Sir Bernard Jenkin MP is the MP for Harwich and North Essex, and was Shadow Defence Secretary from 2001 – 2003.
I once asked a then leader of the opposition: “Who is your shadow minister for the Civil Service?” He named a colleague. I had to point out that the answer was him, because the prime minister’s own official title includes “Minister for the Civil Service.”
That forgetfulness helps to explain why Whitehall reform always ends up an afterthought. Only once they are in office do prime ministers complain about pulling levers and nothing happening, or about officials “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” Yet it is successive governments that bear ultimate responsibility for the decline in state effectiveness, first through neglect, then through ill-thought-out reactions such as more special advisers, a bigger centre of government, or yet another government reshuffle.
It ought to be refreshing, then, that Andy Burnham gave the shape of Whitehall some thought before entering No 10 on Monday. But Andy Burnham’s plan to build up the centre to counterbalance the Treasury does not begin to address the fundamental problem, and bolting on a “No. 10 North” is a gimmick, not a cure. The danger is more of the same: frustration, failure to deliver, and a public growing so disillusioned with our whole system of government that voters keep taking flight, in despair, to the political extremes.
What is needed instead is a comprehensive plan.
Few of the seventeen or eighteen attempts to reform Whitehall since the 1968 Fulton Report have left much trace. A serious plan will never emerge from the centre of government alone, consumed as it is by the daily struggle to keep up with events. It requires forethought, an electoral mandate, and a full parliament and beyond to see it through.
It must command the support of every minister, special adviser and official: harnessing the enthusiasts for change, and there are many, leading the majority who will cooperate, and moving on those who will not. Leaders, from the prime minister down, must live the change themselves and prove their commitment by personal example. This will take serious political will, and it must be one of the government’s central missions. Otherwise, it will fail, like all the others.
Imagine the energy that could be released if just some of what is currently spent resisting change were turned towards it.
The two features at the heart of the plan are leadership and culture, which are precisely the two things almost no one wants to talk about. Yet the leadership of successful large organisations outside government rightly obsess over their organisations’ culture, recognising that it dictates what gets done and how it gets done, how talent is retained, and how risks are managed.
Warren Buffett put it plainly: “culture, more than rule books, determines how an organisation behaves.” Management guru Peter Drucker went further: “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” When Satya Nadella took over a stalling Microsoft in 2014, he did not begin with a reorganisation chart; he began by setting out to change how the company’s own leaders behaved, moving them from a culture that prized having the answers to one that prized learning. Microsoft’s subsequent turnaround is now taught in business schools as a case study in culture-led change.
None of this is a fringe preoccupation. It is simply what the best-run organisations do as a matter of course, and it is precisely what Whitehall has never seriously attempted.
Good leaders have to be trained and developed, and they must then exemplify the culture they want to see in their own attitudes and behaviour. Everyone agrees Whitehall needs transformation and then talks about almost anything but culture. Yet restructuring departments and renaming roles change nothing: they rehouse the same attitudes and behaviours.
Business at its best has much to teach government, though it cannot simply be replicated. It has recently been reported that a civil servant is far more likely to die in the line of duty than to be dismissed for poor performance. Why, meanwhile, is recognition so sparse for those with real subject knowledge and domain expertise? Why are generalists so consistently favoured over genuine experts, rewarded, too often, for fluency in the jargon that wins ‘competency-based interviews?’
Which attitudes and behaviours actually promote state effectiveness, and why are the wrong ones so often the ones that get rewarded? These questions will sit at the centre of a major research programme with Henley Business School. It aims to identify the behaviours to be encouraged and those to be rooted out, and to work out how leaders must oversee that change.
What could be learned from Francis Maude’s creation of the Government Digital Service, or from the whole-of-government reform programmes in New Zealand and Singapore?
At present, there is no one in Whitehall whose job is to lead and drive a cross-government transformation of the kind that companies such as Ford, Microsoft, IBM and Unilever have carried out. It cannot be delegated to a single minister, junior or senior, nor to one department and a handful of officials.
So, the government should establish a State Effectiveness Council, modelled on the National Security Council: chaired by the prime minister at least monthly, and bringing together the most senior cabinet ministers and officials. It should act as a board, owning the policy on senior appointments, performance management, pay and promotion.
Every department and public body should have its own equivalent board, and line managers should take back control of their organisations from the tyranny of HR, which should, by all means, advise but never decide.
Much work remains to flesh this out: better financial and programme management; the proper role of the centre; leadership development for ministers, special advisers, and officials; how to build a smaller, better-paid civil service; the role of AI. The list is long.
But it is essential.
Without it, government will keep veering from crisis to crisis, and the public’s sense that the system no longer works will only harden. The prime minister already holds the title Minister for the Civil Service. The test of this government is whether, at last, his actions reflect its importance. If Labour introduces good reforms (like the new National School for Government and Public Service), Conservatives should support them.
