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Last updated: 19 February 2009
CAB010/09
18 February 2009
Civil Servants are working harder than ever to deliver crucial public services as demand soars during the economic downturn Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, said this evening.
In a speech to the Lancaster University Business School, Sir Gus explained how the Civil Service has a central role to play in helping Britain through the challenges of the financial climate.
Sir Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service said:
“The downturn is the biggest challenge now facing the UK government. Responding to these unprecedented events has been, and remains, the main challenge for the Civil Service. However we have strong foundations in place and are continuously evolving to meet new demands.
“We are tackling the recession head on by making sure frontline staff are ready to help people get back into work, as well as setting up the National Economic Council to assist people and businesses through the difficult times.
“Pressures on the Civil Service are increasing but we continue to deliver great services, be it officials at the Treasury working day and night to tackle the global financial crisis or staff at a Job CentrePlus handling twice as many enquiries as normal.”
Sir Gus said that a new public service ethos was behind the rise in applications for Civil Service jobs. The Fast Stream graduate programme has seen a 33 per cent rise in applications on last year as people realise it is important to do something to help others through the credit crunch.
Sir Gus said:
“What defines and binds together all civil servants is a set of shared values: honesty, objectivity, integrity and impartiality. I am proud that in a recent survey of Fast Streamers 90 per cent said it was important to them to have a job that benefited wider society – in the private sector this was just 15 per cent.”
Ends
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Sir Gus O'Donnell Roland Smith Lecture, 18 February 2009
Good evening everyone.
I do know the Civil Service and it does do amazing things. I'm going to tell you more about that this evening.
First though, I would like to thank Cary Cooper and Lancaster University for giving me the opportunity to deliver the Roland Smith Lecture. I'm also grateful to Cary for his personal contribution to Civil Service issues.
In his role at the Sunningdale Institute he has provided my colleagues and me with support – and welcome challenge – on key issues like capability reviews and delivery models. I look forward to working with him and the Sunningdale Institute on future developments.
I also discovered today that I have a lot in common with Sir Roland Smith.Like me, he studied economics at university and went on to be a lecturer in economics. Like me he worked closely with the Bank of England. Most importantly, however, like me he was also a big fan of Manchester United. He even went on to become its chairman – something I can only dream of! I am honoured to speak in a series dedicated to a man of such obvious good taste.
I understand that Terry Leahy, from Tesco, was the previous speaker in this lecture series – back in February last year. I would bet my civil service pension that nobody who heard Terry speak back then could have had any idea just how different things would be today.
Change happens. We all know that. And we all recognise that good organisations reform and change and keep pace with the evolving needs of the world around them. But there are some periods in history where change seems to happen faster than in others.
We are in one of those periods right now. So against that backdrop, I want to cover three main areas this evening:
- first a look at some of the challenges we are facing in the Civil Service – both immediate and longer term
- second, to talk a bit about the shape of the Civil Service today, what we are already delivering and how well placed we are now to meet some of these challenges
- third – I will look ahead to the kind of Civil Service we need in the 21st Century – how we must continue to build our capabilities to deliver improved public services and what all of this will mean for our staff
Immediate challenges
So – what are our immediate challenges?
The recession presents us with both economic and social challenges. Markets are not operating efficiently and in some cases they have simply ceased to exist. People are feeling uncertain about what the future holds. Unemployment is rising and many families are worried about losing their jobs or their homes.
As a result, governments everywhere are taking action in areas which few would have considered likely - even a year ago. These actions include:
- preparing fiscal stimulus packages,
- Devising policies to help businesses and potential house purchasers get the finance they need and
- developing labour market policies to reduce the amount and duration of increases in unemployment.
But governments also understand that this is a global recession. And that means that the underlying factors need to be addressed at a global level.
In the UK Civil Service we are stepping up to meet the demands of these unprecedented challenges.
Civil servants are providing the Prime Minister and other Ministers with advice on the international aspects of the downturn. To do this, we have brought together the Home Civil Service with the Diplomatic Service more closely than ever. Ministers, particularly from the FCO, HMT and BERR are working with G20 colleagues to explore what can be agreed at international level.
The Cabinet Office has set up a G20 secretariat to support these efforts.
One of the first, major tasks for the secretariat is to prepare for the London summit on 2 April. The summit will:
- Bring over twenty world leaders together in London on one day.
- Be the first time ever that an event of this kind has happened in a European city
- Be President Obama's first visit to Europe.
In contrast to G8 summits there are no existing structures or rules for this meeting and we have only 3 months to deliver it.
It is a very good example of how the Civil Service is rising to immediate challenges and drawing in expertise from across departments, as well as input from external experts, to get the work done.
