Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Strategic Leadership in the Civil Service, HC 1536
Tuesday 15 January 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 15 January 2019.
Members present: Sir Bernard Jenkin (Chair); Kelvin Hopkins; Dr Rupa Huq.
Questions 184 - 244
Witness
I: Sir Gerry Grimstone, Chair of the Public Services Leadership Taskforce
Witness: Sir Gerry Grimstone.
Q184 Chair: I welcome our witness this morning to this session on strategic leadership in the Civil Service. Could I ask our witness to introduce himself for the record, please?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Certainly. My name is Sir Gerry Grimstone. I am the lead non-executive at the Ministry of Defence. I am also the Chairman of Barclays Bank and I am an ex-civil servant.
Q185 Chair: Thank you very much for being with us today. I hope we can move briskly through these questions for your own convenience, but if our questions are too long or your answers are too long, I will intervene. I hope, nevertheless, we will learn a great deal from you.
You were appointed to lead a taskforce on public service leadership. When was this first discussed with you?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I would say it was discussed in approximately February last year; in the middle of February.
Q186 Chair: This was a long lead-in to the Budget statement in the autumn?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Yes. I was called by the Chief Secretary to say they had this work that was going on. They wondered if I would be able to assist them to chair the taskforce. It was as straightforward as that.
Q187 Chair: Who decided the terms of reference and the composition of the taskforce?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: The terms of reference had been announced in the Budget the previous year. I was not involved in that process because my first interaction with this was in February, as I said, last year. I presume they came out of some Treasury/Cabinet Office consultation, but I cannot give views on that because I was not around at that time.
Q188 Chair: I was going to ask about which Department you felt had initiated this process.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I do not know that, but certainly once I was involved, it felt very much like a joint process between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, a remarkably harmonious process between the two Departments. The people who were supporting me were drawn from both Departments and I could not have said to you, “That person is a Cabinet Office person” or, “That person is a Treasury person”. It was a genuine joint team supporting this work.
Q189 Chair: I am mildly amused that so much emphasis is being made of the harmonious and joint working of the two Departments.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: No, I would tell you frankly. I hope the Committee knows me well enough to know that if I felt other than that, I would say so. It would be a more interesting answer in some ways if I were to say that, but it was a team effort, working on a project that was, frankly, in a sense not a controversial project. It was a piece of work that people wanted to be done, and all hands, people were very willing to support it.
Q190 Dr Rupa Huq: The taskforce commissioned the Behavioural Insights Team to investigate the case for establishing a separate academy focusing on leadership and productivity in the public services, but then when the Budget came, the establishment of the academy was announced at the same time as the taskforce. To what extent do you think that all this was predetermined; that the outcome was already decided by then?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It might help the Committee to understand it if I paint a little picture of when I came into this, where this had got to and then what the object of the work was. I came in after there had been two or three months of preparatory work done on this. There had been various roundtables held. To get the work going, I think that the team had engaged with a whole range of people to seek opinions.
I suspect a realisation might have dawned on somebody that, unless this was all pulled together and produced some output at some point, there would be no output. I think the reason I was brought in was almost just as a convenor to bring this forward.
I came in, I read the terms of reference and I met the very interesting people who were involved in it. It seemed to me very early on there were four questions that needed to be answered. Was the idea of having such a centre valid and was there an intellectual justification for it? Secondly, if there was to be such a centre, who should it train and interact with? Thirdly, what should it train them in? Fourthly, how should the training be delivered? If you reduced it down to its essentials, as a purely practical person, those seem to me to be the questions that were likely to have to be answered if this was to be brought to a conclusion for the Budget last year, which was the guidance I had been given.
Dealing with the first question—was there an intellectual basis for this?—it was very important to me that intellectual rigour was applied to that. The Behavioural Insights Team, who I found extremely impressive, was very happy to work on this. In terms of bringing this to a neat conclusion, you clearly then had to do the research. It had to be discussed by the taskforce. The taskforce then had to discuss that research and other matters, produce a draft report and then submit it to Ministers. It would have seemed to me pre-emptive to have published the research before the taskforce had finished its work, because this was research commissioned by the taskforce to help its work.
It just seemed to me, being rather neat and tidy, that it would be better to bring all this to a conclusion at a point in time and publish both pieces of work simultaneously. Of course, absolutely no censorship and no guidance on that from anybody. This was the taskforce’s work. The taskforce produced a report, the Behavioural Insights Team did some research and we published the report and the supplementary material simultaneously. In a sense, it was not a mysterious process. It was almost a straightforward process of getting the report and its recommendations and, very critically, the back-up material into the public domain.
Q191 Kelvin Hopkins: How can productivity in the public sector be accurately measured?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It is extremely difficult because you can measure the inputs, but there has been much academic research over the years. The Office of National Statistics is deeply involved in this, to look at output measures in public services. There is no one single output measure that you can apply, because different public services have different outputs. I do not profess to be an expert in that area. I have read a lot of the literature on it, but there are ways of measuring productivity. I would suggest perhaps it is not an exact science, but I think you can certainly produce performance indicators and output measures that give you, in a broad sense, what the productivity is of the public service. Many statisticians devote their lives to doing that.
