The Week 04 October 2024
Senior Researcher
With party conferences over and people catching up on sleep after several weeks of networking and fringe events, attention is turning back to news in Westminster.
Aside from further Budget speculation, and a deal to turn sovereignty of the Chagos islands over to Mauritius, the other big news in Whitehall was the announcement that Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary (most senior civil servant), will be stepping down by the end of the year after a period of ill health.
The process to find his successor is now underway.
The role will be decisive for the new Government. Permanent secretaries are all accountable to the Cabinet Secretary, who is Head of the Civil Service as a whole and a key aide and confidante to the Prime Minister. To put it lightly, it’s one of the most important roles in government with an extremely varied and consequential set of responsibilities.
In fact, as Re:State has previously argued, the ‘split personality’ of cabinet secretaries — who are both responsible for the corporate health of the Civil Service (a 500,000+ strong profession) and also act as one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers day-to-day — creates challenges of its own. Certainly, proximity to the PM gives Cabinet Secretaries a unique authority to enact reform and represent the views of the Civil Service. However, they can also be left feeling detached from the government machine (one former Cabinet Secretary told us they couldn’t find the “levers” to affect change), and often lack the headspace needed to focus on the finer details of civil service effectiveness.
Another interviewee told us that the Cabinet Secretary is often “sort of floating around” because the “job’s too big”. Without a redesign of the role, a key question for the appointment process must be whether candidates can spin these two plates: meaning they should ideally have experience of transforming big public sector organisations, while also being exceptionally politically astute and expert.
They should, as the job advert suggests, be able to “command the credibility” of permanent secretaries across Whitehall — and have the leadership skills to implement work which is genuinely cross-cutting, such as the Government’s five missions (also name checked in the ad). In other words, they must combine the insider’s ability to navigate Whitehall with the outsider’s ability to recognise where things aren’t working.
It's striking, therefore, that the advert will be open to external applicants. While at Reform we've been big advocates of bringing outsiders into what can be a very insular government machine, for such a tricky, small 'p' political and Whitehall-oriented role, we wonder what kind of external applicant would be able to balance this particular set of priorities. We eagerly await the result of the appointment process.
Onto this week’s read…
This week’s read is an opinion piece from the Financial Times making the case for an equivalent “culture of evaluation” in policymaking as already exists in medical science. It points to the value of evidence banks (similar to the Evaluation Registry being assembled by Cabinet Office) which serve as “one-stop shops” for assessing the impact of alternative policy interventions.
Too often, even on major projects, government does not put in place robust plans to evaluate whether policies have been successful or link spending to evidence that something will actually work. As the article says, we should aim to establish a culture whereby evidence is deployed upstream of policymaking by default and “normalised” in public life. The article also cites the potential of AI to help “synthesise evidence” across these databases and “boil it down to a pithy conclusion”.