You might like to take a look at a book that we have published today - It's called “Road to the London Summit” and is designed to prepare the way for a successful debate on what governments need to agree at the Summit on 2 April. You can find this on the No 10 website.
That's just a flavour of the international work we are doing.
We are also responding rapidly to the domestic consequences of the downturn. The Prime Minister has created a National Economic Council consisting of key Ministers, myself as Cabinet Secretary and the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury.
We meet at least once a week and are supported by a secretariat made up of civil servants from the Cabinet Office and HMT.
The focus of the Council up until now has been on shaping the government's response to the downturn, particularly on jobs, housing and business.
New policies have been launched as a result:
- on extra support to help the longer-term unemployed get back to work,
- on support for small and medium sized businesses with reduced access to lending, and
- with measures to reduce the number of repossessions.
And the recession is also leading to increased pressures on particular parts of our workforce. Jobcentre Plus, for example, is coming under increased pressure and, inevitably I guess, increased scrutiny in how it is bearing up under the additional work load.
So let's talk facts for a moment. What other organisation, public or private, could cope so well with so substantial an increase in its workload over a period of just a few months?
- Since July last year, JobCentre Plus staff have seen a near doubling of new Job Seeker Allowance claims, resulting in around 400,000 New Jobseeker Interviews per month
-there has been around a 33% increase in 13 week reviews; from about 25,000 a week to 40,000 in the first few weeks of January this year
I have visited Jobcentre Plus offices myself - many of them. And I have met some remarkable colleagues who are doing a remarkable job. They are delivering real help for people precisely at the time when they need it most.
In all this work we have to balance the need for rapid responses to the recession with a requirement to build a sustainable long term recovery.
John Maynard Keynes, back in 1923 was worried about the lack of a short term response and he chastised economists for setting themselves – and I quote – “too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”
He was right. But we must also make sure that decisions we take now do not damage our long term objectives in areas like climate change.
Keynes also said – it's the quote people remember - “in the long run we are all dead”. Whilst that is true of individuals it is not true of society – or of our planet. This is why the government is advocating nationally and internationally that we should be investing now to improve our energy efficiency in the longer term.
Longer Term Challenges
And what are the longer term challenges?
Well, there are many. And I don't intend to cover them all this evening. The Cabinet Office did that in an excellent Strategy Unit report published last year.
Tonight I would like to highlight four issues that I think will have profound effects on public services and the Civil Service in coming years.
First, the changing demographics.The UK population is getting older and more diverse and this will present challenges for public policies. Interestingly, surveys indicate that the public increasingly expect the state, rather than extended families, to care for their elderly relatives.
Second, we will face some very complex and stubborn issues that we cannot tackle in silos. Climate change, for example, will require responses at the individual, local, national and international level. And tackling obesity is not something that a single department can do alone.
We can address some of these issues using traditional instruments like tax, regulation and legislation. But, increasingly, policy makers will also want to influence and persuade individuals to change their behaviours for their own longer term benefit and for that of society as a whole.
Third, advances in technology are changing the way people work, communicate and socialize. Our best services are already exploiting these new technologies to improve our delivery. But we have further to go to fully exploit these exciting opportunities.
The fourth challenge is perhaps the greatest. People are going to expect public services to be as good as the best private sector ones. They want to pay online or by mobile phone at a time of their convenience. They want to watch their favourite TV programmes when they have the time, not when the broadcaster chooses to transmit it.
In the Civil Service we can respond to these demands but we have to provide for all customers not just those who are on-line already or who can pay.
However, the reason that rising customer expectations is the greatest challenge is that the public sector is going to have to meet all of these new demands with less – or at best the same – level of resources.
Earlier this month Liam Byrne, the Cabinet Office Minister, laid out the Government's next steps in public service reform. He emphasised the need to “learn from the frontline”, to be innovative and responsive to customer needs and to work better across departmental boundaries.
I am pleased that Matt Tee, the new permanent secretary of government communications, has agreed to lead work to harness best practice on using insight into citizens' lifestyles and attitudes to support and encourage changes in behaviour and in the way we deliver public services.
There are some fantastic examples of this sort of work being done in Government already – the change 4 life programme on obesity and Act on CO2 on climate change are just a couple.
But we need to ensure that civil servants across the organisation see these type of behaviour change techniques as core to their day to day work.
If we do this, we will be in a better place to help facilitate that next stage of public sector reform – a stage in which we will move from a command and control culture driven by central targets, to a world where we understand our customers' needs and respond efficiently to them.
Trust
I have outlined a long – some would say daunting - list of challenges here.
In order for the Civil Service to even begin to meet all of these, we need to be trusted by the public.