We found through the research—and perhaps this is something that is not a surprising finding—that good leadership makes organisations work better. Perhaps leave on one side at the moment what “better” means. Good leadership means that the workforce is more engaged, which of course is very important, and the customers of those services feel they are given better services. There are various economic measures that you can look at. The BIT I think does a good job on setting that out—that you have better public services with better leadership.
That did not seem to me to be a surprising hypothesis. It was not our job, in the work available to the taskforce, to go into the theory of productivity measurement in the public services or how we should attempt to measure that going forward. We thought it very important that the work of the centre should have a research component in it. The research components were, first, to show that the centre was doing what was on the tin; secondly, to show that it was doing a decent job; but thirdly, to add—in some ways coming to the heart of your question—to the sum of academic knowledge as to what is productivity in the public sector and how you should measure it.
In a sense this is a dynamic organisation, which, as well as bringing together the leaders of public services—who themselves will be very expert in this area—would in itself I think stimulate activity in the whole area of measuring productivity and how we should go about that, but I would not want to present myself to you today as a statistical expert in the measurement of productivity.
Q192 Kelvin Hopkins: The public sector is extremely varied in what it does.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Of course.
Kelvin Hopkins: Productivity in some areas might be a concept you could use, but in others, such as operating on very sick people or educating young children, “productivity” might be a difficult word to use.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I completely agree with that, although I suspect, if you are looking at operating on sick children, there are output measures for that. The National Health Service and the hospital, rightly and properly, measure the efficiency of surgical procedures in terms of outputs. In a sense, I would put that in this whole bucket of productivity. I do not think one should define productivity in a narrow sense. It is about whether the service is achieving the output for what it is designed to do in the most efficient way.
Q193 Kelvin Hopkins: A separate question: what constitutes good leadership in public service and how can it best be strengthened?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Again, if I may refer you to the BIT report, there have been various academic studies in this area. I think it is one of these things that you can feel. If one goes in and looks at the culture of organisations, one can sense which organisations are well led and which are not. You can do it through all sorts of measurement techniques. You measure the views of the workforce; you look at output measures; you observe an organisation in action to see how it is behaving. It is a diffuse term, but there are specific measures that can be used to observe it and to measure it.
Q194 Kelvin Hopkins: I notice that on your committee you had the Deputy General Secretary of the TUC, where I used to work myself many years ago. Was there an employee input to your discussions?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Yes, certainly. It is of vital importance to the trade unions—and again, to all of us—that those working in public services, some of whom of course may be union members, are well-led. There was huge sympathy from the TUC as to what we were doing and to make this, in a sense, as wide and as eclectic as possible. I was very concerned that the constituency that advised Ministers was as broad as possible in its recommendations.
I would not have wanted to undertake this work if I had not had available to me on the taskforce a wide group of experts representing different shades of opinion. I think it was a very important component of the work. The TUC participated very actively in the work through its membership of the taskforce.
Q195 Chair: We have talked a little bit about leadership already and you said that leadership affects a whole organisation, but to what extent does quality leadership alone determine the quality of public services?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Of course, leaders can only deal in the public service context with the inputs that they are given to allow them to produce the outputs that they are required to produce. This is necessarily a complex nexus, but of course a good leader will herself or himself have a good sense as to what inputs he or she needs to produce the outputs. I think one of the roles of a good leader in the public service context is within the confines of public services: what do we need to do our job properly?
Q196 Chair: I am going to stray into the productivity question too. How much do you think good leaders are preoccupied by productivity? This remit you were given seems very preoccupied with productivity, when we do not think we can measure it very accurately. When you talk about leadership, you do not mention productivity at all.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I only did not mention it because in a sense—I suppose in my own mind—I took it as self-evident that one of the ways that you measure whether someone is a good leader is by looking at whether they are productive or not. It begs the question as to what productivity is. I am sure all leaders have productivity as one of the very important aspects of their mission, but you can only achieve productivity if you have a strong culture; if you have a strongly engaged workforce; if you have clear views as to what you are trying to achieve; if you have the ability to influence the environment in which you are operating to achieve it. All these things seem to me to add together in the context of public services to achieve productivity.
Q197 Chair: If you were looking at, say, a nurse manager in a hospital, who is in a leadership position, or a superintendent responsible for a police division, or a military officer in charge of a battalion, how much would productivity be a significant part of their leadership?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It may be innate in their leadership. I do not think it would be front of mind but, remember, the target audience for the work of this centre is people very close to the top of pyramid in public services. We spent a long time thinking about—there are necessarily always limited resources in this world—what would be the most effective entry point to helping improve public services. We came to the conclusion that it was a cohort of people roughly expressed as being two years away from the very top jobs in public services.
This may be two years away from being a Permanent Secretary, two years away from being the Chief Executive of a local authority, two years away from being a Chief Police Officer—so this very important stratum that has not yet quite got to the top. Because of course, once you are the leader, then the influences on these matters that are of interest to the Committee are far more profound—and rightly so—than if you are in the frontline doing the work. This work was deliberately aimed at that group, because we believed from our discussions, from the research we read, what would make the most impact on public services would be helping—and I stress the word “helping”—that group realise eventually their true potential as leaders.
