Francis Maude, Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office, has outlined plans to increase transparency, accountability and efficiency across Whitehall.
"The Conservative Party values and support the Civil Service", he said, "but in order to deliver the change this country requires, the Civil Service needs to reform".
In describing the problems in the civil service, Maude highlighted surveys showing low morale and high absenteeism. "The current system fails to incentivise excellence, to support poor performers, is opaque and inflexible, and allows inefficiency to continue without exposing it to proper scrutiny and remedy", he said.
To tackle these problems, he outlined the reforms listed below. Maude added that the aim of these reforms is "to make the Civil Service a world class institution, a better place to work and ready to deliver the change that this country needs".
To increase transparency across the Civil service and quangocracy:
-
Require every department to publish a business plan, listing its key priorities, how it plans to achieve them and how it will measure achievement.
-
Expose the costs of policies to the public.
-
Publish easily intelligible, comparable information on the relative performance of departments
-
Lay out clearly what quangos do and how much they cost
To ensure the Civil Service is held to account for delivery:
-
Establish a new model for departmental boards, which will hold senior management accountable for how they run their department
-
Create an assumption that Senior Responsible Officers (SROs) stay in place for the duration of their projects Improve the appraisal system so that the best and worst performers are properly identified
-
Enable Civil Service managers to remove employees who are not performing by establishing more rigorous appraisal and appeals systems
-
Request Select Committees to scrutinise departments in even greater detail; asking them to examine thoroughly business plans, accounts and reported costs/benefits of policies
-
Ensure Government wide Heads of HR/IT/Procurement/Finance are full time roles with responsibility for recruitment, training and building career paths for their professional stream within the Civil Service
To further promote efficiency:
-
Give more power to civil servants to push for efficiency in their departments through strengthening the role and stature of the finance function and requiring civil servants to seek operational efficiency improvements
-
Reward civil servants for increasing efficiency Bring the Civil Service Compensation Scheme into line with the private sector
-
Encourage innovation through encouraging a change in focus of the PAC and NAO
Read the speech in full.