People tend to have high levels of trust in frontline deliverers, in police, doctors and teachers. Whilst public trust in civil servants has increased over the years - almost doubling since 1983 - we will struggle to improve this further if we are stuck with Sir Humphrey stereotypes
I hope that the public understands that what defines all civil servants – what binds us together - is our unique set of shared values:
honesty, objectivity, integrity and impartiality.
To build public trust all civil servants must live by these values and not tolerate any violations of them. And that is why I am always concerned about any allegations that civil servants are breaching the political impartiality requirement.
It is also why I am disappointed with much of the recent coverage of the issue of hospitality.
Senior civil servants are more transparent about the hospitality they receive than in any other sector. It is a vital part of the job of running BERR, for example, to build relationships with businessmen and women. If we are going to develop policies to help business then we need to hear their concerns. In many cases, when working with banks for example, conversations have to be private. These conversations are helped enormously if there is trust on both sides. And this trust can only be developed by getting to know each other.
In addition to gaining their trust, we also need to demonstrate to the public that we are up to the task – that we are capable - of delivering world class public services.
In order to do that, civil servants need a fusion of the traditional values - honesty, objectivity, impartiality and integrity - with what I call my four Ps: pride, passion, pace and professionalism.
Our traditional values make us strong and mean that we are a reliable force in tempestuous times. The 4Ps allow us to be flexible and nimble so that we can respond with pace to immediate priorities.
Civil Servants can be politically impartial and passionate about delivering the best possible services to our customers. Indeed a desire to make a difference is what drove most of us to join the Civil Service in the first place.
I am proud that in a recent survey of new entrant Fast Streamers in the Civil Service, 90% of them said they were attracted to their job because they felt their work could benefit wider society.
It is this desire to make a difference that is still attracting people to the Civil Service. Unlike many other sectors at the moment we have not cut back on our graduate recruitment and applications are up by a third.
So, civil servants are driven by a desire to make a difference – not a need to make a profit.
And we must all live by the values that I have referred to.
That is why it was also right that, as leaders of the Civil Service, we sent a signal to the public last week that we understand their concerns in these difficult times.
I'm proud of the fact that my Permanent Secretary Colleagues voluntarily waived the bonuses that they would have been entitled to this year and, in doing this, showed their personal commitment to the public sector ethos we hold so dear.
Civil Service Today
Our commitment to making a difference sometimes gets lost in the other stories about us. In fact, in general, I think there is a fair bit of public misunderstanding about the nature of the Civil Service today.
That is why I've produced the fact pack - which you can all take away with you this evening. I hope it will help to refute some of the more persistent myths.
You can read the pack at your leisure, but there are just a few facts I wanted to highlight:
Nearly 40% of civil servants earn less than £20,000.
Civil Servants recruited since July 2007 will have a pension age of 65 and are not on a final salary scheme. The average pension paid to a Civil Service retiree is a £6500.
And we have improved our efficiency – saving £26.5billion, compared to a target of 21.5billion in the Gerschon report. So we continue to meet the challenge of doing more for less.
But it's hardly surprising that there is a mismatch between reality and perception. Unlike Churchill, I don't intend to write history so maybe history won't be kind to me.
Building future capabilities
So we are starting from a strong base in the Civil Service but we have challenging times ahead.
It struck me when I became Cabinet Secretary, that we would not rise to all these challenges if we did not find a way to measure and improve our own capabilities.
The Capability review programme, that I launched in 2005, was an ambitious one.
- I wanted us to assess all the major Whitehall departments against a common framework.
- I wanted the results to be published.
- I wanted outsiders to lead the reviews
- And I wanted to use the findings to hold permanent secretaries and their boards to account for capability improvement.
The reviews have been running for three years now, and I'm pleased with the start we've made. All the major departments have been assessed. Six have been re-assessed against the framework, two years on. And we plan to re-assess all departments by the end of this year.
The reviews have highlighted the areas where we need to improve – and they've done this publicly. This has been their strength. It's something that observers from public and private sectors have remarked on; and government officials from abroad are increasingly coming to us to learn from what we've done.
We now have a common currency for performance improvement across the Civil Service. That's a huge step forward.
Getting the process embedded has been important. But what really matters are the results – and so far, those are encouraging. All of the departments we've re-assessed have shown improvement in their capability. Progress in the Home Office was particularly impressive, with improvements in seven of the ten capability criteria.
The Sunningdale Institute has reported on the reviews. And the NAO recently published an assessment of the Programme. It found that capability reviews had gained traction and put capability improvement firmly on the agendas of boards across Whitehall.
