Public Administration Select Committee
Oral evidence: Civil Service Skills, HC 112
Monday 15 December 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 15 December 2014
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Rt Hon Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General
Members present: Mr Bernard Jenkin (Chair), Mr Nigel Evans, Kelvin Hopkins, Mr Andrew Turner
Questions 234-355
Witnesses: Chris Last, Head of Civil Service Human Resources, Cabinet Office, Oliver Robbins, Director General for the Civil Service, Cabinet Office, and Hilary Spencer, Director, Civil Service Learning, gave evidence.
Q234 Chair: Welcome to this final session on Civil Service skills. After you, we have the Minister of State for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, but I wonder if each of you could introduce yourselves for the record, please.
Chris Last: My name is Chris Last. I am Head of HR for the Civil Service.
Hilary Spencer: I am Hilary Spencer. I am the new Director of Civil Service Learning.
Oliver Robbins: Olly Robbins, Director General for the Civil Service at the Cabinet Office.
Q235 Chair: Thank you very much for joining us. We may be few in number, but we are very high in quality and it will not make it any easier for you. May I also just alert you to the fact that we have to get the whole session done before we vote at a certain time? We know not when. Therefore we are going to get through as many questions as we can with you and with the Minister of State, so short and crisp answers, please and we will try to ask short and crisp questions.
This session is about the leadership of the current approach to training and reform, the delivery of training, how we develop and support leaders, how we learn from mistakes and seize future opportunities and how we attract and retain the right skills. Can I start by asking about the NAO report that came out in 2011? I know that is some time ago, but it found that accountabilities are unclear with management responsibilities divided across HR functions, professional leads and business managers. Of the 13 departmental skills strategies covered in their review, in less than half could they clearly trace the links between business objectives and priority skills gaps and solutions selected. Has that changed and how?
Oliver Robbins: May I take that one, to start with at least? I hope it has. I think it has. The most important changes since then have been a real clarification of accountability at the centre. Part of the reason you have both Chris and myself here today is that I am now what is called the senior responsible officer for capabilities in the Civil Service. I am the customer of what Learning and Civil Service HR do around Government, and Chris and Hilary drive that performance, which I talk to them about most weeks. So, clarity over the accountabilities has improved and Civil Service Learning and the reforms done in 2010 and 2011 that generated Civil Service Learning have got rid of an enormous number of duplicatory and overlapping capabilities and plans around Departments. Plus, of course, in the capabilities plan we published in April 2013, we have tried to explain what things we are going to drive from the centre and what value we are going to try to add.
Q236 Chair: Chris Last, would you like to enlarge on that? HR, of course, is one of those functions that is both in the Cabinet Office and dispersed amongst the Government Departments. Where is the focus for cross‑departmental leadership in the HR function?
Chris Last: The focus on leadership rests with the Cabinet Office.
Chair: It is interesting you do not say, “rests with me”.
Chris Last: Okay, rests with me. The organisation of HR in the Civil Service is very similar to most big organisations. It has a relatively small corporate centre. We follow a model called the orient model of how you organise HR. Most large companies also follow that. We have a corporate‑centred activity; for instance, on leadership there is a small group that works on talent management across the Civil Service, so they work on appointments of Permanent Secretaries and Directors General. They look at how we develop people through the Civil Service, through the organisation from Fast Stream all the way through to Permanent Secretary. Then we have pieces of activity that are run across the Civil Service for Departments. A good example would be setting HR policy—Civil Service Learning is one of those—or Resourcing, which is recruitment across the Civil Service, which I run. The total part of the HR function that is run centrally is about 300 people out of 3,000. The rest of it is in departmental HR, because that is the focus.
Q237 Chair: Most people would agree that the central HR function of any major corporation takes up a lot of time of the chief executive. The HR director of a company would be beside the chief executive a great deal of the time and, indeed, the chairman to make sure that the right personnel decisions are being made—a very strong function in any company however dispersed that company may be. Most people would agree that is not the case in Whitehall.
Chris Last: There is some difference in Whitehall. The structure of how the Civil Service is structured is different from a corporation. The only corporation I know in any detail is Ford, because that is where I used to work and the Civil Service has far more operating elements than, say, Ford had, therefore it is a more complicated structure. To give a good example of that, we do have a Senior Leadership Committee, which is chaired by Nick Macpherson, who is the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, and that group does look at the Directors General and the Permanent Secretaries and their development across the Civil Service, so there is an activity that does that. The new CEO John Manzoni and I have spent a lot of time together since his appointment working on what HR issues we are going to run in the future.
Q238 Chair: How fair is it to say that the Civil Service has a very, very strong culture in which the Civil Service promotes people who are “do not rock the boat” types, which one witness suggested to us?
Chris Last: One of my answers to the Civil Service is we have to remember the Civil Service has 400,000 people in it, so in almost any of these comments you could find examples of that.
Q239 Chair: So we should just discount it.
Chris Last: I would not say we should just discount it.
Chair: It rings true to me.
Chris Last: Okay. I would not say that is necessarily true. I would say there are examples in the Civil Service where we are taking a very corporate approach to people. We develop them across the Civil Service. We are looking at their general capabilities, so I do think we are taking a much more corporate approach than the one I joined seven ago. I think we have a much more corporate approach than we did seven years ago.
Q240 Chair: Professor Colin Talbot, another witness, following the previous witness, said that very few senior civil servants have experience of delivery of the key areas of public service. There are lots or programmes for farming people out to the City and private sector industries and so on; there is very little attempt to get people to make sure they have experience of frontline operations in education and health and criminal justice. What are you doing to address that?
Chris Last: It is true. We are seconding a small number of people out from the Civil Service—fewer than 100, by the way, on rotation at the moment. The vast majority of our employees, our colleagues in the Civil Service, do spend most of their time in Departments. In Health, for instance, most of the senior civil servants have a history of employment in the health service, so I do not recognise the issue.
Chair: You do not think he is right.
Chris Last: No.
Q241 Chair: So you think that senior leaders of the Civil Service have all the operational experience they require. The health service is only one service, but how many Permanent Secretaries have had more than two years operational experience running a major public service?
Chris Last: I do not know the answer to that. Of the ones who are running big operations at the moment, Robert Devereux did have experience in Transport before he came to DWP; Lin Homer had experience in the Border Agency before she went to HMRC. I do believe that we have experience of people getting operational experience before they take on the biggest operational roles.
Oliver Robbins: Excuse me, Mr Chairman; could I help?
Chair: Yes, please.
Oliver Robbins: Both of the areas you are probing us on here are ones where we hope the story is getting better, but I do not think we are satisfied with where things are.
Q242 Chair: What are you doing to address the shortcomings that have been perceived?
Oliver Robbins: Building a strongly capable Civil Service over the next five years depends upon recruiting the right people, training them in the right way, deploying them in the right way and developing the right culture around them that is inclusive of all the experience they bring to those jobs.
Q243 Chair: That sounds very good, but what does it mean? What is wrong and what are you putting right?
Oliver Robbins: Take, for instance, external recruitment to our Senior Civil Service. Just under a quarter of all senior civil servants are externally recruited, and some of those are from the broader public sector; some of them are from the private sector. What we are trying to do at the moment is to establish how well we use their skills when they arrive. We tend to recruit to a role; if someone is good in that role we think, “Great, that is job done”, and then we move on to the next thing. What we are trying to work out is whether they bring something other than just their role‑specific experience that we can use more widely in the service.
Q244 Chair: Why do you think there is such a strong demand, particularly from some Ministers, that they should not have to rely on the natural pipeline of talent that is coming up the Civil Service? Is that an indicator of success?
Oliver Robbins: If I may say so, this is a personal view but I think it is an indicator of modernity, Mr Chairman. I do not think there are very many places in wider public life where you would expect most of the people around you to have come up one career stream. That is decreasingly the case in the Civil Service and that is to be welcomed.