Q198 Chair: I absolutely support the aspiration of this taskforce to improve leadership, but one of the key parts of your remit in your terms of reference was to, “strengthen research on public sector leadership and productivity, working alongside leading academics to establish and champion the use of data and evidence on the relationship between effective leadership and improved productivity”. Aren’t you looking for a blue rose? Aren’t you looking to be able to measure something that cannot really be measured in the way the Treasury would like to measure things? The Treasury likes productivity.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: The Treasury likes measuring.
Q199 Chair: I do not think great leaders are remembered for how they measure productivity.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I think great leaders are remembered for leaving their organisations in a better shape when they step down than when they were there. We could no doubt spend a lot of time talking about the definition of “better shape” this morning, but let’s put on one side the word “productivity”, which might seem in its technical terms a bit pejorative in this context, and say “more productive”. Who would not want to run an organisation that was more productive in terms of achieving its objectives? I would say that for the private sector or the public sector.
Q200 Chair: “Better shape” is a better word really, because it suggests something about the values and the motivations and the attitudes and the behaviours. That is what really good leadership is about. If you get those things right. It will be easy to create better productivity if you target productivity without targeting those other really key, formative factors. Isn’t productivity the wrong end of the telescope when we are thinking about what good leadership looks like?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I completely agree with your comments, Chairman, but I did not see productivity at either one end or the other end of the telescope, because I think I moved away from the technical version of productivity to my expression “more productive”. In some ways, I think one is missing an opportunity if one just stares at a problem: how are you going to measure this stuff? The interesting issue, which I think the Committee is, rightly and properly, focusing on, is “how do you get this stuff better?” Then, once it is better, we can work on ways to measure it.
Q201 Chair: I suppose what I am worried about is that we might create an academy that produces very good leadership, but, because we have difficulty measuring the productivity and proving to our paymasters that productivity is improving, we then lose the argument because the argument for sustaining your brilliant leadership academy will be lost, because the parameters by which they are going to measure it do not measure what you are really achieving.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It is an extremely good point, which is why I think an early and very important discussion we had was the importance of what we called context-based training, as opposed to content-based training. I see content-based training as the typical kind of syllabus, where you sit down, and you teach somebody something. Context-based training is: how do you exercise your responsibilities in the context in which you are operating them in the most optimal way? To do that, clearly it requires some specific knowledge, which is on the content side, but the much more interesting side, which the research that Deloitte carried out showed, was that context-based training in the public services is not well developed.
Particularly at the top of public services, these are not silos. The really important problems that the public service grapples with cross over between one vertical and another. Frankly, it surprised me when I came into this work that in England, as compared to Wales or Scotland, there was no organisation at all for the top leaders of those verticals that attempted to bring them together in the context of what their work was and to try to make them better leaders across these verticals. We can see this centre as almost being the horizontal capping stone that is above these verticals. It does not diminish in any way whatsoever the importance of the verticals for training in those verticals: it is vitally important to train civil servants, vitally important to train policemen, vitally important to train National Health Service employees.
For people at the very top of these organisations, to achieve the outcomes that society and Parliament want of them, they are required to work together with other organisations. There was nothing in this country that brought together, in a structured way, those leaders of public service organisations, unlike in Wales or Scotland. We were very impressed with the evidence that we had from Wales and Scotland—perhaps easier, smaller entities, maybe a greater sense of identity—where Wales in particular had done some very great work on bringing together regularly leaders of public services across these verticals for training for management, for solving problems.
If I may give a personal view, I think this country has been too absorbed in the verticals—in some cases it has done a very good job, in some ways it is still work in progress—and has not paid sufficient attention. In a complex society it is not just the verticals. It is the interaction at the top between these verticals that is likely to produce better public services for our citizens. Perhaps it is worth just noting that only 8% of public servants are civil servants. If you are looking at optimising public services across a whole range of matters, clearly there are a number of verticals you want to do that.
Chair: That is very compelling, and we must look at the evidence of Scotland and Wales as well. That would be useful for us. It also echoes what the Cabinet Secretary remarked to me, which is that his experience as Permanent Secretary in the Home Office was very much that the Home Office was delivering a very wide range of public services that stretched far beyond the Civil Service. Therefore, this unified approach to leadership across the public sector has a great deal to be said for it.
Q202 Kelvin Hopkins: Moving on with productivity again, how far does this centre’s focus on improving the productivity of public services risk compromising their quality?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Quality in the public service context, I am afraid my own view is that quality is deeply embedded into productivity. I am one of the very few people in this country who have both chaired a FTSE 100 company and been a public servant for a large part of my life. I have no doubt that in a private company some of these things probably come a bit easier. You are measuring one thing, which at the end of the day in a quoted company is probably your share price and lots of factors build into the share price. You have an easy indicator in a sense: are you doing well or badly by your owners?