But both the Sunningdale Institute and the NAO are right when they say we can go further.
We know, for example, that departments will need to get better at collaborating with others. Future capability reviews will need to delve more deeply into this, and really test departments' abilities to work together effectively.
And we need to bring capability and delivery together more explicitly in the overall performance management framework. The point of doing all of this, after all, is so we can deliver better outcomes for citizens
I welcome the fact that Sir Michael Bichard and I will be looking at how, in the next phase of Capability Reviews, we:
- improve the link with outcomes,
- encourage innovation and,
- assess how well the various parts of government join up.
What does this mean for staff?
I started this lecture by saying that we were in a period of rapid change. With that change comes the need for a new type of civil servant.
Whilst Sir Humphrey was a master of some things I doubt that he would be comfortable in this new era in which collaboration and partnership building will be key to success.
To respond to all the challenges I have outlined this evening, civil servants in the 21st Century will need to:
They will also need to recognise that a civil service career is not necessarily for life: poor performance will be dealt with and experience in other sectors will be valued
In return, they can expect:
Building strong leaders
The way in which the leaders of the Civil Service behave will be key to achieving these changes. We are already putting a lot of emphasis on developing a strong, corporate leadership team.
In 2007 we introduced a 3-day event for all staff entering the Senior Civil Service – we call it the SCS basecamp. Over 300 staff have attended these events in which we set out our expectations for them now they have joined the leadership of the Civil Service.
It's like a rite of passage in many ways.
We also now bring together, twice a year, all permanent secretaries and Director Generals – what we call the “Top 200” group.
At the very first Top 200 meeting back in October 2006 - I set the members my “100:0:0” challenge. This was my way of asking them how much of their time was spent on their narrow policy areas, their departmental objectives and civil-service wide, corporate issues. For too many of them, the answer was 100:0:0.
I have asked the same question at every meeting since and it's very encouraging to see how the numbers have changed. Senior colleagues are now spending much more of their time on the bigger picture – working on issues that cut across departments like delivery of PSA targets. At the last event, in December last year, the statistic was at 40:45:15. We will only solve our complex policy challenges if we continue to set an example at the top of our organisations and join up in this way.
I have asked my permanent secretary colleagues, in particular, to focus on four cross-cutting corporate priorities.
The priorities are: diversity, skills, sustainability and health and wellbeing.
Some of the people who will be most affected by the recession are already disadvantaged. For the Civil Service, this makes it increasingly important that we build a diverse workforce that understands the needs of the public - even the most hard to reach groups.
We have achieved some good progress in workforce representation – all the details are in the fact pack for you to read.
This year I would like to see progress, in particular, on increasing the representation of disabled and black and minority ethnic staff in middle-management and senior posts. We have to do more to raise aspirations amongst these groups.
On skills, the current economic downturn increases the urgency for us to develop the skills of our workforce so that we can meet the increased demand on those delivering vital support to businesses and individuals.
I also want us to set new goals for the number of apprenticeships we offer in the civil service. We already have 16 departments engaged in the apprenticeship pathfinder and applications for places now top 1400 compared with an initial target of just 500.
On Sustainability of our own estate - we have made progress over recent years:
- carbon from our offices was down 6.5% in 2008 against the baseline,
- and carbon from our road vehicles showed a 10.5% reduction last year
But we can do more. If we are going to be encouraging others to act in a sustainable it is imperative that we lead by example.
Finally, health and wellbeing – a subject close to Cary Cooper's heart - remains a priority for me. The Civil Service needs engaged employees who have a sense of personal attachment to their work. As Cary has emphasised, this is particularly important at a time of economic uncertainty.
Celebrating Success
One way in which I, personally, can help to engage and reward staff is to recognise all the many achievements of civil servants across the UK. Three years ago we held the first ever Civil Service Awards and Diversity and Equality Awards and these have gone from strength to strength. We receive over 600 nominations each year and have had some truly remarkable winners - from the team of civil servants in Northern Ireland, working on the peace process, to an individual from the Home office who has reduced human trafficking into the UK
The awards have become a highlight in the year and they shine a light on some of the amazing things civil servants are doing that make a real difference to people's lives everyday.
Conclusion
I have covered a lot of ground this evening and I want to leave time for discussion.
I would like to conclude with three points:
- In tempestuous times the Civil Service is a reliable force and we are achieving some amazing things
- The combination of our enduring values, coupled with my 4Ps, means we are able to rise to the immediate challenges of the recession
- In the 21st Century we are witnessing a return of public sector ethos. The Civil Service - an organisation that makes a difference to society and people's lives – is more important than ever.
I do know the Civil Service. I hope you agree with me that it does do amazing things.