Q245 Chair: Why do you think so many of the highest functioning private sector organisations recruit very little from outside?
Oliver Robbins: As some of your other witnesses have said to you, Mr Chairman, it is about getting the right balance. I would be equally uncomfortable if we flipped to half of or more than half of our senior managers and leaders recruited externally. We have to invest in growing our own pipeline.
Q246 Chair: So why has the Civil Service been so unsuccessful in growing an effective pipeline of senior leaders?
Oliver Robbins: I do not think we have been unsuccessful.
Q247 Chair: Why is it not good enough?
Oliver Robbins: It is not good enough because I still do not think we are drawing on the broad range of experience that we could be and I do not think we are making enough of it when we get it in.
Q248 Chair: Why is that? What does that mean when you say that? How are we not drawing on it?
Oliver Robbins: As I was trying to explain, what we have a tendency to do is to decide that there is a job that needs to be done, specify that job, recruit to that job and then, if someone is successful in the job, we use that successful experience for as long as we can. We do not invest enough in thinking to begin with about, if you like, a debrief when they join us of what other experience and knowledge might they have that they could bring to the wider use of the service, and then we have not traditionally thought heavily enough about what broader Civil Service career we could be offering that perfectly successful external import.
Q249 Chair: We are going to come later to the question of what leadership training means and what kind of training strong leaders need to have, but how would you appraise the progress that you have made on the skills agenda so far? I am talking since Civil Service reform began about three years ago.
Oliver Robbins: I will let Chris come in shortly—sorry to interrupt you, Chris—but we are pleased with how it is going. To be self‑critical, we mainly have input measures rather than outcome measures. We know how many people are doing courses of various sorts and we know what we are doing with those people; the statistics are impressive and we are gratified that they now focus much more than they used to on the four priority areas that we set out.
Q250 Chair: Part of the problem is that the CBI, for example, has told us that your skills agenda is rather narrowly focused, warning that it does not place sufficient emphasis on the development of complementary skills that fit around and are required to support core skills focused on by the plan. What do you say to that?
Oliver Robbins: I would say that we need to get the right balance between what the centre tries to drive and mandate from the Cabinet Office and then what we ask or even require the partners to try to do around the periphery. We have a responsibility to say that commercial skills are probably the single biggest skills challenge facing the Civil Service and we must get better at doing it and we must work with Bill Crothers, whom you have seen before, and Hilary to get the training offer there for people. However, in order to be completely successful commercial officers those people need a wider experience of Government, good leadership skills and various other things that that central programme is not about.
Q251 Chair: The Institute of Risk Management was very clear that the lack of a consistently embedded approach to teaching skills that help staff manage risks and identify opportunities inhibits the service’s ability to learn from both best and poor practice and to plan and to prepare for future challenges. What is your response to that?
Oliver Robbins: My response would be that there is a list of about another six things, just beneath the four that we have chosen to prioritise, that in my ideal world I would have every civil servant in the country looking at. However, I think it was right to choose four and we have chosen four that are recognisable to civil servants and probably more broadly externally, and I really want to make some decent progress on those.
Q252 Chair: What are you going to do to address the other six things, which might include, as the History and Policy group told us, that the National School of Government used to include core historical components in their coursework, but “CSL has no equivalent history core, which we believe is storing up a major deficit in the toolbox of skills civil servants require for excellent policy-making”.
Oliver Robbins: Personally, I was slightly hoping you would ask about history because it is one of my enthusiasms, and the debate about the role of history in Government is probably stronger than I remember it ever being amongst civil servants. There is a very strong consciousness that history rhymes rather than repeats itself.
Q253 Chair: I share your view. What is the point of a permanent, impartial Civil Service if it does not keep the history?
Oliver Robbins: Absolutely. There was an excellent review done in the last year by the National Archives of some of the challenges of transferring to electronic document management, which is one of the things that spurred some of the concern that we have now re‑emphasised. Departments, other than those that formally employ historians, have now chosen senior managers to lead history networks and history groups. Mark Sedwill has just that at the Home Office.
Q254 Chair: How are we going to address this in the training of the Civil Service, because it is not being addressed at the moment?
Hilary Spencer: The questions about the National School of Government are interesting, are they not?
Q255 Chair: We are going to come to that in detail. I just want to ask this question: how are you going to address the lack of teaching of how to keep the historical record in Government? We visited the National Archives and we heard a lot of what has now appeared, Sir Alex Allan’s report about historical memory and recording data and all that, which we think is a very good piece of work. How is this going to be taught so it is embedded in the culture of the Civil Service?
Oliver Robbins: The most important thing I can say to you about this, Chairman, is that we have recently created, as one of our newest professions in Government, the knowledge and information management profession. Each Department now has a professional head of understanding what Alex’s report and the work of the National Archives means for them. There is a much greater understanding, which, of course, should be mandatory and should be understood by every civil servant about the importance of the public record—the legal importance as well as the administrative importance. Working with that profession, I am now something called the Government Senior Information Risk Owner, which is a title that means I am there to try to care about the extent to which Government understands its own information and the risks around it.
Q256 Chair: I am glad you got back to risk, because that is an important point. Is the problem not that risks are not understood, but that it seems that if there is a risk the job of the identifier of the risk is to elevate it to someone else rather than make a judgment for themselves about whether this is a good risk or a bad risk? How do you create the skill of exercising judgment rather than just passing the buck up the food chain?
Oliver Robbins: The heart of it, Mr Chairman, is probably getting back to one of your very first questions, which is about building people’s experience. The more experienced you are and the more jobs you have done that have taught you about a better feel for which risks are deep and real and are going to eventuate, the more likely you are to make the best call about the next one. That is why the training work that Hilary and her colleagues do is just as important, and thinking hard about how we deploy that skilled experience in the Civil Service and the emphasis on talent management in the last couple of years, including horizontally among professions, is really important.
Q257 Chair: Another complaint we frequently get is the quality of correspondence coming out of Ministers’ offices is not what it should be and certainly not what it used to be. How are we going to train civil servants better to draft letters in sentences and paragraphs that are presentable?
Hilary Spencer: That is probably one for me to take. As I think you are aware, one of my previous roles was as Principal Private Secretary in the Department for Education and, indeed, we had a particular problem with the quality of the correspondence that we had, and it was my responsibility to sort that out. There is a combination of approaches that we took at the time and that is one of the things I am looking at in my new role as Head of Civil Service Learning. One is some basic writing skills. In fact, there are some basic grammar, spelling and punctuation points that are teachable. That is what our education system aims to do. There is a set of skills that are around understanding the context and the customer service element of correspondence, which we need to make sure people are equipped to do and then there is a departmental‑specific role that needs to be played, which is understanding the particular preferences of Ministers or the particular policy context.
Q258 Chair: That is very good. You clearly understand it and have been at the sharp end. How do you disseminate that understanding across the Civil Service?
Hilary Spencer: That is part of my role in Civil Service Learning.
Chair: Yes. That is why I am asking you the question. How do you do it?
Hilary Spencer: We have a range of e‑learning materials that are available to do that, which can adequately, in my view, cover the basics. There are a number of face‑to‑face courses that cover communicating effectively in a number of different ways and then I think there is a role for Departments in terms of enabling people to understand the political context and the ministerial context.
Q259 Chair: We have talked about a wider suite of skills that we regard as essential that is broader than the four key skills identified in the plan, so how are we going to bring all this together, Mr Robbins?
Oliver Robbins: We have to try to keep, from the centre, our focus on the things that we have tried to set out to do in the capabilities plan.