We all know in this room that in public services it is vastly more complicated than that. What makes a good public service is far wider than a profit and loss account. A lot of my life has been spent in the public sector looking for operational efficiencies. Doing things as well as you can do is important, but the measure of what is an optimum public service goes far wider than the measures that you would use in the private sector. This is why, in my own opinion, even though some of the management techniques and training used in the private sector have a role to play, the task of this top level of public service managers is more difficult in some ways. It is more complicated, and the things that they need to know to do it well go even wider than for top private sector managers.
That is a rather longwinded way of answering your question, but I think there are many aspects to this question of what is a good output in a public service.
Q203 Kelvin Hopkins: Indeed. Just at a very simple level, improving the quality of education might mean reducing class sizes, improving the quality of looking after sick, elderly people might mean increasing the number of nurses per ward. These are going against productivity in one sense, but are improving quality. There is a conflict there, isn’t there?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It depends how you define productivity. I am not trying to be clever with words, but I think, if you have a very narrow definition of productivity, you could develop arguments, but I prefer a broader definition of productivity. We know that any country in the world has limited resources that it can devote to its public services. Anybody in the public services would of course wish there were more resources, so I think it is incumbent on us to allocate those resources as efficiently and as effectively as we can. Measures such as you are talking about I would completely see wrapped up in all of that. If I may, perhaps I will not get into an argument about the optimal number of nurses on a ward.
Q204 Kelvin Hopkins: If there is a possible trade-off between productivity and quality in public services, how should that trade-off be addressed? How would you deal with that?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: In the end, that is the reason why we have political processes, isn’t it? This is the reason why—rightly and properly—we have accountability, both local and national; the people who have to account for their trade-offs, and to be accounted for, we hold to account through our democratic accountability systems. That might seem a bit of a cop-out for an answer, but that does seem to me where the buck stops.
Q205 Kelvin Hopkins: I could pursue that further, but I will move on to another question. How does leadership in the public service differ from leadership in the private sector? You have had experience in both, of course.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It is more complex. In the public sector you are dealing with a far greater variety of stakeholders. In a sense, you do not have the rationality, or the irrationality, of the market checking up on you. You have a much more complex range of people. You are accountable to a far wider range of people. Public money is different from private money. As we have been discussing earlier, measuring your outputs and your effectiveness is more difficult. If I am making widgets, in a sense it is relatively simple to work out. I think leadership in the public sector is more complex than in the private sector.
There are things that the public sector can learn from the private sector, and also I think there are things that the private sector can learn from the public sector. I just think the environments are different and more complicated.
Q206 Kelvin Hopkins: Being specific about the public sector, how does leadership in the Civil Service differ from leadership in the wider public services?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I do not want to present myself as an expert on that. They are all different; every public service is different and has its different connotations. In the Civil Service you have the direct exposure to Ministers, and you have the direct exposure sometimes through Ministers to Parliament, which may be different from the exposure—perhaps less direct—in some other public services, which are all trying to do the same thing. In a democratic framework they are trying to help allocate and use the resources of the country as optimally as possible.
It was very interesting to me to have around the table in the taskforce people who are genuinely admired and were genuine experts, having run fire services, police services, health authorities, local authorities, the military, the Departments. At one level you might say, “Gosh, they are all so different. What could be the common thread?” There was a surprising consensus and agreement among these very able people, who I had the privilege of working with, as to what the answers were to some of these questions. I was, frankly, pleased and surprised at the very high level of consensus that we achieved in the taskforce.
We had very strong meetings. These were not shrinking violets. We had meetings that lasted for half a day with people putting their views forward. Out of that, one would see that the views were different for these services—coming back to your question—but with some commonality that made us feel that training this would-be top echelon together would produce advantages.
Q207 Chair: This Committee is primarily concerned with strategic leadership of the Civil Service. Indeed, our remit is primarily about Whitehall and the Civil Service. You can understand a tiny sliver of chagrin on our part that we have been campaigning and arguing for much more attention to be given to leadership in the Civil Service and then along comes this £21 million for the generality of public services, the ones you describe, like the military and the health service. There is a health service leadership academy, obviously there is Sandhurst and Cranwell and Shrivenham and so on for the armed forces, and there is a police leadership academy. They seem to have their training much more sorted out than the Civil Service. What does this contribute to Civil Service leadership and what do you see as the gap that will continue to exist or still needs to be addressed, despite your project, with respect to the Civil Service?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It was a privilege to be able to come to talk to you about something wider than the Civil Service, because I obviously read the Committee’s report in preparation for this and I know the longstanding and appropriate preoccupation that the Committee has had with these matters. I know the Committee will appreciate that I was not asked to look into that, but of course indirectly one did. The existence of what I think is going to be a very high-quality horizontal thin line at the top of these verticals will help every single one of these verticals.
Chair: I am sure that is correct.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Because I think there will be a trickledown impact from the provision of material from people from the verticals attending courses, taking ideas back to their verticals and so on. This is not a waterside compartment, where you are going to have the vertical and the horizontals will gain no benefit from it. I think there will be a trickledown. It is not for me to address ministerial priorities and to know what priority Ministers attach to this as opposed to the Civil Service. Everything I saw in my work showed there is a lot of attention attached to Civil Service training. Of course I come from the generation that remembers the training in the past, which I benefited greatly from as a young man many years ago.
