A selection of our most revealing and insightful interviews
Jonathan Stephens, permanent secretary, Department for Culture, Media and Sport
7 November 2006 and 12 April 2012
When WWW met Jonathan Stephens in 2006, he talked up the department’s role in actively fostering and regulating the areas within his brief. When we came back to him in 2012, his responsibilities remained broadly unchanged but his emphasis had shifted: the focus was now firmly on stimulating economic growth, and the approach self-consciously light-touch. Once, DCMS was “a department that administered or curated different sectors, that kept them going,” he said; these days, it makes careful interventions designed to “leave something behind that is sustainable, for the sector to get on with.” With the digital switchover and Olympics under its belt, DCMS has proved its expertise in “really effective delivery of big change projects,” he argued: nobody should doubt its value as a stand-alone department undertaking a “critical role at the heart of economic growth.”
Paddy Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrats and life peer
18 November 2008
“Politicians don’t lead industry; they follow it – and government follows the industrial structures of its time,” argued Lord Ashdown. But today’s Whitehall is “still stuck in the vertical stovepipes of the industrial revolution, and in our time we’re going to have to begin to restructure our systems”. After all, today’s industry has “stripped down its hierarchies so it’s about flat organisations, it’s about networking, and it’s dedicated to customer needs.” In a “deeply interdependent world, in which power has migrated out of the institutions created to control it on to the global stage,” Ashdown argued, government must once again follow industry’s lead, and adapt to a new era. This change “will be very disturbing to those who’ve grown up in the civil service thinking that in the end they’ll reach the dizzy heights of being in charge of the stovepipe,” he concluded, “because actually, the secret of the future is that you can’t be stovepiped any more.”
Andrew Mawson,
social entrepreneur and life peer
27 January 2009
Lord Mawson is the social entrepreneur behind the Bromley-by-Bow Centre, which catalysed the last government’s Healthy Living Centre initiative. But this expert on local regeneration and service provision railed against the inflexibility and incompatibility of Whitehall departments’ funding and management systems, which he attacked for preventing council officials and community activists from combining a set of local education, health, transport and housing projects into a coherent whole. There were “forces pulling [local service] leaders back into their silos, and I’ve got to be constantly pulling them back out again,” he complained. “We’ve had years of rhetoric about joined-up behaviour, but if you look at the heart of the civil service it isn’t joined up.”
The civil service’s tendency to move talented officials into a new job every couple of years didn’t help, he added: “They don’t want people going native – but that way you’ll never get any staff who really understand the detail.”
Richard Thomas, chair,
Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council
23 September 2009 and 21 September 2011
When CSW first interviewed Richard Thomas, he’d just left the Information Commissioner’s role for a new job at the AJTC. As Information Commissioner, he’d overseen a period during which senior public managers were beginning to “understand the power of technology, how much material was being handled in their organisations, and the consequences if things went wrong.” And he warned civil servants not to “collect more data than you need for a particular purpose”: hoovering up information “on a ‘just in case’ basis, because it might be useful one day, is not acceptable.”
Two years on, he was fighting for the survival of the AJTC, which works to improve both decision-making within government and consideration of service users’ complaints. Poor decision-making creates vast additional costs, he argued, and the AJTC can help get things “right first time” – but it’s set for destruction on the bonfire of the quangos. The Ministry of Justice says it will take over the council’s work, he noted, “but they certainly don’t have the capacity at the moment, and there’s no sign of that capacity being developed.”
Michael Heseltine,
former deputy prime minister; environment, trade and defence secretary; and life peer
8 April 2010
Interviewed a month before the general election, Lord Heseltine spoke out against Tory party plans to axe Audit Commission (AC) inspections of local authorities. “You cannot manage without indicators,” he said, noting that the AC has “had a very considerable effect on local government effectiveness.” He even argued for an extension of the AC’s remit to cover Whitehall: it “would do a very good job in exploring, and using indicators to monitor, the government’s performance.” But the party wasn’t listening: three months after the election, communities secretary Eric Pickles announced he’d be shutting the AC down.
In comments given fresh relevance by last week’s Sunday Times exposé of lobbying by retired military officers, Heseltine criticised the Labour figures revealed by Channel 4’s Dispatches to be touting for lobbying work – particularly Geoff Hoon. “I was personally absolutely appalled to listen to a former defence secretary say that he thought he could help indicate to American companies where they could buy British defence contractors,” said the man who resigned as defence secretary while trying to protect a UK defence firm from a US takeover. It was “quite extraordinary”, he added, that “Gordon Brown says there’s no case for an inquiry.”
Heseltine is as wary of special advisers as he is of lobbyists. ‘Spads’ create “another layer of intrigue, another conduit in the leaking process, another ingredient in the power struggles”, he warned. “They’re now translating into the House of Commons on a significant scale. I would much rather see them getting an experience of some value in the outside world.” Looking at the cabinet’s composition, it is clear that this advice too has fallen on deaf ears.
Dame Anne Begg, chair, Commons Work and Pensions Committee
6 May 2011
Dame Anne Begg didn’t set out to become Parliament’s expert on the welfare system – but she uses a wheelchair, and found herself besieged by journalists asking questions about Incapacity Benefit changes. She joined the work and pensions committee in 2001, becoming its chair in 2010.
