06 October 2006
Whitehall departments should look upon their fledgling inspection regime as an opportunity to learn and improve, the new finance chief at the Department for Education and Skills said this week.
Addressing CIPFA's annual central government finance conference on October 3, Jon Thompson, director general of corporate services at the DfES, urged delegates to make the most of Departmental Capability Reviews.
'DCRs are a huge strand of development. Use it to your advantage to learn,' he said. But he added that it was not the totality of the agenda, and individual departments should be able to set their own priorities.
The DfES was one of the first four departments to be subject to the new scrutiny exercises. Speaking to Public Finance after his session, Thompson, who has been in post since May, said the DCRs had been a useful exercise. 'What they told us resonated and drove us on and helped our improvement agenda,' he said. 'It's given some transparency to our performance.'
In a frank assessment of the impact of the DCR on the DfES's finance function, Thompson said the department was not yet as good as it might be at linking strategy to financial planning. People engaged in policy development needed to acquire an understanding of financial management, he said.
'We have to get people who develop policy to understand financial issues and take ownership of them,' he told the conference.
Thompson said in order to instil financial rigour among staff, the department had needed to take 'a fairly large stick' to the problem and design a policy model to be complied with before submissions could be put before ministers or the board. 'If it doesn't tick all the boxes, it will be thrown out,' he said, adding that these strict governance arrangements would be relaxed once the culture of financial discipline was embedded.
The conference also heard from Sarah Mullen, joint director of public spending at the Treasury, who also said that more needed to be done to strengthen civil servants' financial skills.
She identified high staff turnover within the Treasury as a particular problem and said work was under way to encourage staff to stay longer and build up their skills.
PFoct2006