I know there is a very high level of consciousness and the Civil Service representatives on this taskforce spoke very strongly about the importance that was attached to Civil Service training. No doubt those responsible for that training would like to see more resources devoted to it, maybe work of this sort and doing something of the kind that we are doing, maybe it will have a demonstration impact that will encourage resources to be directed elsewhere. If the work this centre does shows it produces real measurable, tangible advances for this country, I suspect those in any of the verticals will have an easier case to make as to why money properly spent on training and management is money well spent.
Q208 Chair: Very interesting and setting all sorts of thoughts in my head going as a consequence of that.
From your personal experience as a younger man in the Civil Service, being educated by what was then the National School for Government—
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I predate even that, I am afraid, Chairman.
Chair: Okay, the Civil Service College.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Yes.
Q209 Chair: There is no equivalent of either the Civil Service College or the National School for Government today. What would be your advice to this Committee about whether such capacity is required?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I do not want to offer opinions on things that I have not thought about deeply. The way that you deliver learning has changed over the years. There are techniques available now, which when I was young did not exist. I am not even sure we had computers when I was training, so there are many different techniques now and it is right to do that.
It is very important to have a sense as to who you are training and what you are training them for. This is a very broad pyramid you have in these organisations in the public services, and what you do is very important at this level of the pyramid because of the numbers involved. As you were saying yourself earlier, Chairman, the role of someone with a very specific task is greater. The requirements are very different at different stages of that pyramid. It is very hard to give an answer that is equally applicable at all levels of that pyramid.
As I said earlier, the work that I have been engaged in over the last year has been at this level just below the top of the pyramid. It has given me firm ideas about that. With all due respect, I do not want to stretch down into my views lower down.
Q210 Chair: At Barclays Bank how do you train your new recruits and future leaders?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Very comprehensively and very properly, because we see huge value in having properly trained people in the organisation. That training continues all the way up the pyramid.
Q211 Chair: Is that training done by bringing in external consultants or is it done in-house?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It is a mixture.
Q212 Chair: How mixed?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I can certainly give you more information, if you wish, on how Barclays trains people if that would be helpful, but it is a mixture of techniques, depending on the—
Q213 Chair: Does Barclays have a centre or an institution?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Yes, but it has also many other things that it uses as well.
Q214 Chair: What is it called?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I just refer to it as the training centre, but I can give you a specific note on the name if that would be—
Q215 Chair: Does Barclays employ its own educators, mentors and trainers in the organisation?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Yes. A lot of the training in a firm like Barclays is job-related because we are training people for specific tasks. Often the people you need to train people for specific tasks are best done by those with knowledge of the specific tasks, who pass on their knowledge, but within a structured framework. We have many people in the firm whose only job is to do training and whose only job it is to commission training and to develop people.
The responsibility that one naturally feels in a large organisation for one’s people means that you feel a constant responsibility to develop them, to improve them, to make them—putting it crudely—more useful to you, which is more satisfying to them.
Of course, with a firm as complex as Barclays, the requirements for training staff in a local branch are different from the requirements of training staff running an electronic payments business or a markets business, so the training is very diverse, very specialised in some areas, but also has as its basis wanting to help all of us improve ourselves.
Q216 Chair: How does it compare with what is going on in the Civil Service at the moment?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I am afraid I do not know enough about what is going on in the Civil Service to give a sense.
Q217 Chair: That is a comparison we might look at in respect of other large organisations that take responsibility for their own training. It would be a very interesting exercise.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Yes.
Q218 Chair: What about future leadership development in Barclays Bank? How does that compare with the Civil Service?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Again, it is very important where we have a sense as to who our potential leaders are at all levels—as the Civil Service does; this is just good succession planning—and of course what we are then doing is constantly trying to help people improve themselves to become better leaders in the future.
Chair: We might do some more work on that and we might ask for a further exchange of information.
Q219 Dr Rupa Huq: The CPSL uniquely has focused on those on the verge of taking on chief executive roles in the public sector so, unlike all the other Civil Service academies and training institutions, that is its unique thing. How many people fall into that bracket?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: We think it is probably around 1,000 people, if you take it in very broad figures. It is that sort of a number. It depends a little bit what you define as these very senior roles. Would you put somebody running a very large comprehensive school in that kind of category? There is no hard and fast definition, but we had in our minds when we did this that there were probably about 1,000 people out there who would fall into this category.
Q220 Dr Rupa Huq: Is that kind of thing likely to expand or contract? You hear of belt-tightening and I think it is a year ago since Carillion’s collapse.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I think what would expand or contract is the speed at which you could deal with those people. Any training scheme has a finite capacity and certainly, if you are just starting something, you would want to get it going and to make sure that it was working. In our kind of figuring, we said to ourselves that we thought we could probably do about 100 people a year to get this thing up and running, which would mean over a three-year period—we recommend a three-year pilot—we are talking about perhaps 300 or 350 people going through this.
