02 December 2005
The Home Office's finance director has urged caution in Whitehall's drive to professionalise its skills base – warning senior staff not to shift roles too quickly simply to meet new training requirements.
Helen Kilpatrick, the Home Office's director general of financial and commercial, told Public Finance that she was 'very positive' about the Cabinet Office's Professional Skills for Government agenda.
The PSG initiative aims to bring more professionally qualified staff into the civil service, ensure that senior staff develop several areas of expertise and achieve parity of esteem across Whitehall policy making, corporate functions (such as finance, human resources and procurement) and policy delivery roles.
However, Kilpatrick, who enjoyed a successful career in local government before entering Whitehall in April, warned that the initiative has potential pitfalls.
'The idea that you should have experience in more than one broad area of work is a good one, and you should have a range of core skills…to join the senior civil service,' she said.
'But we need to ensure that we have the correct balance between the needs of the individual developing their career and the needs of the organisation. Coming into the Home Office, it seems to me that some people move around more quickly than is optimal.'
Kilpatrick said that the PSG process could become 'over-engineered' and that some senior staff might seek to move around departments too quickly, simply to push on with their careers.
'What we need is for people to be in their jobs for longer to develop skills in depth – particularly some of the corporate functions,' she argued. The ultimate success of the PSG agenda, she said, would also depend on Whitehall achieving a 'culture shift' across departments.
When Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell launched the implementation phase of PSG in September, he reminded government staff that it was 'about more than ticking boxes on a list of skills'.
O'Donnell told PF this week that he remained 'absolutely committed to PSG'.
Echoing Kilpatrick's comments, Anne-Marie Lawlor, the Cabinet Office's director of leadership and development strategy, added: 'PSG is about increasing both the depth and the breadth of people's skills and expertise. It is certainly not about moving jobs for moving's sake.
'The important thing is that we ensure that… the civil service has the skills and the expertise it needs to help deliver effective public services.'
United front emerges in courts dispute
Senior civil servants have joined the fast-escalating row over a delayed pay deal for magistrates' court staff that could end in strikes during the run-up to Christmas.
Members of the Prospect trade union, who hold a small number of influential managerial and legal posts at magistrates' courts across England and Wales, have been balloted over a one-day strike.
The union claimed that 'negotiations to provide an inflation-proof pay offer had reached deadlock'.
The justices' clerks, senior legal advisers and bench legal managers have joined the larger Public and Commercial Services union in threatening walk-outs that could close vital magistrates' offices.
Public Finance revealed last week that the PCS, which largely represents lower-grade civil servants, believes the Department for Constitutional Affairs' 2005 pay offer to staff is a below-inflation 2.2%, despite the DCA's insistence that it informally offered 3.7% in August. PCS officials claim that 1.5% of the DCA's provisional offer related to commitments made before the merger of magistrates' and county courts into the Courts Service.
Prospect leaders concur. They want the relatively low wages of magistrates' courts staff to be harmonised with the pay of other DCA employees.
Outlining the union's 'resentment' at the DCA's failure to offer a formal 2005 settlement, Prospect this week blamed the department's 'failure to properly fund the start-up costs' of the Courts Service.
Alan Leighton, Prospect national secretary, said: 'It's disgraceful that staff are expected to pay the price for the creation of the CS.'
A DCA spokeswoman insisted the provisional 2005 offer was 'comfortably above inflation' and that steps had been taken to harmonise departmental wages.
Two commodious residences, worth £24m
The traditional residences of the prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer at 10 and 11 Downing Street are worth a combined £23.7m, the Cabinet Office has revealed.
The two homes, which open out into a much larger series of buildings attached to the Cabinet Office, form part of the department's £153m freehold property portfolio.
Valuations of Cabinet Office assets were revealed to Parliament on November 28. They also show that the department owns five 'irreplaceable' antique items worth almost £2m, including a commode and a marble bust of Oliver Cromwell, each of which is worth £350,000.
The Blair and Brown families can rest easy, though. In understated fashion, Cabinet Office minister Jim Murphy assured Parliament that the valuation of Downing Street's properties was merely an accounting exercise, saying 'the government are unlikely to place certain of these properties on to the open market for sale'.
PFdec2005
