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Have you seen the Civil Service Reform Plan (CSRP) with forwards by David Cameron and Francis Maude? It’s well worth a read. Check it out!
Tony Colwell, a professional colleague and good friend brought it to my attention and asked me what I thought, so I thought that I would blog about it to the World and perhaps generate a bit of debate.
Personally, I was rather disappointed with the CSRP, with it basically being “too little” and “too late”. The CSRP seems full of motherhood statements and has probably had the once over from a tame consultant working for the Treasury or the Cabinet Office at circa five thousand pounds a day.
Critically, the CSRP seriously lacks quantification as to:
- Where are we?
- How do we compare to international benchmarks?
- Where we are going?
- How are we going to get there?
- What’s the route?
- What’s the cost?
- What’s the risk?
- What other options have been considered, like outsourcing transaction processing across Government?
- Why has Private Sector Best Practice in procurement has not been effectively deployed?
- Why have professional executive interims not been widely deployed to fast track delivery?
Sharing another personal view, it is amazing that the CSRP highlights the need for best skills from the Private Sector but Messrs. Maude and Alexander have created a Catch 22 environment that effectively excludes the best Private Sector skills, like interim executives, preferring to engage big consulting firms instead.
What do you think?
Alf,
The CSRP has caused something of a stir in the public sector procurement community in light of inferences drawn (perhaps incorrectly) that commissioners of outsourced services will take over responsibility for negotiation and agreement of contracts – formerly seen as the responsibility of procurement. An interesting reaction given the reality of public sector procurement: bidding and selection processes that prohibit anything the private sector professionals might identify as effective commercial negotiation.
I think the public sector commercial/procurement function would do well to reflect on (a) its chosen role (often as gatekeeper rather enabler of operational, including commissioning, activities) (b) whether its historic engagement in contract management has been adequate and, if not, (b) can it really lay the blame on other functions.
The CSRP sets out some valid objectives:
- increasing accountability in the public sector; and includes references to cross-functional collaboration and joint accountability;
- the need for better control over commissioning and ongoing provision of outsourced services;
- improving contract management and project management skills with the intention of improving ‘operational delivery’;
but you are quite right that a plan needs to set out the “hows” otherwise it is merely an empty dream.
Coming back to procurement, my main concern is that, underpinning the reforms, there are flawed assumptions concerning the near automatic/universal benefit from centralisation of procurement and adoption of shared services.
Tony, many thanks for your response, giving additional insight and analysis. I broadly agree with you. I fear that once again procurement/outsourcing savings have been churned out of a consultant’s financial model without serious risk assessment of the transformation challenges – you may recall that I was blogging a lot about this in Local Authorities last year. Thanks for bringing the publication to my attention.
It is full of “motherhood and apple pie” statements and as you and Tony Colwell say it fails to answer fundamental questions.
In terms of value per taxpayer pound this country is 17th in the World and the reason is that policies are not properly decision treed and costed as they are in Singapore, where citizen behaviour is modelled so that policies are less likely to create unintended consequences and behaviour that results in less revenue rather than more.
The fact that our top Civil Servants are Oxbridge graduates, and are not cleared out and replaced with each incoming administration is advanced as a good thing, but in reality it leads to complacency, waste and malfeasance by suppliers particularly within the MOD and the Home Office.
Employees within GCHQ and the Bank of England’s note burning operation in Debden, Essex are moved around to prevent dishonesty and the same should be done with such Civil Servants as remain after Lean methodologies are applied.
Our Civil Service is larger by a factor of 4 to 1 than the one which existed in Queen Victoria’s day when the British Empire was the most powerful entity on the planet. Since 1885, the nadir of the Empire’s power, Civil Servants have steadily increased in number as the country has declined in economic and military power. Much of what they do could frankly be done by the Private Sector, including outsourcers, consultancies and interims selected on a competitive basis and with interims and non Big 4 consultants getting 25% of the biddable work.
What we should be doing is starting from the proposition that 75% of Civil Servants are out of touch and not up to the job based on their actual performance and that just 25% are actually needed.
A shamrock organisation with an outer core of some Big 4 consultants, some interims and some smaller implementation consultancies is needed and professional purchasing for Government, the Police, the NHS, local authorities supplied through a panel of competitive tenderers and overseen by professional supply chain experts rotated periodically to ensure no malfeasance is what is needed together with a Balanced Scorecard and a regime of on the spot inspection and review to keep everyone on their toes.
The benchmark for efficiency should be Singapore which produces 3 times the value per taxpayer pound or dollar than we manage.
We should also move to a flat tax and a Corporation Tax regime that encourages business, promotes inward investment and encourages the development of new enterprise, exports and jobs. The present system encourages tax avoidance and causes HMRC to have to employ unnecessary Civil Servants as does the haphazard purchasing regime which costs us billions and as Sir Philip Green discovered in his 2010 review, 8 fold differences in the prices paid for the identical item.
John, I relate to much of your argument.
Surely if the Government were serious about reform, we would see proposals for outsourcing the majority of transaction processing, rather than policies related to vague notions of “Big Society”?