We think this would be, first, a sufficiently large sample to make an impact. It would be a third of that number. It would allow the approach to be verified; it is a large enough sample to make sure that what you are doing is worthwhile, which is why it would be evaluated. I think it would be a large enough number to make a difference. If it turned out that it was making a great difference, then a decision could be taken in the future to either do more of it, or, if it was not making a difference, to do less of it. It seemed to us to be a good kind of starting point for this.
Q221 Dr Rupa Huq: In terms of approach, what would you say the benefits are of training prospective public service leaders alongside their private sector counterparts?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I think it is a very good idea, particularly for those private sector counterparts whose role has some interaction with the public service. The heart of this is a public services leadership centre, but we were perhaps envisaging the course might be 30 people. Let’s put a bit of flesh on this: a course might be 30 people. They will come along for three residential elements during a year. Each 30 would be completely diverse across public services; there would be four civil servants, three people from local authorities and so on. You could easily see in that mix that having a couple of private sector people might be enriching on both sides of it. There might be third sector people; voluntary organisations deeply involved in providing services to the public sector. You could see that would be the mix as well.
The intention would be—in some ways the success of these courses partly depends on how good one is at doing that—to get a diverse group of people on each course, because the nature of training at this sort of level is that people learn from each other; they get great skills from each other. Remember, another important aspect of our work is the networking that we think will go from this. This is a network that is not just people who attend these courses. There is this wider constituency of 1,000 people, because we found in our research a surprising feeling of loneliness and isolationism if you are a CEO of one of these organisations. To be able to turn to people outside your vertical for advice and support may be easier sometimes than to turn to someone who is a bit close to home.
If you postulate that these people in these verticals at these senior levels are facing very similar problems—which I think they are—you can see that the opportunity for cross-fertilisation through networking is very important, so 100 or so a year going through the physical course but others being involved in the wider networking of this.
Q222 Dr Rupa Huq: Is that inbuilt into the centre or is it just an intention for the moment that they have exposure?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: You have practical constraints because, if you are running three or four courses a year, you have to do it, you have to produce the course material and you easily get into practicalities on it. We thought this was a reasonable balance between doing enough of it to make a difference, but not doing so much to swamp it so that you could not do it properly in its early years.
Q223 Chair: You have been allocated £21 million for three years. How do you envisage this is actually spent?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I am sure we could write to you with a more detailed breakdown, but let me just give you a picture of that. There are certain set-up costs. For example, if you want to build a website, you want to commission the course material; there is the money that is required to get this thing up and running. Then you have the running costs each year. Each year you have a certain amount of fixed costs, but then you have marginal costs according to how many people you want to come on the programme.
For the £21 million a year, a business case was produced by the team. That includes both the set-up costs, which in private sector terms you might expect to amortise over a number of years because you could use those going forward, and then the running costs each year of that. I am sure if the Committee wants more detail, I could ask the Cabinet Office to write to you with more details on that.
Q224 Chair: Will there be just one kind of course and what kind of course would that be?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: One kind of course, but backed up by this networking and by the facilitation of contacts.
Q225 Chair: Give us an idea of the productivity of this £21 million.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Is that a trick question, sir?
Chair: Only if you think it is.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: That is something that we will be researching as part of the evaluation research for the centre.
Q226 Chair: How many people do you train each year for £21 million?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Around 100. We are talking about three or four cohorts each year of around 30 people. We thought that the optimum number of people to have on a course is around 30 people, because that is—
Q227 Chair: How many courses each year?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Three or four. Have in one’s head about 100 people a year, 100 to 120 people being trained.
Q228 Chair: How much time does each person spend in training?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Three residential segments.
Chair: Length?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I think the idea for the first one is five and a half days and the second two each of three days, a lot of homework to do between the courses; one or two events a year where everybody is brought together. It is of that sort of order of magnitude. Can I stress that I know a lot of detailed work has been carried out by the Cabinet Office since then. I have not been involved in the detail of that, so these figures may be a little bit out of date, but I think it will be sufficient to give you a broad picture of this. I suspect you are doing a calculation per head or per day, are you, sir?
Q229 Chair: I am just working out how much each day costs. It is quite pricey.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It is if that was all that you were doing, but not if you are producing all this material—coming back to our trickledown impact—you are commissioning academics, you are having a curated website where people can go to to access this material, you are facilitating a network. I agree with you, if all we were doing was parcelling up this money in brown paper envelopes and giving it to these individuals, this would seem to be excessive, but there is much more to establishing a centre and building a new academic institution—albeit, a virtual academic institution—which will take advantage of some of the very great academic facilities around this country, both in the public sector and the private sector.
Q230 Chair: You are talking about 2,000 training days per year amortising the cost at about £7 million which means that you are about £3,500 per training day.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Your maths is better than mine. You are quicker-witted on the figures than I am.
Q231 Chair: How does that compare with—
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Can I offer to write to you about that? You are better than I am at mental arithmetic, so would you mind if I got the figures straight and sent it to you?
Q232 Chair: If you think I have my figures wrong, that is quite possible. Maths is not my strong point. If it was £3,500 per day, how does that compare with comparable training arrangements in the private sector? Because naturally we are very interested in productivity.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Naturally, but again you are encouraging me to give you views on things that I do not know so, rather than make it up, I would rather just write to you if I may.