Q260 Chair: Obviously, Ministers have set some priorities; I understand that. However, you clearly feel the long‑term well‑being of the Civil Service depends upon developing this wider suite of skills and that is part of your responsibility, so how are we going to do it?
Oliver Robbins: I would point you to two things, Mr Chairman. First, we have the wider network, beyond Civil Service Learning, of departmental HR functions and HR directors, which Chris chairs, which is, if you like, dealing, as best it can, with that second list of priorities below the top four, but not trying to mandate extra courses or put enormous extra resource into them. The second is, if I may say so, bringing it back to culture, because my answer to part of your question of Hilary would have been good line management. People from my team do not send up answers to questions that are inadequately drafted. That is because I care about that. I am prompted to care about it by my Minister, as you can ask him in a minute, but I do think transmission through good, tight line management of what quality looks like is part of the answer.
Q261 Chair: I am glad you came back to risk earlier, because civil servants should not be sending up risks that they really ought to be making a judgment for themselves about. How do you train them to do that?
Oliver Robbins: Training is only part of the answer, Mr Chairman. There is good training. A lot of the project and programme management training is basically a good framework for thinking about and understanding risk.
Q262 Chair: I am going to cut you off there, because I think we are going to come back to this point, but we think it is very important. Mr Last, what cultural barriers do you think exist to enhancing and improving skills training in the Civil Service?
Chris Last: Historically, there have been some. I think the situation is improving. The obvious one is Departments taking a departmental approach. Civil Service Learning was set up because Departments were duplicating effort and taking a very departmental approach to learning.
Q263 Chair: What role has the Cabinet Office got in promoting the right attitude and behaviour towards skills?
Chris Last: As Olly said earlier, we are primarily doing this through departmental HR activities. They have the biggest influence on each of the Departments. We are making some changes to the way we develop people. A good example would be the Civil Service Fast Stream, which historically landed people in a Department and quite often they did not leave that Department. We are trying to give them a broader approach to those things. Skill acquisition is primarily not done through classroom training or e‑learning training; it is done by experience, so one of the things we are trying to do is set up a culture where people gain experience in different environments and get a different understanding of the different types of work that need to be undertaken. That also addresses, Chair, your point earlier about trying to give people operational experience. Trying to give these experiences late in a career is much more difficult than trying to give those experiences to people earlier in their career.
Q264 Kelvin Hopkins: This is to Hilary Spencer: you have just been appointed as Director of Civil Service Learning, and we have heard something about the skills problems, writing letters and so on, which are fairly fundamental, but what is your appraisal of the service you are providing? What is it doing well, what are you hoping to change and where does it need to be improved, if at all?
Hilary Spencer: Mindful of the request to be brief, I will attempt to answer all of those questions. My view is that the Civil Service Learning that I have inherited was set up for a number of purposes, one of which was to reduce the duplication that was happening across Government; another of which was to improve the consistency of what was available; and the third of which was to reduce cost. On those terms, Civil Service Learning has succeeded in its objectives. A shared view is that having achieved that, we now need to take it to the next stage of its development in terms of what it is offering across Government.
My view is that there is a lot of learning and development on offer across the Civil Service from quite a lot of different places—from Civil Service Learning, from Departments, from professions. Although that is good in some ways, there is almost too much for people to make sense of, so at the moment the individual has to navigate all of those different sources of learning and development.
The second is people are quite traditional when they think about learning and development. A lot of people default to thinking about classroom‑based training when they think about learning and development, and the way we measure it at the moment in terms of five days a year reinforces that notion of classroom‑based training.
The third thing is that people’s views of Civil Service Learning are quite polarised. In many ways it is a fairly standard bell curve distribution. A combination of surveys and data that we have about usage says that there is a group of people who find Civil Service Learning comprehensive and useful and relevant to their needs. They are able to navigate the offer and find what they need. There is a group of people at the other end of the bell curve who are very negative about it, do not like the model, feel that it is too distant, too centralised and find it hard to access. There is a group of people in the middle who are reasonably neutral about Civil Service Learning as an entity, but who will use it for quite a lot of mandatory e‑learning or for some of their management and development needs. Part of my job is to try to shift that bell curve across so that there are many more people finding what they need and finding it good quality.
I suppose the final thing is there seems to be a reasonably consistent view from the people I have talked to and, again, drawing on quite a lot of the data we have, that we need to improve what we offer to the Senior Civil Service, in particular.
Q265 Kelvin Hopkins: There have been some pretty strong criticisms of Civil Service Learning from Professor Colin Talbot, who appeared before us before, and Paul Grant in another evidence session. He says that what has replaced the National School of Government is fairly lightweight, in his words, particularly in one‑to‑one computer training and so on. Would you accept that criticism?
Hilary Spencer: I think that calling the whole offer lightweight is probably a sweeping generalisation. E‑learning seems to be a bit sort of Marmitey for people. There are some people who really enjoy it, find it useful, convenient, they can do it on their mobile phones, and it is on‑the‑go learning, and there are quite a lot of people who really do not like it at all. Over the last year, 1.2 million hours of face‑to‑face learning were undertaken by civil servants and 1 million hours of e‑learning were done by civil servants, in terms of the balance of face‑to‑face and e‑learning. I also think that e‑learning works very effectively for some things, such as mass information transfer or some compliance activity; a lot of companies use e‑learning in order to do that. There are other skills, particularly in the leadership space, which of course do not lend themselves to our standard understanding of e‑learning.
Q266 Kelvin Hopkins: Paul Grant suggested that there was not sufficient training in the fundamental processes of Government and that many do not understand exactly how Parliament works. As MPs, we have to pick it up as we go along, but you expect civil servants to know these things.
Hilary Spencer: I think he used to be responsible for the course of “Parliament, Government and the Civil Service”, which was something of an eight‑day institution if you joined the Civil Service on the Fast Stream. For better or worse, I am a product of part of that system and so I would have attended “Parliament, Government and the Civil Service” as a course, and it probably was useful to people who had no background in the constitutional position of the Civil Service and Ministers and how Parliament works. However, for others, it duplicated things we would already expect them to know, and most organisations now are moving away from this idea of eight‑day sheep-dip training on something, recognising that it is not often the best way to get people to retain information and change their behaviour.
Q267 Chair: What is the evidence that that is not the best way to get people to retain information and to change their behaviour?
Hilary Spencer: There is quite a lot of evidence in terms of what we understand about the impact of training, the return on investment studies that quite a lot of learning and development functions in organisations have done. There are two parts to it. One is the cycle that Professor Talbot talked about—the process of learning and reflection, putting it into practice and then getting some feedback on it. There is quite a lot of evidence that says our capacity to retain a certain amount of information and then put it into practice is reasonably limited, so the amount of information that you would get in an eight‑day period does not lend itself to that sort of practice and reflection. The second is the evidence around the types of information that is being imparted in any sort of sheep-dip course of five to eight days is often perceived by participants to be quite abstract and they find it hard to understand how it would apply to their role.
Q268 Chair: That would depend on the quality of the course.
Hilary Spencer: Yes, it would.
Q269 Kelvin Hopkins: Two other criticisms have been made. One is that you have had to justify cuts to courses focused on topics such as understanding Government and the work of the European Union, which is a worry, and the lack of transparency about the operation of Civil Service Learning and the courses it teaches. Are they fair criticisms? It strikes me that cuts are obviously very serious, but lack of transparency—surely the courses should be upfront and understood by everybody.
Hilary Spencer: The lack of transparency issue, I think, relates to the fact that the Civil Service Learning portal is password-protected, and that is one of the things I am looking at—whether or not we remove that password.
Q270 Kelvin Hopkins: In the past, there has been training undertaken by Capita, which has had a terrible reputation. I do not know where it is now, but I think it was the Education Service that said that Capita was so bad it should never be given another Government contract. Are any outsourcing organisations still involved?
