The long-awaited Capabilities Plan has now emerged, outlining how civil service skills and abilities are to be strengthened. Now the work begins: Colin Marrs explains how officials will be required to put flesh on its bones.
Bare bones: The plan recognises the need to build a substantial network of specialists within departments - but a lack of detail leaves plenty of gaps to plug
When the Cabinet Office finally published its Capabilities Plan last week, there was no fanfare: it is anyway likely that, in the week of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, no amount of trumpet-blowing could have attracted much interest for the launch of a civil service skills development document. But whilst the plan does not present any major changes in the direction of civil service reform – and lacks detail on many of its provisions – it is important in solidifying and clarifying the government’s intentions as it sharpens the civil service’s skills and strengthens its processes. If last year’s Civil Service Reform Plan (CSRP) laid the foundations of a future civil service, this document puts in place some of the struts and girders around which these improved capabilities will be built.
This framework has been constructed rather slowly. June’s CSRP promised a Capabilities Plan by last autumn: head of the civil service Sir Bob Kerslake tells CSW that it was worth taking the time to get the plan right. Published on Thursday, the 27-page document sets out how to address the civil service’s organisational and skills gaps. It also aims to break down what it describes as the current “departmental silos” in order to achieve “a more skilled and unified civil service”.
The vision takes a three-pronged approach to building staff capacity. Although the civil service will continue to recruit highly-skilled specialists from outside government – particularly from the private sector – the plan also emphasises the need for departments to share specialist expertise. And in some areas – particularly digital skills – new departmental teams will boost in-house capabilities.
Kerslake says the civil service must do more to build and share its own specialist capabilities: “I feel very strongly that we need to avoid getting into a situation where we think in these key areas that we just buy skills in,” he says. These key areas include infrastructure development and project management – and Noble Francis, economics director at the Construction Products Association, says the document is along the right lines: “Government is under severe financial constraints, so focusing on getting a pool of talented and qualified individuals, supplemented by specialists working across departments and utilising secondees, appears a sensible way forward.”
Four priority areas are identified for improvement. The first is leading and managing change – an area where the civil service generally scores poorly in its People Survey. Then come three areas of professional skills: commercial; project management; and digital.
To encourage senior leaders to focus on change management, from 2013-14 their performance assessments will consider their department’s score in the People Surveys’ change management questions, along with other engagement metrics. And from this summer, 1,000 staff will join a new corporate talent pool sitting alongside the Fast Stream programme. Support mechanisms will include centralised teams to help departments deliver change and build capability.
Meanwhile, a broader ranges of skills will be required for promotion into senior grades, and selectors will look for CVs that show experience outside government: a secondment “will be seen as a strength, not a diversion”, says the plan. Short training programmes will be provided to senior managers, who will be expected to “own this agenda and support individuals to take responsibility for their own development.”
The plan also signals a further shift towards shared procurement, suggesting that all departments should be purchasing common goods through the Government Procurement Service by the end of the year. GPS chief Bill Crothers says that the move could increase the spending that it manages from £5 billion to £8 billion. Meanwhile, a new Cabinet Office “complex transactions team” will assist departments in buying and managing large ICT projects; all staff influencing purchasing decisions will be trained in commercial skills; and fast streamers will get more opportunities to take secondments in the private sector.
Alongside these bids to improve services and support for procurement professionals, the GPS is also gaining some executive muscle with which to push forward reform. From next month, commercial or procurement directors in departments will have a “strengthened reporting line” directly to the chief procurement officer. The CPO will have influence in setting their yearly objectives, appraising performance against those objectives, recruiting all senior departmental commercial posts, and setting the remuneration of such senior commercial personnel.
This model reflects common practice in the private sector, says Crothers, where operating units and head offices run “two agendas that are interdependent. We just don’t have the balance quite right at the moment.” In future, he says, government’s ability to bring in the best talent will be strengthened once the CPO “sees and has active input into recruitment."
In the field of project management, the plan tries to foster better rewards, recognition and succession planning for project leaders. It calls for a “new offer” designed to attract the right people to such posts: this, says Kerslake, could involve making it much easier for project managers to move up grades without having to change job – something that should improve continuity in project management. Here, though, some of the plan’s other recommendations appear to have been overtaken by events: it says that lead non-executive director Lord Browne will review the Major Projects Authority’s remit – he published this report at the end of last month – and announces yet again the fact that those heading up the biggest projects must undertake training by the Major Projects Leadership Academy.
On the digital front, the plan prioritises the seven departments which together carry out more than 90 per cent of government transactions. They’ve already begun to build up their own in-house capabilities to deliver services, and each will appoint someone in the new role of ‘service manager’ to oversee this process. Eventually, the role will be extended to all departments. Mike Bracken, civil service executive director of digital, says: “We are suffering from a culture of 15-20 years plus of outsourcing. We lost the skills that come from the internet generation, and need to get them back.”
Leadership consultant and former civil service training chief Robin Ryde welcomes the principles outlined in the plan, but is worried that some initiatives might not be taken up enthusiastically. He cites the creation of an expert service to help departments design and develop their organisations: take-up of previous, similar services was, he says, “not particularly encouraging”. And the proposed new talent-development programme is “more than reminiscent of the ‘high potential development stream’, which was put on hold a couple of years ago due to austerity measures”. What’s more, the corporate leadership development programmes outlined in the plans sound similar to those run within Whitehall for many years.
“Perhaps these programmes are very different, but it is not at all clear how,” he says. “I think this level of granularity, sadly missing from the document, is exactly what is needed.” Responding, Kerslake explains that the document deliberately gives the departments the freedom to decide how to achieve some of the plan’s targets: “I don’t want to dictate every detail,” he says. He’s determined to stick with the plan and see it through into implementation, he says; he’ll be assisted by Chris Last, head of government HR operations, who’ll take responsibility for delivering much of the plan.
Patrick Dunleavy, professor of political science and public policy at the London School of Economics, voices disappointment that the document does not sufficiently define leadership. Traditionally, he says, the civil service has thought of an effective leader as “a good chap who can talk to the minister and is good in a crisis. You do need those people, but also people pushing for change – and that is a different set of skills entirely.” Ryde agrees, and worries that the plan is too similar to previous initiatives to be truly transformational. “As Einstein is quoted as saying, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results,” he says. “The question therefore is: what will this document do that is different?”
The Capabilities Plan clearly inches us down the path of reform set out last year in the CSRP, but few would call it radical or detailed – and it took nearly a year to get this far. Whilst the foundations laid down in the CSRP now support a skeletal framework for further progress on civil service capabilities, unless senior leaders across government choose to see it as a call to action rather than another irritating central initiative, it looks like it will be many years before the head of the civil service can cut the ribbon and declare the civil service’s capabilities fully open for business. And if that ever does come to pass, it will definitely be an occasion for trumpets.