The benefits of Sir Gus’s quest for joined-up government are clear and other countries have shown it can be achieved
If joined-up government is the holy grail of public administration, then Sir Gus O’Donnell might be a sort of King Arthur. Over the past month, the Cabinet secretary has been quietly calling for a major reform in the way public money is spent. Rather than giving pots of money to departments then hoping they will tackle problems such as climate change, he wants cash to be allocated to specific cross-cutting problems – pooled budgets for teen pregnancy and obesity, perhaps.
Over the past three months, researchers from the Institute for Government have been examining how other countries have achieved successful joined-up government. We think there are three vital lessons to learn. First, keep the number of policy goals low. Second, joined-up government will fail unless it is powerfully driven by politicians. Finally, use money as a lever to change behaviour in departments – cash should drive collaboration.
The argument for joining up is well-rehearsed: many of the problems the government faces involve more than one department, and Whitehall has not historically been very good at working across boundaries. So making the civil service work effectively on complex problems probably means some changes to financial flows and organisational structures. It definitely means changing Whitehall culture.
Dealing with cross-cutting issues often means thinking differently – keeping your eye on the big picture of outcomes and citizen needs, rather than just the bit of it that your team happens to be working on.
The civil service is improving on this front. The 30 Public Service Agreements introduced in 2008 required departments to work together. The result has been a wave of experimentation with cross-departmental governance on new PSA delivery boards.
But governance is often all that the PSAs have changed. Money still flows to departments rather than problems and – unsurprisingly in the current political climate – ministers do not appear to have made the joined-up goals a political priority.
From Canada to Finland, other countries have experimented with a wide range of techniques. The first thing their experience suggests is that governments should keep the number of centrally driven joined-up goals to a minimum. Cross-government working takes up a huge amount of bureaucratic energy and vertical accountability to superiors will almost always trump horizontal accountability to colleagues.
The Dutch have only ten cross-cutting programmes, with pooled budgets attached, and the Finns just three. Importantly, these are specific top-down goals set out in agreements between the ruling coalition parties.
More ‘bottom-up’ approaches seem less powerful – Canada and New Zealand ask departments to show how their work contributes to a handful of high priority, but more general, goals – with mixed results.
Joining up seems to work best when it has strong political leadership. The Netherlands has done this by appointing two programme ministers – one for youth and families and another for urban policy – who sit outside the traditional departmental structure and work across organisations.
Finally, successful experiments often use cash to help departments work differently. For example, in Canada, departments often have to enter joint bids for funds, setting out each partner’s role and responsibilities and ensuring clear and logical programme design.
What does this suggest for a British system? One option is to create pooled budgets at the centre and make departments bid for them. The pooled budgets and the outcomes they are designed to achieve could be overseen by a lead minister or a Cabinet committee. A more radical option would be to create a handful of programme ministers for the government’s top five or so priorities. They would sit outside the traditional departments in small offices and use their budgets to commission work on, say, climate change from across Whitehall and perhaps even beyond.
This kind of reform might not be enough to turn Whitehall into Camelot, but it would definitely get civil servants sitting at the same round table.
Simon Parker is a fellow of the Institute for Government. The results of the institute’s research will be published towards the end of the year