Hilary Spencer: Yes. The contract we currently have with Capita is due to expire at the beginning of 2016 and we are about to start a re‑tendering process for a contract around learning and development early in the new year.
Q271 Kelvin Hopkins: What about taking it in‑house?
Hilary Spencer: That is one of the things I have been looking at, as to whether there are some options for us to do that. Probably with the scale of the Civil Service, with its 400,000 employees and the range of things we need, I do not think we have the capacity to deliver all of that training in‑house, and I do not think even the National School of Government in its heyday would have delivered all of that.
Q272 Kelvin Hopkins: There are a lot of senior civil servants who have taken early retirement packages and that kind of thing. Surely they would have tremendous experience and ability to pass on to junior civil servants. Would that not be a way forward, doing it in‑house with people who have been or even are civil servants themselves?
Hilary Spencer: That is one of the things I am looking at. There is a role for experts in the Civil Service to impart some more Civil Service skills, but there are also some other skills that we know we need in the Civil Service where I do think we need some external input and external expertise.
Chris Last: Just one thing I thought would be helpful: I was around when the decision was made to set up Civil Service Learning, and that was not about closing the National School of Government; it was because we had 2,000 people working in Departments undertaking often duplicative interventions in the training world. For instance, from memory, there were about 250 leadership programmes, a number of which, if you just looked at them, fundamentally looked the same. They just had a different departmental badge on them and we were purchasing them ineffectively. We were running the courses in departmental silos rather than doing them across organisations, which added to this departmental approach to everything. When the decision was made to close the National School of Government, my memory was that eight of the people who worked in the National School of Government who were working on some of the most obviously Parliament‑orientated things were transferred to Civil Service Learning to continue that.
Q273 Chair: They are the witnesses we have had and they are engaged by these contractors to teach the same courses, they believe, now very inadequately compared to how they were taught before.
Chris Last: Eight of them were transferred to continue to be employed by Civil Service Learning. The model of Civil Service Learning is to have a relatively small—compared to the size of the Civil Service—core group of people, who are constantly reviewing the training it undertakes.
Q274 Chair: We are not trying to turn the clock back and reopen Sunningdale, but how fit for purpose is Civil Service Learning? I intend absolutely no personal criticism of any of the three of you sitting in front of us or, indeed, of the Minister, but how good is it really and how much baby went out with the bathwater when we closed down Sunningdale?
Chris Last: If I can answer that, first of all, I do think, before I can answer that I need to remind people, because in our evidence it showed that the National School of Government only touched around 30,000 of what must have been—
Chair: We are not here to defend the National School of Government, but what did we lose?
Chris Last: I think, in terms of the major operational delivery activities, we are now providing better quality training to that vast majority of group. However, as Hilary said earlier, there is still work to be done on the high‑end piece of the service provision we provide.
Chair: The preparation of the top leadership.
Chris Last: Exactly. Some other things we have done in that, as both of my colleagues mentioned earlier, involve the fact that experience and doing the job is just as important as classroom learning.
Chair: Of course and we will come to that in a moment.
Oliver Robbins: If I may, two very quick points, Mr Chairman: first, part of what the National School was about, which we hope Civil Service Learning in the future will not have to deal with in the same way, was combating some things about the culture, which we embedded through the structure we had. I joined the Fast Stream; I was allocated to the Treasury; I stayed there for 10 years. Today’s Fast Streamers do four six‑month placements around the Civil Service, owned by Chris rather than by a home Department, then two one‑year placements to deepen their experience. They are citizens of the Civil Service rather than of a single Department. Secondly, professions: they were not strong when I joined. They even were not strong, I do not think, five years ago.
Q275 Chair: Are they stronger now?
Oliver Robbins: They are stronger now. People join a profession and they have much more of a lateral sense of what that means.
Q276 Kelvin Hopkins: Slightly deviating from what the Chairman said, a central National School of Government surely overcomes the silo problem: it is in‑house, you get a general culture across the Civil Service, and you re‑establish consistent systems. There are all sorts of advantages, are there not, of having a National School of Government? Am I being devil’s advocate? I thought that sounds like sense to me.
Q277 Chair: With a lot of these courses that are ad hoc, put on by firms of consultants, the evidence we have had is because they are too near the office, they are not residential, people pop back to the office, they stay for two or three days of the course and then disappear back to the course because they are too near to their bosses who have other priorities than training. We know that most civil servants are not getting the five days mandatory training they are meant to have across the year, so how fit for purpose is Civil Service Learning?
Oliver Robbins: If I may say so, Mr Chairman, as you will know better than me, those are not new problems in the Civil Service.
Q278 Chair: No. I am not saying it was perfect before, but how are you dealing with it?
Oliver Robbins: For a start, sparing Hilary’s blushes, we should not completely fixate on Civil Service Learning. A lot of what civil servants are doing, as Chris mentioned earlier, is on-the-job training. They are doing mentoring, they are doing work-shadowing, and they are developing themselves in a whole range of ways that add up to a richer learning experience than going and sitting in a room for five days.
Q279 Chair: That takes us on to developing and supporting leaders, which is the piece we think needs to be addressed and, in particular, the evidence we have from Professor Talbot. He remarks that the Civil Service is very strong at this experiential learning. That is the culture of the Civil Service: find a nice boss or find someone you like and empathise with, who is a bit further up the system than you, perhaps out of the line management, learn from them, watch other people. This is how a culture, perhaps not the best culture, reinforces itself. We know that Ministers are very keen on what they call “conceptual” learning; that is, sending people off to business school and giving them a different set of skills about writing strategies and coming back and having great schemes to do. However, what Professor Talbot says we lack is reflective practice: an approach that involves individuals engaging in roles and then reflecting on what worked and what did not and, indeed, experimental learning. I hope that Civil Service Learning is doing some experimental learning to see what works and what does not work and how it can improve, but how are we going to bring these four types of learning into equal and opposite tension in the training of Civil Service leaders in the future?
Chris Last: One of the big things that we did recognise we had not got was good development all the way through the Civil Service. We have always had a really outstanding Fast Stream but, as Mr Robbins mentioned earlier, one of the problems was we left people in one place too long. Then we typically ran development programmes for the most senior people in the Civil Service. What we have now focused a lot of effort on is filling the gap between the two. We have brought in a future leaders scheme and a senior leaders scheme, and they are trying, for that narrow group of people we have identified with the highest potential, to give them different types of learning and experience. For instance, if you go to the future leaders scheme, there will be a presentation by a senior civil servant who exists now about a piece of work they have done in the organisation. There will be a project they are sent off to do and they will come back and reflect on how that went.
Q280 Chair: I hear everything you are saying. This was not so heavily reflected in the Cabinet Office evidence that you gave us. I must bring in Mr Turner on this, but who is the guiding mind behind this strategy for educating the future leaders of the Civil Service? Is it you?
Chris Last: I am the expert; I am responsible for it.
Q281 Chair: So everything that the National School of Government used to do is concentrated in you. That is asking quite a lot, is it not?
Chris Last: Yes, except that most successful leadership programmes and development of leaders is not done purely by the HR person. In fact, not done by the HR person; it is done by the leadership of the Civil Service.
Q282 Chair: So who is accountable for ensuring this full spectrum of learning for leaders is carried out?
Chris Last: The Senior Leadership Committee is the customer guiding mind on this, so the senior Permanent Secretaries who meet regularly to do that. I am the person who is responsible for making sure that the work that needs to be done to provide those pieces is done in the organisation.
Q283 Chair: You have just made it clear that you really cannot be held accountable individually for this because it is up to the Senior Leadership Committee.
Chris Last: I can be accountable for delivery of the input. As Mr Robbins pointed out, measuring outputs is much more difficult.
Q284 Chair: Mr Robbins, can I ask you who is the guiding mind behind the leadership training of the Civil Service?