In her CSW interview last year, Begg raised concerns that her committee was struggling to scrutinise the government’s welfare reform measures because so many changes were being made at once. “We’re worried that things are sneaking through with nobody realising,” she said. She also admitted that the 2010 intake among her committee members were “still finding their feet”, commenting that “inevitably, when you come in as a brand new government, you’re going to think that everything your side is doing is wonderful; and when you come in as the Opposition, you’re going to think the other side is dreadful.”
Peter Hennessy, history professor at Queen Mary University and life peer
20 April 2011
A big fan of the civil service, Hennessy called for “self-confident crown servants who will speak truth unto power, whatever the cost to them in terms of jarring relationships.” Officials’ role in challenging and testing policy ideas is essential to good government, he said – but the growth of “protective layers of special advisers” can weaken trust between ministers and civil servants, and reinforce politicians’ tendency “to see evidence that the smoothy lifers are ganging up on them in their silken, concealed way.” The risk, he warned, is that “jagged relationships between the governing tribes create an awful ecology”.
Hennessy criticised the government’s rush to push through major pieces of legislation in its first year. “These enormous, ground-breaking, scene-shifting bills are just shoved down, one after another,” he said; mistakes caused by excessive haste are bringing “the whole process into disrepute.” The peer will certainly be pleased at the disappearance of one prospective legislative burden: he fiercely opposed Nick Clegg’s proposals for Lords reform. “Here, by historical accident, you’ve got this remarkable cluster of people; this very rich legislative compost,” he said. “And what are we going to do? Throw it away? I don’t believe we are. Nick Clegg’s a nice man, but I don’t think he’s got the feel for all this.”
Alistair Darling, former Chancellor of the
Exchequer and MP for Edinburgh South-West
19 October 2011
“The economic conditions are far, far worse than they were three years ago,” Alistair Darling warned CSW last year. In 2008 “the economy was crashing, but there was a reasonable expectation that by acting together, we were going to come out of it; whereas now, we could be like this for five, maybe 10 years, and that’s a very bad place to be – unless there’s a change of direction.”
Darling also discussed Labour’s relationship with the civil service, and highlighted the dysfunctionality of Number 10 when Gordon Brown was prime minister. “There was just so much going wrong,” he remembered. “Meetings were not being held when they should have been, decisions were not being taken when they should have been, and that was just all very difficult.” The arrival of Jeremy Heywood and Lord Mandelson in Number 10 helped turn things around, he said.
Darling was also concerned by the high rate of civil service turnover, particularly in the Treasury. “What the government is saying to the civil service is, effectively, that there’s a pay freeze and soon you may not have a job. A lot of people in the Treasury who are in their twenties and thirties face the prospect that they’re never going to be able to buy a house in London or start a family.”
Tim Kelsey,
Cabinet Office director of transparency
1 December 2011
“Parts of the public data infrastructure are going to be the things that drive the next generation of Googles and Facebooks,” said the government’s transparency chief, imagining “a world in which there’s a continuous feedback loop from state to citizen, citizen to state.”
Kelsey has been a champion of open data ever since he launched the NHS watchdog website Dr Foster, and argued that publishing performance figures and other information encourages service providers to compete on quality; enables better examination of the factors behind variable performance; reveals opportunities for innovation in service design and delivery; and paves the way for greater choice and self-service in service provision.
Kelsey envisages a world in which citizens have control over their own data online, and can grant access to public bodies or private companies as they choose. There are risks, he accepted – the complexities around ensuring that data is comparable; the danger that flawed data will sap public trust; the inevitable revelations over ‘postcode lotteries’ – but he believes that the combination of technology and transparency offers huge opportunities for citizens, public bodies and businesses alike. “This, for me, is the future,” said Kelsey, who’s now been recruited by the NHS to oversee its own transparency drive. “And the UK is about to be the world leader in setting this agenda.”
Malcolm Dawson, chief executive,
Land Registry
19 September 2012
When Dawson joined Land Registry in 2008, he told CSW, it had a surplus of £70m-plus and “people had been working overtime to cope with the intakes of work.” Then the property market slowdown devastated the trading fund’s income: almost overnight “the market just disappeared: intakes and fees died away. They have never recovered.”
So Land Registry entered the era of austerity a full two years before the public spending squeeze hit the rest of the civil service: it’s now lost nearly half of its workforce and offices, and completed a major programme of outsourcing and service transformation.
One of Dawson’s braver moves was giving up the agency’s flagship London HQ for a Croydon base – something that took a toll in staff and expertise, but produced the cash for service reforms. While most departments are pushing more service user contacts through big call centres, Dawson went the other way and allocated each client to a specific customer team: this has produced big savings, he said, by identifying potential efficiencies and reducing the error rate.
His reforms haven’t all been straightforward, though: Dawson has scaled back his ambitions in moving to online services, following opposition from service users. And he acknowledges that it will be a struggle to restore the workforce’s morale: “People are now much more positive than they were 18 months ago,” he says, but “I’m not expecting massive strides, because there’s still a lot of uncertainty around.”