The Cabinet Office has always played a key role in coordinating government and developing the civil service. Matt Ross finds that, as the home of the deputy prime minister and the efficiency agenda, it is becoming more powerful still.
Uniquely, the Cabinet Office has two separate policy agendas, each key to the coalition’s ambitions and each affecting civil servants across government. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is based here, pursuing constitutional reform while he oversees Liberal Democrat ministers’ relationships with their Tory counterparts.
Meanwhile, minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude has been granted wide-ranging powers on the efficiency and reform agenda, working to Tory plans that have survived the arrival of coalition government largely unscathed.
“The Conservative reform agenda, which Francis Maude announced before the election, has been put into effect absolutely intact and with remarkable speed,” comments Institute for Government fellow Peter Riddell. “All the stuff on head counts, procurement, non-executive directors and IT is going ahead as if it was a single-party government.” Along with minister of state Oliver Letwin – the Tories’ backroom policy architect – Maude sits on all the key cabinet committees, giving the pair enormous influence in the coordination of departmental policy as well as the efficiency agenda.
To develop and enact its work on cutting the cost of government, the Cabinet Office has created an Efficiency & Reform Group (ERG) with serious clout: its board of well-known efficiency experts is co-chaired by Maude and chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, while former chief information officer and permanent secretary Ian Watmore will begin work as its chief operating officer next month. The ERG has already absorbed the Office of Government Commerce and its procurement agency Buying Solutions, developed a transparency programme, and used the Cabinet Office’s organising role in professional fields such as IT and HR to clamp down on expenditure on management functions and back office operations across government.
Some of the professional groups are proving useful here, and Maude is a fan of the professionalisation agenda. “It’s important that the authority and prestige of those heads of profession in departments should be enhanced,” he told an audience at Civil Service Live in July; he later told CSWthat finance directors should be “the second-most senior official in a department, with a much more strategic role” than currently. Senior officials will also be encouraged to take a tougher line on performance management: “Most civil servants are really committed, dedicated, hardworking,” Maude told CSW. “They resent the fact that poor performers aren’t managed in a forceful way.”
Almost all government spending on consultants and interims, senior appointments, IT projects, communications and marketing now requires Maude’s sign-off: his readiness to wield a red pen has already halved the Central Office of Information’s workload, forcing the organisation to axe 40 per cent of its staff. Procurement is set for a dramatic shake-up, with the buying of more generic items forced through a few designated purchasers. Training is likely to follow – the previous government’s plans to streamline its HR offices’ procurement work were halted by purdah – and HR managers, like procurement officials, will be squeezed. “There’s a much higher proportion of HR professionals to head count in the civil service than in most organisations,” Maude told CSWin July. “You expect to see about 1:100 under good practice, but it’s about 1:50. And we’re looking at that.”
Departmental boards are to be beefed up: they will now be chaired by secretaries of state, while former BP chief Lord Browne is working with Number 10 adviser Kris Murrin to recruit non-executive directors from the private sector. Public service agreements and annual reports are being replaced by business plans – though Maude wants to keep capability reviews. “I think it was a very good, brave move to make capability reviews public, and we’ll stick with them,” he told CSW, “though I want to involve Lord Browne in looking at them, as I think one of the ways this might work better in future is for the non-executives to be much more involved.”
The biggest savings, of course, will result from reductions in head count: Maude envisages a “flatter, less hierarchical” civil service, and is legislating to reduce redundancy pay-outs in an attempt to force the unions back to the negotiating table. Meanwhile the Cabinet Office is masterminding a programme of axing non-departmental public bodies, and Maude has plans to make cutting costs a core responsibility of all civil servants: he has talked of linking appraisals and bonuses to success on efficiency, and of including a “fiduciary responsibility” in civil service terms and conditions.
The ministerial team
Nick Clegg (right) is well liked by those who’ve worked with him – and this isn’t just because he’s a nice guy. His working style, says one Liberal Democrat who knows him well, was forged in a European Parliament where “it pays to be polite, because you’re always building alliances. There are no majorities there, and with 27 countries and a wide range of views, you’ve got to be able to get on with people and
build coalitions.”
Indeed, Clegg is no fan of Westminster’s adversarial political culture. “He despises and hates the way Westminster works, and has always longed to change its ‘yah boo’, public schoolboy attitude,” says the Lib Dem. “He’s raged to me about the appalling behaviour of people at Westminster. He says: ‘Why can’t people just get on with each other, and get on with the job?’ He must be very excited to get a chance to make things more cooperative.”
Clegg only ran for election to Westminster, the source adds, “on the outside chance that he’d make it to party leader”. Former leader Paddy Ashdown had suggested to him while Charles Kennedy was in charge that he “could be the next leader but one”, but “the risk was that he’d end up as an obscure backbencher: it was only worth going to Westminster if he could actually make a difference.”
The gamble has clearly paid off for Clegg, who’s ended up in a relationship of interdependence with a prime minister threatened by his own right wing. “Clegg’s best hope is that Cameron isn’t secure either, and he needs Nick – but whether this will stick, I don’t know,” says the source. Before the election, he adds, many voters believed that a vote for the Lib Dems was probably a vote wasted. That’s different now – but whether Clegg’s gamble pays off for his party will depend on whether the coalition can survive and make a success of its plans. “Now Nick has to make the coalition work,” says the Lib Dem. “If this thing falls apart in six months’ time, then at the next election we’ll be buggered.”
Francis Maude is one of the Tories’ few experienced ministers, and played a key role in preparing the Conservatives for government: he led the Tories’ implementation team, which oversaw pre-election meetings with the civil service, managed a frontbench training scheme with the Institute for Government, and planned out a legislative timetable. Asked about his management style, Maude told CSW: “I generally know what I know and know what I don’t know. I like to get advice: don’t always take it, but I always listen to it. And I have views about most things; not dogmatic views, generally, though some are.”
Suave and rather smooth, Maude fits well into Whitehall – and he’s a big fan of the British system of government. “I deeply believe in our system of a politically impartial civil service,” he says, adding that he “wouldn’t trade what we have for the American system in a million years. Our system doesn’t always work perfectly, but it’s very good. And it’s kind of my job to work with the leadership of the civil service to make it better.”
The other Cabinet Office ministers are minister of state Oliver Letwin – a cabinet member who for years has overseen Tory policy coordination from a standpoint safely out of the limelight – plus the cabinet minister without portfolio Baroness Warsi; the minister for civil society Nick Hurd; and the minister for political and constitutional reform Mark Harper.