Q233 Kelvin Hopkins: This Committee has criticised an over-reliance on on-the-job learning at the expense of reflective, conceptual or experimental learning. What balance should the CPSL strike between these?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: As I said earlier, I think the bias expressed in that criticism would be a bias absolutely felt by the taskforce. We feel that context-based learning is much better for these types of people. It is context-based learning rather than content-based learning. There may be some times when this happens. For example, this group—I will call them my group of trainees; excuse the familiarity—they might find it very interesting having a session on artificial intelligence or the latest advances in social media, but it is relating that content, as you are saying perhaps in the Committee’s views of this matter, to the context in which they are operating. The taskforce’s bias would be absolutely in line with the previous thinking of this Committee.
Q234 Kelvin Hopkins: Yes, but presumably both are regarded as essential.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: We see the verticals providing a lot of the content training. The great advantage of being the horizontal layer at the top, where you have a very specified task, which is taking people approximately two years from being the chief executive, means that you are not doing what these verticals are doing far lower down.
Coming back to the Chairman’s point, I am not replicating Barclays in this by saying that this centre is taking on people from the bottom and moving them up. That would have been a massive enterprise and I think would have been inconceivable to achieve across the public services. Just to repeat myself, aiming at a target of around 1,000 to 1,200 people at the top of the public services allows you to develop very sophisticated context-based training, place-based training.
The other thing that became very clear to us was that there will be a trickledown impact. For example, we had one of our taskforce sessions in the West Midlands. The material we may produce may cause public service leaders within the West Midlands—just to take an example—to want to come together themselves to give themselves place-based training on how to optimise public services in that region. Once you develop mechanisms and material that allow those responsible for public services to come together in a structured fashion, if one uses one’s imagination, one can see all sorts of ways in which this can be delivered.
It is getting it started. It is the generation of the material. Look, the test at the end of the day is that these 30 people, after their first five days on this, go home and say, “Gosh, that was jolly tough, but wasn’t that good? We gained something out of that”. That is a high bar to set. These people that we are talking about will be a demanding group to satisfy, but it is only going to work if that is what they feel at the end of this experience. If they feel that, there will then be demand for other people to come on it and to do it and there will be a demand from the verticals to raise their standards so that people doing their training feel the same way about it.
Q235 Chair: There is no doubt about that, but to what extent will you be able to evaluate the people coming on to your courses and be able to compare the shortcomings? I do not want to criticise, but you will find some people coming from different organisations will be better prepared for your course than other people. Will you be measuring that? How will you measure that and how will you use that information?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: There will be an independent—I stress independent—evaluation of the work of the centre, but I think that we have recommended there should be some oversight board for the centre.
Q236 Chair: I am thinking about evaluating the individuals as they come on the course to find out what their training and development needs are.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I will come on to that immediately. We think there should be some form of oversight board, which would have on it representatives from public services. We would expect those public services to want to take back the knowledge from people on the course. This is early days in terms of the designing. I would expect there would be very rich feedback from the seniority of these course members back to their parent organisations and back to their verticals. That will be a two-way process. First of all, they are not competitors, the verticals. I should have stressed that. This is not competing against the verticals. It is not supervising the verticals. It does not own the verticals, but obviously we will want to work closely with them to achieve the optimum outcomes for each public service.
Q237 Kelvin Hopkins: Just pursuing the previous question, to some extent a digression somewhat from it, there was a fashion—and it is fading rather now—in public services and elsewhere, no doubt, of looking for whiz kids from outside and parachuting them in to shake things up. I think that was particularly true of perhaps the Blair Government. I think that is now fading, but does this feature on the courses?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: This is not a headhunting organisation. Again, one of the answers to that question is: where will the people come from who go on these courses? We would expect these people to be—we will cast our net widely—effectively almost nominated by the verticals. Let’s take perhaps the Civil Service as an example; it is the easiest example. There will be a cohort of Director Generals whom the Cabinet Secretary may see as potential Permanent Secretaries in two years’ time. For that segment, you could see that the civil servants who are nominated on the course will be drawn from that group of people. Similar mechanisms have to be set up for the other public services to identify those people.
Against that context, nominated by the public services, I am not quite sure where—using your words—the flash kids from outside come. If we think these courses should be properly diverse, as I said, I think there will be a private sector component, and there may be a third sector component, who knows? By bringing these groups of people together, you may find that policemen become Permanent Secretaries, Permanent Secretaries become fire officers—that might be a bit more farfetched—or you might find that other groups of people interact with each other.
Again, perhaps the thing I should absolutely stress is that this is not a Whitehall initiative. This is something done collectively by the public services. It would be the death of this enterprise if public services throughout the country thought this was something that was being owned by Whitehall, run by Whitehall. This is something that the public services have to come together themselves and want to use to create better leaders for public services. This is what will make this work.
There may be some public services that are thinking of putting this person into one of the jobs that you talk about and there may be people with exotic backgrounds coming on this. That would be jolly good, but they will come out of structures within those public services that make those public services think, “These are our very strong potential leaders a couple of years from now”.
