25 November 2005
The government's Departmental Capability Reviews were this week dismissed by one of Whitehall's most respected commentators as lacking credibility because of the civil service's insistence on self-assessment.
Sir Michael Bichard, a former permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Employment, also told an audience of Whitehall experts that the perceived need for DCRs merely 'emphasised the failure of the National Audit Office to hold the government and civil service to account in an effective way'.
Speaking at a Public Finance-Deloitte round table discussion on Whitehall's professionalisation agenda on November 21, Bichard launched a scathing attack on the embryonic central government performance assessment system due to be piloted later this year and rolled out across Whitehall by the end of 2006.
The brainchild of Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, DCRs will assess how well departments perform their core, largely 'back-office' functions. Details of the system are still sketchy, but the reviews have already been loosely compared to the corporate element of local government's successful Comprehensive Performance Assessments.
They will rate departments according to predominantly corporate functions such as financial management, human resources, IT and project management, and the results will be published annually.
However, they will not assess departmental performance in delivering policy objectives, which is covered by, among other things, the Treasury-led Public Service Agreement system.
Bichard articulated widespread concerns that, unlike the successful Audit Commission-validated CPA, the DCR system would not be externally assessed. It will instead be monitored by the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit using a system of peer review and merely boosted by limited independent input from the likes of the Audit Commission and the NAO.
Bichard said: 'I find it difficult to understand how a civil service which has supported the reform of public service on the back of external, independent assessment of performance still seems unable to accept that in its own back yard. It isn't external, it isn't independent and it isn't assessing performance.'
Sir Richard Mottram, until recently the permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions and now the Cabinet Office's security and intelligence co-ordinator, played down criticism that DCRs would not assess policy performance. 'We're not saying that this process is the sole measure of departmental performance. It will sit alongside the process of performance against PSA targets – it will be one of the two pieces of evidence available when we're having discussions with permanent secretaries on monitoring performance.'
Turning his attention to the NAO, Bichard, now rector at the University of the Arts, said the need for DCRs also highlighted the largely benign nature of the government watchdog. 'It is the failure of the NAO to achieve centrally what the Audit Commission has successfully achieved locally that is causing us constantly to look for some other way of assessing performance,' he claimed.
Nick Sloan, the NAO director of performance measurement, countered by insisting that it was crucial to have a system that assessed departmental corporate functions, even if that system was self-assessed by Whitehall. 'We're not allowed to question the merits of policy objectives. For most politicians, PSA targets are the expression of policy objectives, so we start from a bad place,' Sloan added.
See next week's issue for full coverage of the round table debate
PFnov2005
