Patrick Barbour spent 41 years in business. He was a founder member of the think tank Reform, a Trustee of Civitas, and is currently a director of the Effective Governance Forum. He is the co-author of the EGF report, Effective Government.
The six-month investigation into Dominic Raab, and his eventual resignation, demonstrates that the machinery of government in the UK is simply not fit for purpose. Departments are dysfunctional, and in desperate need of modernisation and professional management.
Ministers have a vast workload: constituency work, dealing with Parliament, media appearances, and running huge sections of the economy, ranging from health to transport. It’s absurd that, in addition to all that, leading ministers like Raab also have to spend time dealing with delicate Human Resources and staffing matters, as part of their wider responsibility of managing their department.
It is not for me to pass judgement on Rabb’s personal conduct. But Raab has rightly criticised the “Kafkaesque saga” he has been caught up in. Adam Tolley’s report into the allegations against him, meanwhile, highlights how different government departments’ grievance policies are to those of normal workplaces.
Both are fair points. The Justice department should not have been disrupted for months on end because of issues of this nature. As such, the way that government works must now be modernised.
Public services—from policing to pothole repair—are poor quality and expensive because of the poor productivity in the public sector, which has increased by just 15 per cent compared to the private sector between 2007 and 2019. The major cause is not money but the UK’s system of managing government.
Raab’s resignation letter says ministers must be given “direct oversight” over senior officials in order to “drive the reform the public expects of us”. At the Effective Governance Forum, we disagree. Ministers’ involvement in the granular elements of organisational management often means less is delivered for the public.
As Effective Management, our recent report, showed, reform has for years been held back by a mismatch of Ministers’ and senior Civil Servants’ skills and expertise to the needs of their roles. This has resulted in them both having impossible jobs.
Ministers are often appointed at short notice. Many spend short periods in position. Senior civil servants frequently change roles and departments, leading to instability and loss of knowledge and institutional memory.
Ahead of our report’s publication, we spoke to MPs (from all parties), Lords, academics, and journalists. And these two fundamental causes of failure in the public sector were widely recognised: the mismatch of experience and skills, and instability.
One of the recommendations in the report—that can help to tackle both issues—is to give responsibility for managing departments to a Chief Executive Officer. Departmental CEOs will bring enhanced objectivity, long-term organisational planning, and measurable objectives, and plans from the top to the lowest teams. They will stabilise departments with their correctly matched skills and experience.
Ministers, in turn, would act as the Chair of their departments and would have more time and energy to work on their political and policy objectives. The role of a Secretary of State is to make policy, yet currently, they spend much of their time trying to manage these huge departments, a task they are ill-equipped for. This must change.
Most government departments are huge. Take the Department for Education, for example, which is one of the UK’s largest employers with nearly 11,000 administrative staff and more than 200 roles with the title of Director General, Director, or Deputy Director.
Almost all large organisations employ management models with a Chair and CEO, including most charities, local governments, NHS trusts, and, of course, businesses. We believe government should be learning from businesses, which are the largest, most complex, and most efficient organisations in the UK, and the world.
Australia and New Zealand—two parliamentary democracies initially modelled on our own—both employ variations of this CEO-Chair model at the top of government departments, with the latter introducing CEOs in the late 1980s.
In the UK, it is often said that our constitution evolves gradually and without radical overhaul. But numerous radical reforms have, in fact, been introduced and, as research and polling by my organisation shows, more radical change is now needed to stem a concerning level of political apathy in the UK.
A poll we commissioned from Savanta ComRes and published last week showed that just 1 in 5 voters (21 per cent) are confident that national politicians can meet the challenges that face the nation. A majority (58 per cent) meanwhile, don’t believe public services will improve, regardless of which party is in power, and 63 per cent agree that taxpayers do not get good value for money from public services.
Our system of government is broken, and voters feel powerless. Only a radical overhaul of Whitehall can address these problems.
That is why the EFG has launched its new campaign. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 introduced professionalism into the Civil Service. The role of government has changed substantially in the intervening 170 years but the UK’s system of managing government has hardly changed at all.
And change we must. The EFG’s proposals are both radical and achievable—a rare thing in the world of policy and politics. And they would be an ideal addition to the manifestos of any of the major parties, including – and especially – the Conservatives.