Q238 Kelvin Hopkins: I could pursue that at greater length, but I will not now. Obviously, that would be self-indulgent.
You have touched on networks and public service leaders already, but is there anything you want to add to how significant a part of the centre’s work that is? You have touched on it.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I think it is a very significant part. I may have underplayed it a little bit in my earlier comments because it is easier to talk about the physical courses. The networking will be a very important part of this.
Q239 Dr Rupa Huq: One of the taskforce recommendations is that the centre should maintain a diverse intake but, given that these are people who are within two years of taking on a primary executive role, who typically are the sort of people who lack every sort of ethnic, gender, sexuality, disability type of diversity, how do you achieve this?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Look, I see—and I am very pleased to be able to say this—rightly, the attention that is now paid to diversity. The need for diversity in senior management has increased exponentially in recent years. In my world, I think that has been an extraordinary change. We all know that the problem we have at the moment is the pipeline and moving very able people through the pipeline so that the output from these pipelines is as diverse as the people within the pipelines. We know that is a problem we have to deal with.
Every single vertical among the public services I am sure feels what you are expressing, the need for strong and diverse leadership. When I go out and about, one detects absolutely no reaction to that and, indeed, positive biases nowadays in favour of diversity and strong leadership. This centre will be taking, though, the people from the verticals that the verticals see. This centre will do all it possibly can and, certainly within its control, it will be diverse across sectors and it will do all that it possibly can to encourage diversity and to ensure that it gets diversity, with gender diversity, other forms of diversity—
Dr Rupa Huq: Geographic.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: —geographic diversity and so on. In a sense, we are all trapped a little bit at the moment by the pipeline and the very important requirement to get more people into the pipeline. This centre’s work is towards the end of the pipeline rather than the beginning of the pipeline, but I am sure one of the things that the centre will want to train its people in is the importance of diversity and the importance of these matters when they go back to their eventual roles in leadership. People will be trained in diversity on these courses and the importance of diversity in achieving the objectives they will want to achieve as public sector leaders eventually.
Q240 Dr Rupa Huq: That would be an element of what they do in these courses?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Of course. It will be naturally part of making them more productive. Diverse workforces are more productive.
Dr Rupa Huq: So positive biases in a formal way. Okay, that is reassuring.
Q241 Chair: I am very pleased we have had this session. I think it has been very enlightening and this is a very exciting and influential project, potentially of great influence.
Can I just ask one detailed point? Ever since the Fulton report, there has been concern in the Civil Service about the over-emphasis on developing generalists at the expense of specialists and experts. Despite that, that still seems to be a problem in Whitehall. By having the ambition to enable a Permanent Secretary to run a fire service or a police officer to run a Government Department, aren’t you just reinforcing the generalist principle rather than developing the specialists?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Perhaps my imagination ran away with itself when I gave those particular examples. Almost by definition, once you become a chief executive of a major organisation, you have become a sort of generalist.
Chair: Yes, of course.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: It does not mean that you are not a specialist in getting up there. When I go to my work in Whitehall, I have been very struck with the growth of the professions, which I think has been a very laudable thing in Whitehall. The professional growth in Whitehall, the development of the professions, the training that is now given within professions in Whitehall, frankly, is light years away from where it was in my time. That is absolutely to be encouraged.
In order to be an effective leader, you have to have both specialist knowledge and you have to have generalist knowledge. If someone talks to you about artificial intelligence and big data, you have to have a sense that you know what they are talking about. There may be some elements in the training of these people on this course that is topping up, because the world has moved on in the last 10 years. You can see that part of what this centre will do will be topping up these people’s knowledge in specialist areas as part of preparing them to be a very strong leader.
Q242 Chair: Also, I think you are arguing that you can create diversity by mixing different experiences at the top of different organisations. Is my understanding correct?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Certainly. My experience of these types of courses is that some of the most beneficial interactions come from animated conversations between course members who had not realised how similar the problems were; how a solution that one part of the forest has used is a tremendously good solution for another part of the forest. It is just they were not aware of it.
Chair: I can absolutely see that.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: The interaction between the course members, both within the context of the residential courses, but also—absolutely critically—in the network outside it, I hope will have profound influence going forward.
Q243 Chair: From what you have told us, this is going to be very high value and very high return on expenditure. I personally wish you every success with it and I hope it influences and infects other parts of the public service in the way that we want it to.
When you step back from it in a few years’ time, what are the three totem poles of success that you would like to see that will prove it has been really worthwhile?
Sir Gerry Grimstone: That this has become an established part of our system in the United Kingdom, that people are anxious and keen to go on it and compete to go on it, and that, once they have been on it, they think, “That was a jolly good thing to do”.
Q244 Chair: Perhaps a few potential Cabinet Ministers ought to go on it too.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: Perhaps I can leave you to make that point, sir.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for the work that you are committing to this and for the various tasks you are given by people in Whitehall to do—we have sat on a panel together to make a very senior public appointment—and your work as a senior non-executive director of a major Government Department. If everyone in the private sector contributed as much as you do, this would be a better country. Thank you very much indeed.
Sir Gerry Grimstone: I am very grateful for those comments. Thank you very much.