28 January 2005
Government plans to move thousands of Whitehall staff away from the Southeast received a minor boost this week when Birmingham emerged as the city favoured to host the proposed Gambling Commission.
Provisions for a new regulatory body are contained in the Gambling Bill, which received its third reading in Parliament this week. The Bill would establish a regulator for gaming, betting and some lotteries.
One of its core activities will be to regulate the eight 'super casinos' that could be built around the UK when the Bill becomes law. The commission will employ around 260 public servants.
A statement issued by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which will oversee the new body, revealed that 'Birmingham is the preferred location.' The DCMS said the next step would be to 'appoint advisers, by competitive tender, to find suitable premises and organise their fitting out'.
The current Gaming Board of Great Britain, which will be scrapped when the commission is up and running, operates out of Holborn in London, and many of its staff of 80 are likely to be offered relocation packages.
But relocation and efficiency plans at other Whitehall departments are progressing less smoothly.
The £21.5bn efficiency drive aims to shift 20,000 civil servants from the Southeast and axe 80,000 posts by 2008. But Public Finance has learnt that some departments are struggling to find uses for superfluous buildings outside London.
The Department for Work and Pensions, for example, has been unable to convince other public bodies to take over its pension centre in Liverpool, which only opened in 2002 but will close as part of the department's plan to axe 40,000 staff posts by 2008.
In a Commons statement last week, Work and Pensions Secretary Alan Johnson said: 'After full exploration of alternative uses for Liverpool, all options have been exhausted.'
A 12-month notice period to leave the site has been served and it is likely the DWP will sell the building.
Treasury sources said the government's favoured policy was to rehouse departments in existing public buildings, but stressed that any sales would contribute to a separate target: to realise £30bn of public assets by 2010.
E-government chief plans IT flying squad
E-government supremo Ian Watmore is to set up a 'flying squad' of IT 'heavy hitters' to get what he calls 'mission critical' government IT schemes implemented, he has told Public Finance.
One of the aims is to put an end to the succession of failed IT projects in central government.
The squad will almost certainly be based in the Cabinet Office, says Watmore, and will be available to any department that needs it. Big NHS schemes and the roll-out of identity cards were the type of projects to be targeted. But he added that strategically important schemes in the police or local government might also be supported.
Watmore said that the creation of a central team with a roving mandate would assist the government to recruit some of the best IT professionals in the country, providing them with
a more interesting and challenging role. 'We might give them a year working on the NHS programme and then a year on ID cards,' he said.
It seems likely that the team could also act as troubleshooters, going into departments to sort out serious problems when they occur, such as the recent Department for Work and Pensions systems failure.
A spokeswoman for the Cabinet Office said that between five and ten IT specialists would be employed. While they would be 'senior civil servants', their pay and grades had not yet been decided.
The FDA union, which represents senior civil servants, welcomed the proposals. Its spokeswoman said: 'Our members would be very happy to have access to that type of expertise.'
She doubted that top civil servants would see it as a lessening of their power.
Former NatWest managing director joins DfES board
The Department for Education and Skills has expanded its private sector expertise with the appointment of Philip Augar, a former managing director at NatWest bank, to its board.
DfES permanent secretary Sir David Normington this week announced that Augar would also chair the department's audit committee.
Augar joins the DfES board as its second non-executive member alongside Lin Homer, the chief executive of Birmingham City Council.
Education Secretary Ruth Kelly and Normington will be expected to draw increasingly on private sector experience as the department strives to meet the tight efficiency targets outlined in last year's Budget. The DfES must find annual efficiency gains of at least £4.3bn by 2007/08, half of which must come from administration. A key part of that is the department's plan to axe 1,460 posts by 2010.
A DfES source said it was likely Augar would 'inform' the efficiency drive through his role on the audit committee.
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