I was glad to be able to read the recently published The Radical How, co-authored by Andrew Greenway and Tom Loosemore, who want to 'shift government from an organisation of programmes and projects, to one of missions and services'.
One reason I wanted to read it, apart from its subject matter, was that Andrew Greenway had previously co-authored Bluffocracy - a brilliant take down of ...
'... the top of our government, our media and the civil service [where] core skills are talking fast, writing well and endeavouring to imbue the purest wind with substance. They know a little bit about everything, and an awful lot about nothing.
So this new report promised to be a good read, which indeed it was. Here is my summary and occasional comment:-
It's always useful to divide Civil Service/Government Reform reports into three elements:
· The Problems
· Possible Improvements
· Implementation
The Problems
The report is on strong ground by homing in on an interesting selection of problems:
· Governments focus too much on outputs (as distinct from outcomes) because of the long lead-in times to achieving and being able to measure outcomes, especially for long-term, national-level ambitions.
· Vertical lines of accountability are inflexible and discourage cross-team working.
· Hypothesis-driven cost-benefit analysis as demanded by HMT in business cases is a good thing, provided these hypotheses are tested against realities, and the analysis is iterated over time. But, all too often, the hypotheses are not tested until it’s much too late to iterate anything.
The final bullet is a particularly interesting. I would add that much the same applies to post-implementation evaluation. Hardly anyone in government is interested in it. The Treasury set a bad example by hardly ever evaluating the success of the Chancellor's policies. And most Ministers (and hence senior officials, who take their lead from Ministers) aren't interested in learning from pilot projects. They like headline-attracting national rollouts.
The report's authors stress that this is a cultural issue as much as a process one.
'[A recent PAC report] says that “programme resets are typically viewed negatively, government bodies continue to try to resolve unresolvable issues, leading to wasted effort and costs, rather than admitting the need for a reset.” In other words, even when the management information is available, decisive corrective action tends not to happen.
In practice, it means placing huge bets on the assumptions made at the policy stage. Yet this is almost always the moment where the least is known. The small policy or analytical error can snowball into a catastrophic mistake as implementation ramps up. And when faced with a hostile opposition and media environment, the cultural temptation to bury heads in the sand rather than face up to mistakes often serves to compound the damage further.
But who cares what the Public Accounts Committee says?
'Select Committee or Public Accounts Committee hearings are almost always a ‘red pen’ exercise - they happen after things go wrong, or when they are very obviously about to. This turns them into performative occasions, in which committee members attempt to tease out admissions of failure while witnesses go on the defensive. Candour is rare. And in any case, by the time a hearing takes place, the issues in delivering the programme are usually far too advanced for a committee’s recommendations to make much difference.
Hearings like these don’t do much to improve outcomes. But they do encourage a certain set of skills to prosper in the senior ranks of the civil service. ... Lower grade civil servants, who have the knowledge of the daily realities of public service delivery their senior management lack, never get invited at all. The fact that very few of the civil servants who’ve deployed the kind of approaches described in this report (or come from civil service professions that think in these ways) have risen to the point of taking part in these committees is a real problem.
... Even the Public Accounts Committee, supported by the National Audit Office, is constrained in how far and in what directions it can dig. The language is also telling - ‘audit’ is an activity intentionally looking for malfeasance, or picking through the bones of failure. It is bound to look for flaws to address, rather than flagging opportunities to improve.
Possible Improvements
The report helpfully highlights a number of success stories. Universal Credit, for instance, was a rare example of turning around a huge programme that was “heading for nowhere but the rocks.”
'A crucial moment for the new team was the Secretary of State saying to them: “I want you to deliver an intervention that means we support more people to find more work, more of the time, while protecting those who can’t work.” Note the difference between this and: “I want you to deliver Universal Credit.” The Minister set a clear outcome for the team to achieve, not a named policy for them to deliver.
But how to replicate this?
The authors suggest reframing the roles of ministers, Senior Responsible Owners (SROs - the senior official ultimately accountable for a programme), and Parliamentary committees.
