Whitehall love and pain

David Cameron will address nearly 500 senior civil servants this morning on his new philosophy of public service, namely that departments will no longer be answerable to targets issued from above but directly to the taxpayer. The Government has been busy talking to Whitehall this week, and I’ve looked at this love-bombing in my Telegraph column today. Here’s an extract:

“Mr Maude yesterday addressed a conference organised by the think tank Reform, whose director Andrew Haldenby is one of the most eloquent critics of what he fears is the Coalition’s failure to take on what he calls the “structural causes of inefficiency”. For a start, he says, ministers being embraced by delirious civil servants, telling them what a joy it is to have them on board, should be immediately suspicious. As Jim Hacker discovered every week, a happy Sir Humphrey is a Sir Humphrey who is getting away with something. Mr Haldenby believes that Mr Cameron is returning to a traditional model which is no longer working.”Then there are those in Westminster who believe that by ceding power to the mandarins, for example by doing away with the political advisers who previously used to drive through progress, Mr Cameron is guilty of “unilateral disarmament”, leaving ministers vulnerable to wily officials. Some senior mandarins are uneasy about the absence of heavyweight policy advisers in No 10 itself. Giving Cabinet ministers autonomy when things are going well is easy: but how will Mr Cameron drive through his agenda if members of his private team underperform, as some inevitably will?

“The Prime Minister’s decision to put Lord Browne of Madingley, the former head of BP, in charge of an “efficiency unit” just when he is talking about ending the reliance on outside agencies has also been questioned. The betting is that like so many of his predecessors, Lord Browne will be eaten for breakfast, no doubt at the Athenaeum. Then there is the “hair shirtier than thou” issue, as competition between ministers to promise the largest cuts is derided by officials who fear political posturing is coming before value for money.”