19 November 2004
The draft civil service Bill, published in a consultation document this week, will help maintain the values and high standards of the civil service, the First Division Association said this week.
FDA general secretary Jonathan Baume accepted the Bill in principle, saying the FDA had campaigned for legislation for the past six years.
'We welcome the long-promised publication of this draft Bill which demonstrates the increasing support and degree of scrutiny this issue has received,' he said.
However, the union believes the draft Bill has flaws, particularly when there is no commitment to cap the number of special advisers in government. This has been a bone of contention since Labour came to power.
Baume said. 'For the past two years, the Cabinet Office has sought to increase political involvement in civil service appointments and minimise the importance of the civil service code, and the Bill has been drafted in this spirit.'
Ruling out a fundamental restructuring of the civil service, the government has side-stepped the controversy about advisers and suggests that their role should be clarified in any new legislation.
Published on November 15, the consultation document says: 'Of course, the government must account for the special advisers appointed by ministers. The Bill's approach is to require transparency and it provides for the minister for the civil service to make annual reports to Parliament giving their names, responsibilities, activities and cost.'
The government, which is determined to push ahead with the reform process across Whitehall, said any future legislation should not impede the civil service's 'continuing evolution, development and reform'.
The draft Bill, which is out for consultation until February 28, suggests the establishment of a new commission that would ensure all appointments to the civil service are open and based on merit.
A Cabinet Office source said the Bill was an attempt 'to placate and ease' some of the issues raised by the public administration select committee, which had produced its own Bill last year to try to force the government into action on the issue.
He told Public Finance: 'We are not convinced that a Bill is the right way forward but understand that many people have concerns which need to be addressed. What is important is to try to get some kind of cross-party consensus on the issue, which is the main aim of Sir Andrew Turnbull.'
Turnbull, the Cabinet secretary, is thought to be lukewarm on the issue of a Bill, but the source added: 'The high standards across Whitehall will be preserved, but not at the expense of reform.
'Turnbull has made it clear that the challenge is to change and reform without losing the ethos of the civil service. That is what is being aimed at.'
Social security IT systems 'far behind the outside world'
The outgoing chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee has accused the government of creating an 'alien' welfare system that is too complicated for most of its users.
In the foreword to his final report, published last week, Sir Thomas Boyd-Carpenter said the government must 'urgently' reform the system, even if it means that some people will fall off the benefits ladder.
The seventeenth report summarises the year's work of the SSAC. In an overview of the changes that have taken place in the nine years he has chaired the committee, Boyd-Carpenter calls for a 'radical simplification programme' to make the system 'comprehensible to its customers and manageable by its staff'.
He claims the Department for Work and Pensions has an over-complex IT system and has fallen behind the 'outside world'.
He said: 'The complexity is both driven by, and drives, the IT problems that the department faces. While there have been improvements during the past decade, the department probably remains as far behind the outside world in its systems as it ever was.'
The current tax credit and benefits system is too large and unwieldy, according to the government's welfare adviser, who said: 'Complexity characterises the entire benefits system, and the addition of tax credits, with different rules, merely makes the whole structure more opaque to its customers.'
He warns that the resulting welfare regime is a 'system whose complexity risks appearing both alien and capricious to its customers'.
He adds that the size, complexity and dispersion of the benefits system and the blurring of the boundaries between the departments that administer them 'has led to a pervading sense of a loss of cohesion'.
PFnov2004
