Civil service standards to be raised

19 May 05
The architect of Whitehall's attempt to broaden the skills base of the civil service has warned potential mandarins that the standard for senior posts will be higher than ever in future.

20 May 2005

The architect of Whitehall's attempt to broaden the skills base of the civil service has warned potential mandarins that the standard for senior posts will be higher than ever in future.

Sir Richard Mottram, chair of the task force that created the Cabinet Office's professional skills for government (PSG) programme, has also sounded the death knell for a Whitehall tradition: the 'generalists' at the apex of the civil service.

In an interview with Public Finance, Mottram, permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, said future senior civil servants must display higher levels of professional training, experience and qualifications than his generation of mandarins had started out with.

'Public services have developed substantially in recent years and the skills and experience required to formulate policy and manage those services have also developed,' he said.

'Some of my own training was very short. Very quickly you could end up in charge of organisations employing hundreds of thousands of people and I believe, absolutely, that you could have a more structured approach to helping people build their capabilities to manage organisations.'

Mottram later outlined the PSG initiative at a Public Management and Policy Association seminar on May 18. Cabinet secretary Sir Andrew Turnbull launched PSG in 2004, to ensure that the civil service 'has the right blend of skills and expertise, at every level, to deliver government priorities'.

It divides civil servants into three job groupings: policy expert/analyst, those involved in operational delivery and those delivering corporate services. Individuals aiming for senior positions will have to have experience in more than one field.

A core part of the initiative, Mottram said, was to ensure that departments had professionally qualified finance directors, to instil improved understanding of the costs involved in policy implementation and management.

To help deliver that, CIPFA, in partnership with the Warwick Business School and the Treasury, has launched a diploma in public finance and leadership, which aims to fast-track civil servants to chartered accountancy status in under two years.

Mottram also responded to concerns that assimilating more professionals into Whitehall could create policy 'zealots' – individuals with a personal interest in policies – at the expense of the traditional apolitical civil servant.

He said: 'I understand those dangers. I've worked with specialists who lacked the capacity to see that there is a different point of view. The solution is to put together departmental teams… with a balanced mix of skills, to get a positive result.'

Sir David Normington, permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Skills, and chair of the PMPA event, told PF: 'PSG will help to ensure that highly skilled work, such as policy formulation, is recognised professionally in the same way that a lawyer's work is.'

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