1st May 2009
By David Williams
The National Audit Office seems unable to enforce performance management in Whitehall, according to the chair of the Commons public administration select committee.
Tony Wright told a round table discussion organised by Public Finance that it has become ‘a truism’ to say the civil service manages its performance badly.
He also directly challenged the NAO’s performance measurement director, Nick Sloan, on the issue.
‘It’s been a consensus over many years that the civil service manages performance badly,’ said Wright. ‘I’ve heard endless permanent secretaries and Cabinet secretaries say it.
‘And yet we’ve had an NAO auditing government all these years. But seemingly it has not got hold of this issue of poor performance.’
He said his committee had discussed what action could be taken ‘to make sure that somebody starts monitoring and driving performance inside the system’.
Wright said: ‘People said to us you don’t need another body but you do need the NAO to up its game and get hold of these issues.’
Addressing Sloan, he then asked: ‘What I want to know is do you accept there is an issue there? And might you have a role in it?’
Sloan rejected the idea that the NAO does not address performance issues, and pointed out that the body’s work is tailored to the demands of Parliament.
He stressed the difficulty in making adjustments with the present system, which does not allow the NAO to criticise policy, and said it was ‘damn difficult’ to make comparisons with other countries.
Sloan argued there were also difficulties in measuring performance. ‘You have to fall back on some arbitrary scale which is fundamentally political, and will change from period to period.
‘I can see why people yearn for a simple answer. I just don’t think it’s there to be had.’
In the debate that followed, Colin Talbot, public policy professor at Manchester Business School, suggested that the NAO should report to all the Commons’ select committees.
He said: ‘They should produce regular reports on departmental annual performance analysing what departments have done. But you would have to relax the constraints on the NAO about policy issues, you’d have to get Parliament up for doing it.’