Sir Bernard Jenkin MP is the MP for Harwich and North Essex, and was Shadow Defence Secretary from 2001 – 2003.
I once asked a then leader of the opposition: “Who is your shadow minister for the Civil Service?” He named a colleague. I had to point out that the answer was him, because the prime minister’s own official title includes “Minister for the Civil Service.”
That forgetfulness helps to explain why Whitehall reform always ends up an afterthought. Only once they are in office do prime ministers complain about pulling levers and nothing happening, or about officials “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” Yet it is successive governments that bear ultimate responsibility for the decline in state effectiveness, first through neglect, then through ill-thought-out reactions such as more special advisers, a bigger centre of government, or yet another government reshuffle.
It ought to be refreshing, then, that Andy Burnham gave the shape of Whitehall some thought before entering No 10 on Monday. But Andy Burnham’s plan to build up the centre to counterbalance the Treasury does not begin to address the fundamental problem, and bolting on a “No. 10 North” is a gimmick, not a cure. The danger is more of the same: frustration, failure to deliver, and a public growing so disillusioned with our whole system of government that voters keep taking flight, in despair, to the political extremes.
What is needed instead is a comprehensive plan.
Few of the seventeen or eighteen attempts to reform Whitehall since the 1968 Fulton Report have left much trace. A serious plan will never emerge from the centre of government alone, consumed as it is by the daily struggle to keep up with events. It requires forethought, an electoral mandate, and a full parliament and beyond to see it through.
It must command the support of every minister, special adviser and official: harnessing the enthusiasts for change, and there are many, leading the majority who will cooperate, and moving on those who will not. Leaders, from the prime minister down, must live the change themselves and prove their commitment by personal example. This will take serious political will, and it must be one of the government’s central missions. Otherwise, it will fail, like all the others.
Imagine the energy that could be released if just some of what is currently spent resisting change were turned towards it.
The two features at the heart of the plan are leadership and culture, which are precisely the two things almost no one wants to talk about. Yet the leadership of successful large organisations outside government rightly obsess over their organisations’ culture, recognising that it dictates what gets done and how it gets done, how talent is retained, and how risks are managed.
Warren Buffett put it plainly: “culture, more than rule books, determines how an organisation behaves.” Management guru Peter Drucker went further: “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” When Satya Nadella took over a stalling Microsoft in 2014, he did not begin with a reorganisation chart; he began by setting out to change how the company’s own leaders behaved, moving them from a culture that prized having the answers to one that prized learning. Microsoft’s subsequent turnaround is now taught in business schools as a case study in culture-led change.
None of this is a fringe preoccupation. It is simply what the best-run organisations do as a matter of course, and it is precisely what Whitehall has never seriously attempted.
Good leaders have to be trained and developed, and they must then exemplify the culture they want to see in their own attitudes and behaviour. Everyone agrees Whitehall needs transformation and then talks about almost anything but culture. Yet restructuring departments and renaming roles change nothing: they rehouse the same attitudes and behaviours.
Business at its best has much to teach government, though it cannot simply be replicated. It has recently been reported that a civil servant is far more likely to die in the line of duty than to be dismissed for poor performance. Why, meanwhile, is recognition so sparse for those with real subject knowledge and domain expertise? Why are generalists so consistently favoured over genuine experts, rewarded, too often, for fluency in the jargon that wins ‘competency-based interviews?’
Which attitudes and behaviours actually promote state effectiveness, and why are the wrong ones so often the ones that get rewarded? These questions will sit at the centre of a major research programme with Henley Business School. It aims to identify the behaviours to be encouraged and those to be rooted out, and to work out how leaders must oversee that change.
What could be learned from Francis Maude’s creation of the Government Digital Service, or from the whole-of-government reform programmes in New Zealand and Singapore?
At present, there is no one in Whitehall whose job is to lead and drive a cross-government transformation of the kind that companies such as Ford, Microsoft, IBM and Unilever have carried out. It cannot be delegated to a single minister, junior or senior, nor to one department and a handful of officials.
So, the government should establish a State Effectiveness Council, modelled on the National Security Council: chaired by the prime minister at least monthly, and bringing together the most senior cabinet ministers and officials. It should act as a board, owning the policy on senior appointments, performance management, pay and promotion.
Every department and public body should have its own equivalent board, and line managers should take back control of their organisations from the tyranny of HR, which should, by all means, advise but never decide.
Much work remains to flesh this out: better financial and programme management; the proper role of the centre; leadership development for ministers, special advisers, and officials; how to build a smaller, better-paid civil service; the role of AI. The list is long.
But it is essential.
Without it, government will keep veering from crisis to crisis, and the public’s sense that the system no longer works will only harden. The prime minister already holds the title Minister for the Civil Service. The test of this government is whether, at last, his actions reflect its importance. If Labour introduces good reforms (like the new National School for Government and Public Service), Conservatives should support them.