By Jaimie Kaffash
8 July 2010
Whitehall will no longer have its work directed by aspirational performance targets, the prime minister said today.
David Cameron told civil servants at a conference in London that ‘structural reform plans’ for each Whitehall department would be included in the full departmental business plans published after October’s Spending Review.
These would not contain targets but ‘specific deadlines for specific actions’, Cameron said.
‘Not what we hope to achieve – but the actions we will take.
‘They will show how each department plans to bring democratic accountability – how they will create the structures that put people in charge, not politicians. I want you [civil servants] to read these reform plans and work with them. They mean a real culture shift for you, a sea change in what you do.’
The prime minister also said that he and Chancellor George Osborne will tomorrow release suggestions for reform after a government consultation. A letter asking for public sector workers’ views on public service reform was sent out last month. The response has been ‘fantastic’, Cameron said, with 50,000 ideas returned in two weeks.
However, the Unite union said the consultation was meaningless. Assistant general secretary Gail Cartmail said: ‘What members are telling us is that they want an end to the expensive privatisation of public services.
‘They don’t want the axing of vital local services, such as nursery provision. The majority of the electorate in May didn’t vote for the massive cuts programme now on the agenda’
‘The fact that this letter has been sent out smacks of seeking “boy scout” solutions. It is ludicrous to ask people for their suggestions to make savings, when the government has already decided on the biggest round of public sector cuts since the 1930s.’
