Civil Service Live

Civil Servants' expertise must be utilised - chief executives

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Chief Executives talking during the seminar

The knowledge and expertise of civil servants working within delivery agencies has to be utilised if policies are to be successful, a panel of chief executives has said.

Head of the Home Civil Service, Gus O'Donnell and a number of agency heads took part in a discussion that covered cross-department joint working and the challenges of transformational government.

Sir Gus said it was increasingly, and necessarily, the case that the “people dreaming up the policy have had the delivery experience“ when he took part in the seminar at Civil Service Live.

Joining Gus O'Donnell were chief executives from areas such as crime and transport, as well as permanent secretaries Robert Devereux and Nicholas Macpherson.

Robert Devereux, head of the Department for Transport (DfT) since last year, said there was often a gap between policy and delivery - giving the example of this month's changes to elderly bus travel which probably took just “minutes“ of ministers' time and had been the subject of ten months working by his staff.

Ordnance Survey chief executive officer Vanessa Lawrence, like most of the panel, thought policy and delivery should be “intertwined“ if government was to work effectively

And Sir Gus reported that politicians were increasingly thinking beyond announcements and beginning to “think about the consequences of delivery“, while communication between departments and agencies was becoming a two-way relationship.

The experience of Vince Gaskell, chief executive of the Criminal Records Bureau, has been a little different as policy decisions were handed down from the Home Office to the agency once it was on its feet.

Although there were weaknesses, and the model would not fit everyone, Gaskell said it had been “better driven from the delivery end“.

“It is knowing when to let go and having the confidence to let go“, he said.

Turning to transformational government, Robert Devereux emphasised the gains that could be made and the difficulties that could be faced when he discussed the linking up of MOT garages and insurance databases to the government's online system.

The introduction of the technology into thousands of small garages across the country caused some problem and financial costs for both the agency and its IT partner Siemens, and Robert Devereux said: “I am not sure that I know of many transformational government projects that have been easy to do.“

But ultimately, he added, the system had become the biggest online retailer in the country used by 100,000 people a day, making it an “extremely clever piece of work“ that represented an “excellent story“ for government.