Patrick Barbour spent 41 years in business. He was a founder member of the think tank Reform, a Trustee of Civitas, and is currently a director of the Effective Governance Forum. He is the co-author of the EGF report, Effective Government.
The six-month investigation into Dominic Raab, and his eventual resignation, demonstrates that the machinery of government in the UK is simply not fit for purpose. Departments are dysfunctional, and in desperate need of modernisation and professional management.
Ministers have a vast workload: constituency work, dealing with Parliament, media appearances, and running huge sections of the economy, ranging from health to transport. It’s absurd that, in addition to all that, leading ministers like Raab also have to spend time dealing with delicate Human Resources and staffing matters, as part of their wider responsibility of managing their department.
It is not for me to pass judgement on Rabb’s personal conduct. But Raab has rightly criticised the “Kafkaesque saga” he has been caught up in. Adam Tolley’s report into the allegations against him, meanwhile, highlights how different government departments’ grievance policies are to those of normal workplaces.
Both are fair points. The Justice department should not have been disrupted for months on end because of issues of this nature. As such, the way that government works must now be modernised.
Public services—from policing to pothole repair—are poor quality and expensive because of the poor productivity in the public sector, which has increased by just 15 per cent compared to the private sector between 2007 and 2019. The major cause is not money but the UK’s system of managing government.
Raab’s resignation letter says ministers must be given “direct oversight” over senior officials in order to “drive the reform the public expects of us”. At the Effective Governance Forum, we disagree. Ministers’ involvement in the granular elements of organisational management often means less is delivered for the public.
As Effective Management, our recent report, showed, reform has for years been held back by a mismatch of Ministers’ and senior Civil Servants’ skills and expertise to the needs of their roles. This has resulted in them both having impossible jobs.
Ministers are often appointed at short notice. Many spend short periods in position. Senior civil servants frequently change roles and departments, leading to instability and loss of knowledge and institutional memory.
Ahead of our report’s publication, we spoke to MPs (from all parties), Lords, academics, and journalists. And these two fundamental causes of failure in the public sector were widely recognised: the mismatch of experience and skills, and instability.
One of the recommendations in the report—that can help to tackle both issues—is to give responsibility for managing departments to a Chief Executive Officer. Departmental CEOs will bring enhanced objectivity, long-term organisational planning, and measurable objectives, and plans from the top to the lowest teams. They will stabilise departments with their correctly matched skills and experience.
Ministers, in turn, would act as the Chair of their departments and would have more time and energy to work on their political and policy objectives. The role of a Secretary of State is to make policy, yet currently, they spend much of their time trying to manage these huge departments, a task they are ill-equipped for. This must change.
Most government departments are huge. Take the Department for Education, for example, which is one of the UK’s largest employers with nearly 11,000 administrative staff and more than 200 roles with the title of Director General, Director, or Deputy Director.
Almost all large organisations employ management models with a Chair and CEO, including most charities, local governments, NHS trusts, and, of course, businesses. We believe government should be learning from businesses, which are the largest, most complex, and most efficient organisations in the UK, and the world.
Australia and New Zealand—two parliamentary democracies initially modelled on our own—both employ variations of this CEO-Chair model at the top of government departments, with the latter introducing CEOs in the late 1980s.
In the UK, it is often said that our constitution evolves gradually and without radical overhaul. But numerous radical reforms have, in fact, been introduced and, as research and polling by my organisation shows, more radical change is now needed to stem a concerning level of political apathy in the UK.
A poll we commissioned from Savanta ComRes and published last week showed that just 1 in 5 voters (21 per cent) are confident that national politicians can meet the challenges that face the nation. A majority (58 per cent) meanwhile, don’t believe public services will improve, regardless of which party is in power, and 63 per cent agree that taxpayers do not get good value for money from public services.
Our system of government is broken, and voters feel powerless. Only a radical overhaul of Whitehall can address these problems.
That is why the EFG has launched its new campaign. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 introduced professionalism into the Civil Service. The role of government has changed substantially in the intervening 170 years but the UK’s system of managing government has hardly changed at all.
And change we must. The EFG’s proposals are both radical and achievable—a rare thing in the world of policy and politics. And they would be an ideal addition to the manifestos of any of the major parties, including – and especially – the Conservatives.