The Civil Service better brace itself

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister (Photo: Paul Grover)

Francis Maude is a fan of the Civil Service. Today he presented its upper echelons with his plan for what Whitehall should look like in 2020, a decade from now. In his speech he noted that the qualities of the Civil Service that make it “one of the jewels in our constitution” remain intact 18 years after he was last in government. He made a point of noting the ill effects of 13 years of Labour: the Civil Service had too often been marginalised “through the spread of special advisers or the over-use of expensive consultants”.

What he plans is not easy. His shopping list included quite a few words freighted with meaning that will make some nervous. The Civil Service of 2020 will need to be “smaller and more strategic”, which means reducing numbers (though whatever the doomsayers of the Guardian and elsewhere predict, much of what is required can be achieved by natural wastage); also “modern and flexible”, which suggests greater private sector influence and changes to working practices; it will need to produce a “modern employee offer”, which sounds like a reworking of the pay and conditions for recruitment purposes to align it with the private sector.

But there is a lot that those in the Senior Civil Service who are happy to embrace reform will be delighted to hear. For example, on performance management, he questioned not only whether outstanding effort it rewarded, but more problematically whether “we manage poor performers with sufficient rigour? I sense some discomfort that the under-performing few are too often carried by the hard-working majority.” The SCS needs to give greater value to operational and managerial jobs, which in the past have been neglected in favour of policy jobs working alongside ministers.

He wants Whitehall to use its “massive collective buying power” to drive down procurement costs, and to limit the scope of its activities to a core few (strategy, cash, headcount, big reputational projects, etc). Significantly, he wants to design an “affordable reward package with a sustainable balance between pay and pension”. The existing redundancy scheme is “untenable”. It should be capped at 12 months for compulsory, 15 months voluntary. Sick pay – a particular bugbear – has to be brought in line with the private sector.

Mr Maude is walking a tightrope. He is asking the Civil Service, which expanded under Labour, to join in the task of shrinking every aspect of its being: size, cost, sphere of activity. The Civil Servants in his cross hairs are the very people he needs to deliver sweeping changes in Government departments and further afield. He must engage them, while maintaining enough distance to be able to drive them and demand great sacrifices. His is not a role that will attract great public attention but it is one of the most important in the Coalition.