18 May 2007
'In 1997, it was a moment for a new beginning. The sweeping away of all the detritus of the past. And expectations were so high. Too high, probably.'
Outgoing prime minister Tony Blair's farewell speech on May 10 in part exposed the over-optimism of those who believed the Labour Party's resurgence a decade ago was the solution to all of Britain's challenges.
Only minutes later, at the FDA conference of senior civil servants in London, officials were being given a stark warning of the need to confront modern political and economic realities in the fiscally tight, post-Blair era.
Ten years on, the departing leader, who initiated a minor revolution in the public services by injecting unprecedented amounts of funding, has left nobody in the dark: government is tough and public expectations about those services must be managed.
It is the sort of message the electorate would normally associate with the man likely to succeed Blair on June 27: the dour, pragmatic and prudent chancellor Gordon Brown.
Perhaps the famously strained relationship in Downing Street had eased enough for the outgoing leader to helpfully reduce expectations.
Now it was up to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell to outline to FDA delegates the challenges his senior personnel face under a new prime minister. He offered a predictable, but important list: globalisation, rapid technological changes, changing demographics, increasing flows of capital and labour, migration and security issues.
'[But] added to these, we find rising public expectations. Expectations around public service delivery are rising. But expectations of what governments will do in future are also changing radically,' O'Donnell said.
'The government is now being asked to tackle childhood obesity, for example, and… its span of influence, whether we like it or not, is widening because of expectations. On top of this, we're expected to increase the quality of services and this means increasing public expenditure to manage those things.
'But we're entering a period where the rate of growth of public spending is going to decline… and yet the requirement is to do more.'
According to the head of the civil service, two things follow from this. First, there will be a cross-party consensus in the Commons on an 'unrelenting search' for efficiencies and cheaper ways to deliver services. That, O'Donnell admitted, meant that 'civil service numbers will continue to decline'.
It was also a warning that internal Whitehall opposition to the continued privatisation of services and the use of the voluntary sector is futile.
'And, secondly, I'm afraid to say, it will be realistic to assume that the chancellor will want to carry on seeing pay restraint in the public services,' O'Donnell warned. 'I strongly encourage you to engage in this process of doing more for less.'
O'Donnell's stark words did little to raise the spirits of senior civil servants who had spent the morning debating a year-long delay to below-inflation pay rises, the impact of 84,000 Whitehall job cuts by 2008, rising workloads and the real-terms cuts in departmental budgets expected in the Comprehensive Spending Review.
Jonathan Baume, the FDA's general secretary, told the conference that 'by early July', with new premier Brown in place, 'the civil service and civil servants face significant challenges on a number of fronts'.
But he warned that 'too often public sector staff have felt disenfranchised from the difficult changes that have been made in the past decade' and called for a new period of political engagement over reforms.
Brown masterminded the unpopular efficiency and job-cuts targets in 2004, and while he has backed away from identifying a firm figure for additional cuts beyond 2008, Baume expects major upheavals following the chancellor's promotion.
Motions passed by FDA delegates claimed the head-count reduction was mere 'political point-scoring' with 'little basis in the reality of the [civil service's] workload', and managers are now adamant that the reduction of staff has had an impact on the services to which Brown and O'Donnell will demand improvements.
Michael Baxter, a statistician at the Department of Health and formerly of the Office for National Statistics, warned that the resource constraints that forced the ONS to relocate staff 'caused some very serious problems with the construction of the retail price index' – on which other key government policies, such as the public sector pay cap, are based.
Privately, other FDA delegates said they feared direct problems with the delivery of work and pensions, skills and health services.
Baume attacked the speculation surrounding the machinery-of-government changes and reconfiguration of departments as demotivating for civil servants.
Referring to the 'chaos' that followed the creation of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2001, he added that 'substantial human resources problems… usually emerge'.
'Neither Labour nor Conservative governments have been adept at handling these machinery-of-government changes. Too often such changes are made at the last minute, often following a general election, with little thought and almost no planning. Chopping and changing departments to massage a political ego is probably the worst excuse for reorganisation. But we all know it happens and too frequently,' he claimed.
O'Donnell is no stranger to such changes – his report led to the creation of the merged Revenue and Customs department in 2005. But, uncomfortable as it is for civil servants, O'Donnell stressed that Brown was entitled to redesign Whitehall if he believes that better services would follow.
'Prime ministers regard machinery-of-government changes as their right and responsibility and there will be times when they say: “This is what we're going to do”. I would hope to be consulted over how to make things more effective.'
That means wider and intensified use of Departmental Capability Reviews, Whitehall's fledgling inspection regime, which have put the performance of permanent secretaries and their senior staff under the microscope.
In the wake of Blair's announcement, Brown's closest advisers spent days briefing the media on plans for a 100-day overhaul of key public services, including improved access to GP practices and a new local government planning regime.
While the message to the public was one of renewal, rethinks and new dawns, Whitehall's internal message was an eerily familiar reflection of the past three years: more penny-pinching, heavy workloads and tougher conditions. That's how to manage expectations.
PFmay2007