Oliver Robbins: The plain answer to that is it is probably some combination of me and Chris. I try to support the senior leaders in thinking about what we need to do to create those issues around leadership and culture we were talking about earlier—how do we fix them, what kind of people do we need, what kind of experience and development do they need along the way. Chris is the expert on how we get it and how we give it to them in the most efficient and effective way.
Q285 Mr Turner: Is the approach coherent?
Oliver Robbins: Specifically on leadership training, it is more coherent, I would say, than at any other point in my Civil Service career, which may not completely answer your question, but I think it is pretty coherent. As Chris says, we have levels of the development offer that go up each important gateway in the Civil Service. My worry, openly with this Committee, is sometimes we are trying to choose a leadership cadre at quite low levels in the Civil Service where there are literally tens of thousands of people in that pool from whom we are selecting and we are only able to pick dozens of them for the kind of offer we are able to give, but yes, I think it is coherent.
Q286 Mr Turner: What happens to those people who do not get into the top group?
Oliver Robbins: For a start, the cadre can always change. The way we organise this is there are a series of cross‑Civil Service senior committees below the one that Chris described who look at each level of the development offer and check that we are putting the right sort of people into that, and that we are not falling into the trap that the Chairman alluded to of simply perpetuating the Civil Service and some of its less good as well as its good cultural characteristics. So we can add people in and we often do. We have 300 people currently in the various talent schemes. We are planning to add another 150 over the course of the next year, so it is constantly changing.
Q287 Mr Turner: Is 500 enough compared with 10,000?
Oliver Robbins: I do not believe it is quite enough.
Q288 Mr Turner: How much is?
Oliver Robbins: We do not have a target number here. We want to make sure that we are focusing the development offer on those people we think will most benefit from it. Chris is more deeply involved in this process than I am, but it involves us looking closely at where Departments and senior management are currently placing people in their own estimation of future talent potential and making sure that we are putting as many of the best people as we can into the course as we can afford.
Q289 Mr Turner: Mr Last, you are doing this. In what way are you merely replicating individuals’ belief and in what way are you pushing the boundaries for those who may not be as good as they would be entitled to if only you know it?
Chris Last: Yes, I think that is quite a challenge in the Civil Service. Getting our leaders to be constantly looking for the most talented people and developing and stretching them so they can be better and develop further is a management challenge.
Q290 Mr Turner: How do you do it?
Chris Last: One, you do it, for a relatively small group, through these programmes. Departments also run programmes within Departments as well, because almost every big organisation has a tiny, thin group of people whom it is trying to develop as corporate talent. The other thing we have to gradually do, and this is a cultural change, so this does not change overnight—18 months ago we did not have talent programmes in the middle and we need to engender this desire amongst our leaders to look for the most talented people and develop them. We have to do that.
Q291 Mr Turner: The 500 or so that you are measuring now were not there one and a half years ago.
Chris Last: That is exactly right. One of the things that we have learned is to start running the programmes and make sure they work properly. Particularly at the grades below the Senior Civil Service where we can do most, we have to increase that population on the talent programme just for it to be proportionate, but we have only been running at it for 18 months.
Q292 Mr Turner: Is sufficient focus placed on leadership by the capabilities plan?
Chris Last: It is one of the things that is specifically highlighted in the capabilities plan. On the very thing you talked about, one of the things we are trying to do is make sure that in performance appraisals the importance of leadership is reflected in the objectives. Too often appraisals are focused on the “what” and not enough on the “how” and we need to encourage that to be both. We are trying to do that and are seeing some progress on that.
Q293 Mr Turner: To what extent is this skill being learned among the lower grades?
Chris Last: Before I did this job, I looked after DWP, which is the biggest operational Department. Quite often I saw some of these skills being very well developed in relatively junior people who managed large numbers of people in Jobcentres and contact centres. This whole issue of focusing on the individuals who work for you and trying to make each of them the best they can be, I have seen good pockets of that.
Q294 Mr Turner: Why is it good, apparently, in DWP, but not so good in other areas?
Chris Last: I specifically was saying there were places you could see. Quite often, if you went into a contact centre or a Jobcentre, almost immediately you could sense it was well done, so that did not mean it was always the same; it was just examples of it. I think it comes down to quality of leadership and expectations. In my time in the Cabinet Office, I have seen the Civil Service has gradually increased its expectations of its leaders in this field and I think that is a good thing.
Q295 Mr Turner: What percentage was good in the DWP?
Chris Last: I cannot statistically answer that.
Q296 Chair: I am very sorry, but we are going to have to move on. How should we judge the success of leadership training the Civil Service?
Oliver Robbins: I think Bill Crothers gave you the best possible answer to that, Mr Chairman. It is about whether you are seeing the trees move rather than whether you are measuring the wind speed. I hope that what you will see after a further 18 months of the schemes that Chris has been talking about is a real step change in the quality of leadership starting to be reflected universally through engagement scores around Departments.
Q297 Mr Evans: Using the West Coast Main Line franchising fiasco as an example, when something goes terribly wrong do you think that there is the right skills set within the Civil Service to learn from the mistakes?
Oliver Robbins: Not always, no, but we are trying, not least prompted by that incident, to get much better at this. Part of my answer to your question, Mr Evans, would be to look at what we have done through the professions over the last few years. One of the first reactions, a bit more below the radar than some of the other reviews that Ms Moriarty was talking to you about, was for the Government’s economists to look at the quality of economic and financial modelling through Government and what could be learned from the errors in the West Coast modelling for other over‑used and, perhaps, over‑dependent models in Government. So what we are trying to do is make sure we use networks of professionalism across Government, communities of people who know their stuff to work together to make sure that the experience is shared.
Chris Last: In our leadership programmes, as I mentioned earlier, increasingly we get senior leaders in the Civil Service to come and talk about their experiences, good and bad. Those stories that are told impart a greater level of knowledge than academic examples, so increasingly, on all the leadership programmes we run there is a significant content of senior leaders coming in and talking about their experiences.
Q298 Mr Evans: For instance, with the NATS thing that happened just recently, what role does the Civil Service take in any of that now?
Chris Last: NATS is a private sector organisation, but I know Philip Rutnam in the Department for Transport is asking about those experiences and we will make sure that those experiences are used—although the people in that organisation, just to be clear, would not have been people who we would have trained or developed.
Q299 Mr Evans: No, but you would expect somebody within the Civil Service, within the Department for Transport to at least have been able to predict that something like this would happen with some of the horizon stuff that is being done.
Chris Last: I do not know the answer to that.
Oliver Robbins: I do not think the Department for Transport had predicted it or obviously they would have tried to do something about it, but what we are trying to professionalise comes back to the Chairman’s questions about risk management earlier in the session.
Chair: The interesting thing about that case is I bet there are people in NATS who knew this vulnerability existing and perhaps had not been listened to. That is what I would expect, but really that is not our primary responsibility here, because it is a private sector organisation. Can you move on, Nigel?
Q300 Mr Evans: As far as the future is concerned, do you think that the Civil Service now, as far as the challenges for the future go, has the right mindset for that too?
Chris Last: I think we are doing all the right things. None of this is new. If you go and look at other big organisations that are successful, both in the private and public sector, they are doing the very things that we are talking about. They are focusing on a number of priorities, but not making them too many and we have our priority areas. They are focusing on building their professions and they are also focusing on making sure they have good capability in training the future leaders of the organisation. All of those things are the recipe for success here. One of the things we have to watch, as Olly mentioned earlier, is that we do not try to look at very short‑term successes or failings on this. This takes time to build over many years, not a few months.
