28 November 2008
By Vivienne Russell Transformation is not yet in the ‘DNA of government’, Whitehall’s transformation adviser has said. Sir David Varney told the second annual Varney conference, hosted by Governetz, that while a ‘good and promising start’ had been made on the transformation agenda set out in his 2006 report, ‘more needs to be done’. ‘This requires leadership and determination,’ he told delegates at the November 24 conference. ‘We need to find ways of accelerating the next generation of services.’ Varney said the government’s strategy was beginning to tally with his recommendations and an architecture for service transformation had been put in place. The centrepiece ‘Tell Us Once’ project for reporting births and deaths was up and running and was adapting to problems highlighted by user feedback. ‘We set out with a model designed by the best policy brains. We’re now using one designed by the service user.’ Ray Shostak, head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, told the conference that Varney’s report had ‘shone a light on the central question of what public services look like if you look at them from the point of view of the citizen’. He agreed that, while some progress had been made, more needed to be done. ‘There is a great deal more to do. Our capacity, collectively, to listen, is the most important element of getting public services right.’
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