Articles and op-eds
A selection of article and op-eds, originally published elsewhere, looking at the machinery of government and civil service reform.
Featured
A selection of article and op-eds, originally published elsewhere, looking at the machinery of government and civil service reform.
The Commission for Smart Government has called for the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury to set up a joint “Office of Strategy, Resources and Performance” to better support the prime minister and improve planning and delivery.
An ambitious programme for government reform, to ensure the country builds back better from COVID-19 has been launched by ministers and civil servants today. The programme will ensure that the government has the tools and resources it needs to deliver on its agenda to level up across the UK.
Boris Johnson is creating a new delivery unit in 10 Downing Street to ramp up policy implementation, following the recommendations of a review by Sir Michael Barber.
A commission set up to drive reform across Whitehall has dismissed HM Treasury’s Spending Review process a “political scrap over who gets the biggest budget” and called for a complete overhaul of the way government manages its money.
In Reform’s Resilient State essay collection, I reflected on my experiences as a local government leader during the Covid-19 crisis. Whitehall had reverted to type, and gripped departmental levers to try and tackle complex problems rooted in local places. I argued that ‘the centre cannot hold’ and that we needed to think differently.
Giving local government more power isn’t a zero-sum game for central government. It can help the civil service improve as well. The authors of the new Commission for Smart Government paper ‘Smart Devolution to Level Up’ look at how devolution could be the missing ingredient of the government’s efforts to reform Whitehall.
The appointment of new digital leadership is a welcome start to what – if the UK is to thrive in a post-Covid, post-Brexit world – must become a wholesale reboot of digital government.
In a year when the Covid pandemic has rocked the machinery of government and tested the civil service’s ability to deliver for the nation, we should welcome the appointment of Simon Case as the new Cabinet Secretary.
The recent A-Levels fiasco, in which thousands of school leavers were denied a place at their chosen university, was blamed on a “mutant algorithm” by the Prime Minister — a freak of nature accidentally released to roam the country’s classrooms, threatening to ruin everyone’s exams results until stopped in its tracks.
The distinction between different kinds of public servants hinders public sector collaboration. It is time to end it, says former Whitehall permanent secretary Lord Michael Bichard.