, of course, a reasonable inference that if capacity is low, then performance will also probably be low. But this is the 'dog that didn't bark'. Why, when we have had mountains of data since 1999 onwards (under the Public Service Agreements regime) has the review process not carried out a retrospective analysis of actual performance?
This is even more curious because the DCRs are taking place at the same time as the so-called 'second' Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR07), due for publication next July.
The CSR in 1998 introduced the idea of Public Service Agreements – targets for ministries – and since then there have been further spending reviews in 2000, 2002 and 2004 and PSA targets throughout this period. So why is there no comprehensive analysis of how departments have done against PSAs and other performance measures?
Almost simultaneously with the publication of the first four capability reviews (Cabinet Office-led), the Treasury published an interim report on CSR07. This contained no analysis of actual performance against PSAs, just a discussion of how they might be reformed in the future.
So who, if anyone, is to blame for these apparently appalling DCR results? Some will argue that it is actually the whole target system that has undermined leadership and delivery in departments. Others will suggest, perhaps with a bit more justification, that the emphasis on efficiency since the Gershon report has forced Whitehall to take its eye off the delivery ball.
A further refrain will probably be, very quietly in Whitehall but more loudly from some retired civil servants, to blame the politicians. 'Initiativitis', meddling ministers and insufferable special advisers will all be fingered for causing the civil servants to slip from their otherwise Rolls Royce standards.
This may be partially true, but to use a familiar argument which Whitehall frequently deploys – others face the same or similar circumstances, yet achieve excellent results. Local government and the health service are not uniformly excellent, but many of their organisations get consistently high ratings in the various capability and performance audits. They all face targets, efficiency drives, political interference and initiative overload too – but they still manage to do well.
As Whitehall constantly tells the rest of the public sector, if some can do well and others don't, there must be a management problem. The senior civil service must shoulder their share of the blame.
The influential Institute of Public Policy Research think-tank is due to publish what is expected to be a very hard-hitting report on Whitehall shortly. I have written previously in these pages about the absence of the 'national debate' about the future of public services the government announced it wanted last year.
The combination of the IPPR report with these DCRs may just mean we get a debate, but not the one the government wants – a debate about why Whitehall is so bad at delivery, has such weak leadership and can't even yet do strategy properly. In other words, why we need root-and-branch civil service reform.
The centre of this debate has to be about the fundamental status of the civil service. It is important to recall that the civil service only represents about a tenth of the public service and that within it only about a tenth of civil servants work for the 'Whitehall village' which serves ministers and deals with high-policy issues.
This 1% of public servants in Whitehall effectively drives most of what happens in our highly centralised and highly executive-driven system in the UK. In most other advanced democratic countries, other tiers of government have constitutional rights and much greater autonomy and their legislatures usually play a much more active role in holding the executive – ministers and civil servants – to account.
The Whitehall villagers are not only uniquely powerful because of this centralised, executive-driven system, they are also fairly insulated from the rest of the public services. They may have opened up somewhat in recent years, but this has been much more to the private sector than to the rest of the public domain.
In terms of their social origins, qualifications (unqualified either academically or professionally by international standards), and experience (usually no hands-on delivery experience) our senior civil service remains largely as it was 20, 30 or even 40 years ago.
Is it possible to change the civil service without changing some of the institutional context within which it operates? I doubt it. Unless we radically decentralise towards local government and enhance the democratic role of Parliament the scope for real reform is very limited. But some things could be done.
First, the senior civil service should be made much more actively accountable to Parliament. Why not have select committees hold US-style nomination hearings with prospective permanent secretaries? The quaintly named 'Osmotherly rules' should be changed so that civil servants can be called to give evidence in their own right and not merely as, officially at least, mouthpieces for 'their' minister.
And select committees could be given greater powers to name and shame those responsible for major failures as happens elsewhere in public service, with the expectation that disciplinary action would follow, regardless of where the culprit has moved on to within the service.
Secondly, Parliament's role could be enhanced by increasing the power and scope of select committees, especially by giving them much greater resources.
Thirdly, the role of the National Audit Office could be expanded to support select committees and it could be freed of the restrictions which prevent it from questioning policy decisions, a distinction which is almost impossible to maintain, anyway. It should take over jobs like the DCRs.
Fourthly, it should be made mandatory that anyone appointed to a senior civil service post should normally have had at least several years' experience of managing front-line service delivery in the civil or public services.
Finally, all senior posts should be open to competition – it is probably the case that to get the top jobs, candidates will have needed to have had some civil service experience, but that is no reason to maintain the artificial barriers which still keep most top jobs closed to outsiders.
Colin Talbot is professor of public policy and management at Manchester University's Centre for Public Policy and Management
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