'Make them more oriented around missions or outcomes, rather than departmental lines of accountability. Create the constitutional space for select committees to confer honours for exceptional public service, to position them as advocates of great work as much as those holding poor performance to account.
As other commentaries on civil service reform have referenced, lasting institutional change will require ministers to adapt their roles and norms too. The prescription often points towards better training - vocational education on how to be more effective in a job many new ministers have no professional parallel for. This is important, but not enough.
The same logic applies to ministers leading missions for a couple of days per week - the closer they are to the team and to the realities of how ideas play out in practice, the more effective they are likely to be at delivering the political aims they seek.
There are some intensely practical ways to help create that closeness. Ministers usually spend most of their time ensconced in their own Whitehall department buildings. The physical geography of power is important. Co-locating ministers responsible for delivering missions for a couple of days per week - possibly alongside decanting Number 10 for a long-overdue refurbishment - would cost nothing and help literally bring down the walls between departmental silos.
The report recognises that Ministers will too often be reshuffled to pastures new ...
'... but civil service leadership should be more long-lasting. Consistent senior leadership is an enduringly reliable indicator of success in government transformation efforts, longevity of tenure in Senior Service Owner roles is essential. Senior civil servants will need to be given clear, positive incentives that staying in post long enough to make a substantial contribution is to their benefit, as much as it is to the programme as a whole.
It follows that:
We must also rethink how civil servants are rewarded. Again, that does not mean throwing out the existing package. But it must involve a full discussion of how sufficient flexibility is introduced to induce and retain a far more diverse pool of talent, recognising both the fact that people’s needs change over time, and that the labour market itself is changing fast.
Turning to Parliament:
We need mechanisms for public scrutiny of progress towards delivering missions that are real-time rather than post-hoc, bring expertise from multiple fields to bear, and subject the government’s highest priorities to robust, informed and constructive feedback. We also need them to recognise and celebrate success, as well as traducing failure.
Implementation
This is, so far, all good stuff. But will anyone take the lead in implementing these recommendations? The authors ...
'... believe in the old adage about making the most of a crisis. We think taking a new approach makes it possible to shift government from an organisation of programmes, projects and paperwork, to one of missions, services and people.
But the civil service would need to take the lead:
'Public service management practice and organisation is a domain few ministers have chosen to enter. The current orthodoxy is entrenched, and very hard to change. Even political leaders who want to change it rarely have enough time in office to even start thinking about how.
Multiple attempts to reform how the machinery of government works over recent decades have failed to deliver radically improved outcomes at scale. Tweaks to departmental structures, new processes, or the creation of central units, have yielded some advances. But their effect on the overall character and direction of the public service has been fleeting.
The rare exceptions to this - and they exist in central government, local government and the NHS - prove the point. Thanks to unusual circumstances that created political cover, they were able to practise the methods we describe in this report - and they delivered. And yet these exceptions have remained just that. When leaders move on or the circumstances change, ways of working revert to the norm.
And, by the way:
Addressing the current and growing capability gap will demand substantial interventions. Civil service training is a pale shadow of what it was 50 years ago. A National College for Government would pay for itself in saved management consultancy fees. Investing in that - and making it open to participants from outside the civil service - would start to answer the need for a talent pipeline in expensive, scarce skills like cyber security or data science.
There are, unfortunately, no signs that the current civil service leadership has any interest in any of this. Brexit implementation, the flawed response to Covid and many other blunders have come and gone. Powerful broadsides such as this one have no discernible impact even though (or because?) it was fired by two former Permanent Secretaries.
Coincidentally, the Institute for Government today (11 March) published a report on the organisation of government which recommended, amongst other things that ‘there should be a new statute for the civil service and the Civil Service Board to hold its leadership accountable for reform priorities’.
Maybe, just maybe, the Keir Starmer/Sue Gray combination will listen?
Let's hope so.
Notes
You can read The Radical How here (in my extensive online library).
Amazon are currently selling my 'Speaking Truth to Power' for only £3.99. You could buy it for your team - or your boss?!
Several good ideas here, I particularly like the thought that select committees give awards to individuals/teams who've done a particularly good job.