Q301 Chair: Can I just ask something about the Laidlaw prescription, which you will have heard about, which we have learned about and we are very impressed with? It was the lessons to be drawn out of the West Coast Main Line fiasco, which shows that these little cards have been sent round the Department that everybody should be viewed with clear process, clear responsibility, adequate resources, openness to challenge and escalation and honesty about risk, to which I would add two further prescriptions. One is that you should be rewarded for using your own judgment; secondly, that you should learn from failure. However, there is no evidence from the Laidlaw prescription that the Civil Service has yet learned that it needs to have courage to delegate or that failure exists and always will exist and that is one of the things that you are going to learn from as an organisation on a constant basis. Do you think I am being unfair?
Oliver Robbins: I do not think you are being entirely unfair, no, Mr Chairman. Going around the country over the last few months listening to civil servants talk about good and bad leadership experiences, one of the things that comes through most often is what I would call about empowerment, being given a sense that if they say things and they find a new way of doing something that that will be backed and experimented with. I do think, from the very top, from the Minister but also from the permanent heads of the Civil Service, we are getting the message out there that experimentation and upward challenge and some of the things, frankly, I joined the Civil Service hoping to find and enjoy are going to be the culture of the future, but they are not universally so at the moment.
Chair: Thank you. We are going to leave it there. There are one or two other questions we might follow up with in writing about attracting and retaining skills, but we have been over that ground many times before. Can I thank you very much indeed for being with us today?
Oliver Robbins: Thank you.
Witness: Rt Hon Francis Maude MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, gave evidence.
Q302 Chair: Please could you identify yourself for the record?
Mr Maude: I am Francis Maude. I am Minister for the Cabinet Office.
Chair: Because there is going to be a division at some stage, we are going to go as quickly as possible, which means we are going to try not to be rude and brusque with each other, but it might sound like that.
Mr Maude: Okay.
Q303 Mr Turner: In which areas would you have liked to see more progress in the delivery of the capabilities plan?
Mr Maude: All of them.
Q304 Chair: Which areas are you most concerned about?
Mr Maude: It is not a criticism of the leadership, all of whom I would say want things to move faster in terms of refreshing capability, which is both bringing people in, frankly, some of the people maybe not continuing, but also building on giving skills to people already in the system. We have made good progress with digital, some progress with commercial, but with all of these areas we started from a low base.
Q305 Mr Turner: We were told that you were trying very hard but everyone knows you do not have the support from the Prime Minister. Do you think you are getting sufficient support?
Mr Maude: Yes. The Prime Minister feels very strongly about this and has given me robust support.
Q306 Mr Turner: So what is it that makes it apparently not work at the moment?
Mr Maude: There was a lack of appreciation when the Coalition Government was formed, four and three‑quarter years ago, in the then leadership of the Civil Service about how severe the deficiencies were. There was, if I can put it this way, a high degree of complacency. In the early days, I would consistently be served up with draft articles and speeches that started with the confident assertion that the British Civil Service is the best in the world, though when I asked for the evidence that supported this contention it did not exist. We have absolutely some of the very best civil servants in the world and we have a system of a permanent, politically impartial Civil Service that other countries have sought to emulate, but this kind of confident assertion that everything was fine was not borne out by any evidence. Yet there was plenty of evidence from civil servants themselves, who were making it clear, particularly deeper in the organisation, that they felt that the leadership and management of change was weak. This was coming out consistently through the people surveys. It was clear that we were short of capability in digital, partly because the way IT had been outsourced meant that we had simply lost, almost deliberately, a lot of the capability to be an intelligent customer for IT. We are bringing in‑house now a lot of that capability and the work that Mike Bracken and Liam Maxwell are leading is very impressive. Commercial, we know that we had too many people who, in the commercial and procurement areas, were procurement processors and not people who were bringing commercial insight and capability to what they did—more concerned with ensuring that the process had been followed than with their being a good commercial outcome—and the failures of project management and project leadership were legion.
Chair: That was a very long answer; we must go at a clip.
Q307 Mr Turner: You identified us as having some of the best civil servants in the world. What proportion of those is very good?
Mr Maude: It is impossible to say.
Q308 Mr Turner: I know, but I want to know.
Mr Maude: It is really very difficult to say. Any Minister gets exposed to a small part even of his or her own Department, let alone the whole of the Civil Service. I see some brilliant civil servants. Performance management has been very weak in the past; it is getting better but I think the leadership of the Civil Service would still say there is some distance to go before it is properly rigorous. In every organisation, this is difficult to do, and difficult to do well, but it is really important.
Q309 Mr Turner: What responsibility will John Manzoni have for driving forward the Civil Service skills agenda?
Mr Maude: Overall responsibility, with Jeremy Heywood, but particularly the functional areas that we have talked about will be particularly John’s responsibility.
Q310 Mr Turner: Are the appraisals that Departments make of their capabilities realistic?
Mr Maude: Variable, which is why one of the things that is happening and will happen more with stronger functional leadership is that there will be fewer Departments marking their own homework. Chris Last, rightly, is overseeing capability in HR; Bill Crothers in Commercial—and he and John Kingman have just done a capability review across Government, which brings consistency to it; Mike Bracken and Liam Maxwell on Digital and Technology; and Julian Kelly will, I am sure, be doing the same with the financial-management function, which has been weak.
Q311 Chair: Can I chip in there? We have been told that the core of any really effective HR function is really good data about the people you have, what skills they have, what skills they lack and how you are developing them. In our procurement report 18 months ago, we found the data was awful. How is it improving?
Mr Maude: A bit, I think it is fair to say.
Q312 Chair: Why is it taking so long?
Mr Maude: A lot of it is habit. The data is getting better. Which particular area—was it Procurement?
Q313 Chair: We looked at how many procurement professionals were in each Department. We asked for the data, and the data you sent us was very patchy. It was not comprehensive.
Mr Maude: Departments sometimes do not know what they have within their own Department; sometimes, they are reluctant to divulge it.
Q314 Chair: Is that still the case? That report was 18 months ago.
Mr Maude: It is getting a lot better. It is getting a lot better but it is by no means perfect, because people define roles in different ways.
Q315 Chair: What is the obstacle to improvement?
Mr Maude: When you look at functional leadership, and we had McKinsey do a very quick study of how we fared in functional leadership, which we did last year, they concluded that, in most areas, we had a relatively very weak model of functional leadership compared with similar Governments elsewhere. You would find, for example, in counting how many procurement professionals and so on, Departments defining this in a different way. It is the same with IT and a whole lot of people, so it is had been frustratingly hard to get a firm handle on this. There have been different, inconsistent definitions, so it is hard to know.
Q316 Chair: If I was one of those nasty Opposition chairs, I would now be lambasting you for being here for four and three-quarter years and you not having sorted this out.
Mr Maude: It is partly the consequence of having a very federal model of Government, and that we have consistently had a weak central model.
Q317 Chair: You are, however, only asking for numbers and information, or maybe you are asking them to collect information that they just do not have.
Mr Maude: I think a lot of it is that they do not have it, or they do not have it in a consistent form.
Q318 Chair: Do you have a Cabinet mandate for this?
Mr Maude: Yes, and sometimes Departments will take a Cabinet mandate less seriously than they should. I remember once a bunch of, I think, Commercial directors, when I asked them why they had not given effect to a decision made by a Cabinet Committee, one of them said, “We did not think it was a very strong mandate”, so I did ask them what they needed.
Q319 Chair: What about the Jeremy Heywood and John Manzoni mandate? That, surely, runs throughout Whitehall.
Mr Maude: Yes, but we are still in a federal model. Permanent Secretaries will say that their principal reporting line is to their Secretary of State.
Q320 Chair: Surely if the Cabinet agrees something, the Secretaries of State have agreed to it.
Mr Maude: Yes.
Q321 Chair: What do you think the answer to this is?
