Robert Devereux is the overall Head of the Policy Profession and is the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions.
A board of senior policy leaders oversees the management and coordination of activities to strengthen policy professionalism. Board members, and a wider network comprising other Departmental Heads of Profession for Policy, provide the profession’s collective leadership.
They work closely with individual departments, devolved administrations and the HR community to strengthen policy skills across government by:
- setting clear standards against which policy makers can measure/assess performance and, sitting alongside this, learning and development support for policy skills
- helping policy makers build knowledge and best practice to share with others
- building the cross-government policy community to provide a collective voice and career support.
Policy at Civil Service Live 2010
At Civil Service Live 2010, the Policy Profession held a session led by Robert Devereux, Head of the Policy Profession across government.
Read more about the Policy session at Civil Service Live
Robert spoke about changes in the weeks since the new Government came in. Policy making must adapt to the critical priority of deficit reduction and the need to find alternatives to spending and regulation. Increased emphasis on how government can influence behaviours becomes vital and civil servants need to develop these skills further. An excellent starting point would be for people to read ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ – Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book discussing how policy makers can design environments that make it more likely for people to act in ways that serve their and government’s best interests.
Head of a primary school in a previous life, David Bell added his perspective to the changes in recent weeks, particularly in education. David explained how the Government is interested in replacing central targets with frameworks through which schools and teachers can bring about improved local outcomes and suggesting that in future the state will only intervene when there is extreme failure