Transport permanent secretary Robert Devereux has been a policymaker all his life – and now he leads the profession. He tells Matthew O’Toole that policymakers must listen to the frontline
There is a perception that making and advising on policy – being the area of civil service work that sits closest to ministers – is the most prestigious of callings in government. Perhaps surprisingly, the head of the civil service policy profession quickly dismisses the suggestion as unhelpful. “I think it’s actually quite a damaging way of thinking about this,” says Robert Devereux. “My guess is that prestige has no correlation with inherent importance, and I’m quite keen to get across the idea that the civil service is at its best when it works as one team.”
Devereux’s day job is as permanent secretary of the Department for Transport, and he took on added responsibility for leading civil service policymakers when the previous incumbent, former business department boss Sir Brian Bender, retired last year. Although one of the reasons for his taking the job was the fact that he’s “been a policy person all my life”, one of Devereux’s major preoccupations in the role is getting his fellow policy people to recognise the need for input from other areas of the civil service – from areas like law and finance but also, crucially, from those who work in frontline service delivery.
Getting input from the front line, Devereux stresses, is especially important in the formulation of good policy. “There is no such thing as a good piece of policy if it is not actually deliverable,” he says. Given all the various reports over the past 18 months – most notably those from the National School of Government and Institute for Government – on joining up Whitehall and the front line more effectively, how is this actually achieved? Put simply, he says: “You don’t do it by sitting in a room and guessing – you go and talk to them.”
Devereux is supported by a heads of profession group made of directors general from across Whitehall departments. This group is currently working on “sharpening” the definition of the skills needed in policy professionals. Though he’s wary of separating out the policy profession based on imagined prestige, Devereux does stress that policy professionals have to operate in a political context. Recognising this fact is important in identifying the skills needs of officials.
“We are not a supermarket chain; we are not an oil exploration company,” he says; policymaking “is not a straightforward process of asking: what’s the problem, and what are the solutions? You are in a world in which the only reason an issue is in front of ministers, in many cases, is that different parts of the population have different thoughts about the right answer.”
This also means that, unlike some other civil service professions, policy professionals cannot be as straightforwardly recruited from other sectors of the economy – at least, not at the most senior levels. “Several other professions have straightforward private sector counterparts. You can be a lawyer or a doctor or an economist somewhere else. Policymaking in government is pretty particular; it’s not the same as doing strategy for a private sector organisation.”
What’s more, Devereux is unconvinced that setting out a highly specific set of training or qualifications for government policymakers is necessary or desirable. “Personally, I’m more interested in making sure that people understand what’s required of them and in supporting them,” he says. “Professionalisation and professional qualifications are not the same thing.” Devereux is more interested in what he calls “leaders teaching leaders”: informal learning, whereby top policy professionals pass on knowledge and experience to colleagues.
Given their closeness to the political side of government, policy professionls will be confronted by more than just corporate issues in the months to come. The impending election, and the spending cuts that will inevitably follow, will change the context in which they operate. As head of profession, Devereux stresses that the principles of the civil service code should guide officials’ behaviour if there is a transition to a new administration, and insists that policy professionals have the flexibility and impartiality to advise politicians of different colours.
“There may be differences between one government’s policies and another’s, but they are still policies,” he says. “The bedrock skills: do you understand the landscape you’re working in? Do you know what citizens, users and stakeholders think? Can you identify ways of making it better? Those are going to be true under any government.”
Policymakers: Who are they?
All civil servants engaged in the elaboration and development of government policy, from directly advising ministers on the formation of policy to designing its implementation. The profession takes in a vast range of job titles and grades.
What do they do?
The Modernising Government white paper of 1999 defined policymaking as “the process by which governments translate their political vision into programmes and actions to deliver ‘outcomes’ – desired changes in the real world”. Policymakers advise ministers in the preparation of policy, as well as drafting white papers, legislation and other policy guidance