Mr Maude: A strong model of functional leadership. We are moving towards this and we are making progress, but this is a very big super-tanker with a lot of inertia built into it. We need a strong model where functional professionals within Government see their careers as depending on being compliant with centrally and collectively made decisions.
Mr Turner: Hasn’t anyone said that at Cabinet level?
Q322 Chair: Does that not underline what one of our witnesses said about the Prime Minister? If the Prime Minister was interested in it, it would happen, surely.
Mr Maude: The Prime Minister might say that he is equally frustrated by the lack of data.
Q323 Chair: He has the Cabinet Secretary, you, and now John Manzoni, and he still cannot make it happen.
Mr Maude: It is very hard, in this federal model; the way we think it ought to run through central Government, it does not always. There is a lot of habit of poor data collection and poor data analysis. It is getting better but we are by no means there.
Chair: We will try to help you with some recommendations.
Mr Maude: That seems helpful. I would appreciate that.
Q324 Chair: On the question of risk management, do you agree with this personal sentiment of mine that what we want is for individual civil servants to make judgments about the risks that they should be making at their level, rather than passing all the risks up the food chain?
Mr Maude: Yes.
Q325 Mr Evans: Minister, how do you rate Civil Service Learning?
Mr Maude: I think it is improving. It has been doing something quite radical, which is to take what was happening in a thousand different places, very expensively and with very low levels of satisfaction across central Government, and to pull it together so that we do not constantly reinvent the wheel and do things in a very inconsistent way, which was happening before. In terms of developing a strong common ethos across the Civil Service, this was a real defect, but I think everyone concerned with Civil Service Learning would say that it is a work in progress and probably always will be. There will never be a perfect way of doing this which is steady-state forever.
Q326 Mr Evans: When you took over in 2010, how would you rate Civil Service Learning then from one to 10, and how many out of 10 would you rate it now?
Mr Maude: Civil Service Learning did not really exist in 2010. We had the National School of Government and we had this being done in different places, with huge numbers of people involved, and very expensively. It depends on according to what criteria. It was very expensive, not very high level—
Q327 Chair: If 10 is where you would like it to be, and zero is dysfunctional, where is it?
Mr Maude: I would say we are now at six-ish.
Q328 Mr Evans: What improvements do you want to make? Are there some things you would have liked to have done that you cannot do, either simply because of this inertia that you talked about or, indeed, because you are in a coalition?
Mr Maude: Not particularly because of the coalition; I do not think that that has been an inhibition. In terms of learning and development, I think we have done quite a lot, and not all of it through Civil Service Learning: the Major Projects Leadership Academy has been widely supported; the Commissioning Academy, which is operating on a shoestring across the wider public sector but including central Government, is doing a great deal very well indeed; and changing the way we do Fast Stream. I remember, when I first sought to reform the way that Fast Stream worked, rather astonishingly four different Permanent Secretaries came to a meeting with me to tell me that what I wanted to do could not possibly work. It is working and making Fast Stream much more like a graduate training scheme that you would find in other organisations. That has been a plus. All of that has been good.
Getting agreement that people who take on big leadership roles in the Civil Service should go through a top management executive programme at a top business school, where they will be alongside people from other sectors, and particularly from the private sector, has been a plus. It has not happened yet but four Permanent Secretaries will be going through it imminently, as I say, at top business schools. We then want the next generation to be going through this, because one of my concerns is that, over quite a long time, we have been expecting people to take on positions of enormous responsibility with woefully inadequate preparation. We cannot assume that bright people can just be thrown into positions of great responsibility and be expected to learn on the job. It is not fair on them and it is not fair on the taxpayer.
Q329 Mr Evans: A final question: intimating what the Chairman said about it not being a priority, we got the sense from Dominic Cummings, when he came to give evidence—as you know, he was very much at the heart of it and knew what was going on—that he just thought that it simply is not a priority, and that Government, as such, do not treat the Civil Service as the priority that they should; otherwise, the changes that you and the Prime Minister are frustrated about might just happen.
Mr Maude: I think most people would say that we have made more progress. The caravan trail of Civil Service reform is littered with the whitened skeletons of people who have failed in this. I would not say we have had complete success by any means, but we have achieved quite a lot.
Q330 Chair: Just on Civil Service Learning, we heard that there are poor-quality trainers, there has been a significant reduction in the scope and choice of courses, there has been a lack of dedicated training space where people go and can be separated from their bosses and away from distractions, there have been arduous processes that are difficult to use and act as a disincentive to managers to deploy, and there is a lack of transparency about what is on offer and what it is intended to achieve. That is quite a harsh criticism, and I make no criticism of the witness we have just had, who has only just started in his role, but how much of that do you share?
Mr Maude: It is hard for me to know. If that is what people are saying, that is what people are saying. I do not think anyone would say this is yet perfect, nor, as I say, will it ever be. This will be a work in progress for quite a long time. All I can say is that it is a lot better than it was.
Q331 Chair: We do not want to turn the clock back to the National School for Government as it was, but to what extent do you think one or two babies went out with the bathwater?
Mr Maude: I have never heard anyone identify one yet.
Q332 Chair: In our previous session, we identified the senior leadership training.
Mr Maude: I would regard that as a benefit, because the senior leadership training that I heard described being done through the National School of Government was not of high quality, and nor was it consistent. If we are going to do this, we need to it in a way that is consistent and very high quality, and being done alongside people from different backgrounds, so that we do not have this sense that what the Civil Service do is completely unique and distinctive. There is much in common with leadership needed in other organisations, and there is much that each different sector will have to learn from each other.
Q333 Chair: Lastly on this question of training, one of the ideas we are intrigued by is that there has been some training for Ministers. The Civil Service might operate better if more Ministers understood how Whitehall worked. We have the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme, the Industry and Parliament Trust and the Police Service Parliamentary Scheme; should we have some equivalent for the Civil Service?
Mr Maude: I have a vague feeling that there is something, but I could not quite put my finger on it.
Q334 Chair: I do not think there is, but would it not be a good idea—
Mr Maude: Yes, that is a very good.
Q335 Chair: If some of these MPs were sent on training programmes that civil servants were going on, and sat beside civil servants at their desks to see what they do?
Mr Maude: I think it is a very good idea. You mentioned training for Ministers. One of the things we did before the last election—
Chair: Was with the Institute for Government.
Mr Maude: Yes.
Q336 Chair: I am thinking, however, rather than emergency preparation for busy Shadow Ministers, half of whom did not turn up for the courses, of something that young MPs just entering the House of Commons would love to do because they want to find out what is going on.
Mr Maude: I think that is a very good idea.
Chair: Excellent.
Mr Evans: As long as we do not go native.
Q337 Chair: It usually works the other way round. Developing and supporting leaders, as we mentioned before: to what extent do you agree with the NAO, who said in their assessment that there needs to be some acknowledgment the leadership style needs to move away from command and control towards an approach based on aspiring and engaging people”?
Mr Maude: I think that is absolutely right. I think a point a number of people have made, including many people in the Civil Service, is that the Civil Service has quite a deferential culture, and that the best kind of culture is one where people both feel able and encouraged to challenge the status quo and challenge what happens, but then expect and are expected to take personal responsibility for making things happen. This is a much more empowered organisation and we are not yet there.
Q338 Chair: Professor Colin Talbot said, “We are probably the weakest country, certainly among the big OECD states, in terms of having a system for developing our senior public leaders”, and he was not just talking about civil servants. Do you agree?
Mr Maude: I could not make a comment about the comparison, but I think one of the things that I identified when we were drawing up the first Civil Service Reform Plan two and a half years ago was that we had a whole lot of different leadership programmes for people at different stages: you had the Fast Stream, and then you had a gap, and then different levels of the SCS had different schemes. What we have done now is to create the High Potential stream, which includes people all the way through from the Fast Stream. It has to be very porous, with people dropping out, because not everyone wants to reach or is capable of reaching the top, and other people coming into it, but addressing the development of future leaders much earlier and much more consistently is, I think, crucial. In terms of managing that team as a corporate resource, as any big complex organisation would do, rather than allowing Departments to squirrel away their best talent, I think this is a very important development. We are in the early stages of making it work but I think there will be a big dividend from that.
Q339 Chair: We have talked a bit about engagement and its importance, but the NAO highlighted the recent Civil Service people survey, in which only 43% of respondents rated the theme of leadership and managing change positively; yet, in the job descriptions that were issued at the beginning of this year—
Mr Maude: The objectives.
Chair: The objectives—improving engagement figured in only a tiny majority of Permanent Secretary job descriptions.
Mr Maude: I must have failed to spot that because it absolutely—
Chair: I am glad you feel that way.
Mr Maude: No, it absolutely should be in there as a key corporate objective; you are absolutely right.
Q340 Chair: In terms of the lead responsibility for raising staff engagement scores, then, where does that rest?
Mr Maude: That will rest with the leadership of the Civil Service.
Q341 Chair: In terms of teaching leadership skills, the SCS survey showed that 40% of their members do not feel they have had adequate opportunity to enhance their skills and competencies. What does that say about their engagement in the right kind of training? Incidentally, their survey was pretty accurate on everything else. It concurred with the Government’s own survey.
Mr Maude: Yes. That is not very satisfactory, clearly.
Q342 Chair: Who holds the lead in that area, and how coherent is the approach? Sorry, I am going very quickly because we have a division in about six minutes.
Mr Maude: The responsibility for that will lie with Jeremy Heywood and John Manzoni in their new roles, and both of them take it very seriously.
Q343 Chair: In terms of learning from mistakes—and we talked about the Laidlaw prescription earlier—where are lessons of failure recorded, who maintains those lessons, and how do you ensure that lessons are properly disseminated across Whitehall?
Mr Maude: I guess it would be in Departments in particular, but I think we are not very good at this. In terms of the West Coast Main Line fiasco—I think you called it—I think we did a good exercise in learning the lessons, the result of which is, as you have put it, the Laidlaw prescription, which all made good sense. One of the good things in that context was that, as soon as that was disclosed, the leadership of the Civil Service said that this was incompetence by civil servants that would not be tolerated. I think what we are less good at is seeing that we are culpable. The failure there was not the initial failure—mistakes will happen; it was that it was not elevated or escalated. The thing you want in any organisation—
Chair: Yes, I totally agree with all that—
Mr Maude: It is quite important to make this point: the Google mantra is “Fail small, fail fast”. It is not a fear of any kind of failure; it is “Spot that it is not working, stop doing it and make sure that the organisation learns from it”.
Q344 Chair: Learning from failure, however, was not in the Laidlaw prescription.
Mr Maude: No, but he probably thought that was self-explanatory because that was, itself, an exercise in learning from failure.
Q345 Chair: Do you think the Civil Service hates to write down the words, “failure is a good thing”?
Mr Maude: No, it is not a good thing because I instituted in this year’s Civil Service awards what I was not quite brave enough to call an award for the best failure. It got described as the innovation award, and it also made the mistake of including in the rubric—
Q346 Chair: Why were you not allowed to call it the best failure?
Mr Maude: Because I probably gave up in a weak moment. I have weak moments.
Q347 Chair: Does that not suggest a lack of ability in the Civil Service to just call a spade a spade?
Mr Maude: Next year, if I am still around to do it—which I hope to be—it will be called the Francis Maude Award for Failure, and I will risk amusement in the Daily Mail at my expense. I allowed to creep into the rubric the word “bravely”, which is a bad word in Whitehall, as in “That would be a very courageous decision, Minister”. What it was meant to do was to reward people who tried something new that did not work. They then stopped doing it and ensured the organisation learned from it. These are fundamental things in good, strong, confident organisations; yet, what was revealing was that, in the 80 nominations we had for that award, only one was for something that had not worked. The rest of them were perfectly good things, which had been tried but did work, which itself illustrated how far we have to go yet in creating this open culture that we need.
Q348 Chair: There is, though, a lack of architecture to learn from failure. You could do it by setting up a central secretariat that tells people what to do from the Cabinet Office, but that meets resistance, does it not? If the learning function had that capability to be a store of what has worked and not worked, does that not militate in favour of some kind of recommendation from us to build on Civil Services Learning to make it more of an institution, more cross-Governmental and more coherent? I think that is the direction that we are minded to go.
Mr Maude: I think that sounds like a very interesting nascent recommendation.
Q349 Mr Evans: Do you think enough praise is given to civil servants when they do things right, and do you think that more heads should roll when things go badly wrong?
Mr Maude: I am probably not the first. On the rare occasions when the PAC reports on something that goes well, it disappears without trace. I think heads rolling when things go wrong is too broad a thing. I think things will go wrong, and it is how you deal with it. Do you stop doing it early? Far too often, we carry on doing things after it is obvious that it is not working. It is about having that open culture where people feel that the crime is not to do something that has not worked but to carry on doing it and not to ensure that the organisation learns from it.
Q350 Chair: How many years ahead should the Civil Service be looking as it plans its future capacity and its future capability?
Mr Maude: There is not a particular date.
Chair: To the nearest decade.
Mr Maude: It depends on what you are talking about. In terms of leadership, we should be building the leadership for 40 years hence now. It is not too early now. In terms of digital skills, that will be over the next five years. Commercial is much more—there is no one-size-fits-all answer.
Q351 Chair: I agree with that, but does that not militate in favour of some kind of institutional architecture that embodies that forward look?
Mr Maude: Possibly, but let us not ossify it. Let us not set it in concrete.
Q352 Chair: I agree. Looking at some of the challenges we are looking at—we are going to have to stop now, unfortunately—whether it is nanotechnology or microbiological threats, the opportunities presented by the development of certain industries, climate change or public-expenditure control, how should we be preparing the Civil Service to deal with these longer-term challenges which go beyond the immediate time horizon of Governments that are trying to win another election?
Mr Maude: One of the things we have started to do is a more consistent approach to horizon-scanning, which has tended to be more focused on threats than opportunities. One of the things we know we need to build is more data-science capability, and data scientists are scarce. There are some in Government but they are dispersed. With these kinds of scarce resources, we need to be building a more critical mass for Government as a whole. I would say that that is one thing that particularly crossed my path that we need to do better.
Q353 Chair: My final question relates to a whole series of questions which I do not have time to ask you about.
Mr Maude: That is very disappointing.
Chair: It is about the pay gap, attracting and retaining the right skills, and the use of the pivotal allowance. With the recovery in the labour market and the demand for these skills outside Government, have we done anything like enough to retain the right people and attract the right people?
Mr Maude: The first point to make is that, for most of the Civil Service in most of the country, when you look at total reward, terms and conditions and pensions, as well as salary, they are better paid than their private-sector equivalents.
Q354 Chair: We are talking about niche skills in senior positions and senior responsible owners, where, for example, there has been a 25% annual turnover of SROs of major projects.
Mr Maude: Yes, and that is not particularly them leaving the Civil Service.
Chair: No.
Mr Maude: That is exactly why we created the pivotal role allowance, to give us the ability to pay—
Q355 Chair: Is it enough?
Mr Maude: I do not know—time will tell—but I think we are far too ready to allow senior responsible owners to move out of their roles into different roles inside Government. More often, we need to be willing to say to people, “No, we are not going to allow you to move to another job. You are going to stay in that job until a particular point where it works for the project for you to move off it.”
Chair: Minister, thank you very much indeed. We are very grateful to you.
Oral evidence: Civil Service Skills, HC 112 28