Interview: Will Cavendish

Will Cavendish is the man tasked with pursuing the government’s deregulation and open public services agendas across Whitehall, while fulfilling the coalition’s loudly-proclaimed desire to move from policymaking to delivery. All three missions will require departmental civil servants to adopt new techniques and attitudes – and Cavendish argues that the civil service has already made great strides in adapting to the requirements of a changing society and a new government.

“If I was going to caricature the civil service of the past, at our worst we were a group of monks sitting behind impenetrable walls, all deciphering a text to each other that nobody else could understand,” he says. But the days of such remote, ivory-tower policymaking are long gone: today’s civil servants need “the ability and confidence to work in a much more open, fluid, 21st century world. That means understanding that policy expertise isn’t the monopoly of the civil service. It means finding new ways of engaging with people, and getting input into what we’re doing”. After all, he argues, the “wisdom and expertise and knowledge that can really help me do my job is out there. If I close my eyes and ears, I’m cutting myself off from that.”

This kind of thinking is key to Cavendish’s role: in February he became the executive director of the Cabinet Office’s newly-formed ‘Implementation Group’, where he stands at the heart of the coalition’s new approach to policymaking and delivery. The former economist, lecturer and special adviser now heads three units: the Red Tape Challenge Team, which pushes for a less bureaucratic, lighter-touch administration; the Open Public Services Team, which champions the service reform agenda across Whitehall; and the Implementation Unit, which pressurises departments to get policies implemented on the ground.

All three tasks, in Cavendish’s view, will require civil servants to change their mindsets, skills and working practices – and he sets out the required reforms with an almost missionary zeal. His wholehearted enthusiasm for the coalition’s agendas may surprise those who remember his previous links with Labour: he was made the party’s head of policy in 2000, and a year later became a special adviser to education secretary Estelle Morris. But he’s a policymaker rather than a partisan – he joined Labour after a career as an international economist – and stepped across to the civil service in 2003. Nowadays, he takes pride in the civil service’s neutrality and its ability to serve any elected government: “I think it’s fantastic that I, and the civil service that worked under Labour, can work very closely with this government and achieve its ambitions,” he says. “To me, that is the high point of professionalism.”

Open questions on services
Of course, in a coalition, the government does not necessarily have a unified set of ambitions – and the open public services (OPS) agenda, potentially the coalition’s most radical reform programme, has not to date produced the dramatic expansion of outsourcing that businesses and free-market Tories had anticipated. Thanks to interventions by senior Lib Dems, the 2011 OPS white paper lacked big, specific plans to open up new areas of service provision to the market: instead, as Cavendish says, it represented both “government’s opportunity to say what it was already doing in this area”, and “government laying out its philosophy of how public services should look in the future.”

This philosophy, as presented by Cavendish, incorporates “better quality control; decentralisation; transparency; accountability; and fairness baked into everything we’re doing.” This will mean different things in different fields, he explains: he cites elected police commissioners, payment-by-results (PBR) schemes, and the expansion of personal budgets as examples of OPS in action. His new, 10-strong OPS team is working “to support departments in pushing forward that philosophy as it applies to the services in their responsibilities.”

So far, so determinedly soft-pedalled: although the PM created this new team to give the jaundiced OPS agenda a bit of oomph, Cavendish plainly doesn’t want to scare either proudly-autonomous Whitehall departments or cautious Liberal Democrats by loudly championing outsourcing. Nonetheless, his list of current research projects gives a clear indication of the centre’s priorities: “We’re doing a major piece of work on choice and how we could embed choice in a significant way in all public services,” he says (see news, p3). “We’re working on PBR: what are the new areas in which it could go, and what have we learned from the existing pilots? We’ll be doing another piece of work on the provider side: how do we make sure that it’s genuinely open to new providers to offer services?” While he emphasises that “each department is responsible for its own services,” Cavendish says his team will be “working closely with departments on how those principles get turned into real reforms in practice over the next period.”

The snipper of red tape
Meanwhile, Cavendish is overseeing the Red Tape Challenge: an audit of all the government’s regulatory frameworks, with the aim of ditching unnecessary bureaucracy and lightening the administrative burden on businesses. This is a “very open, very public” process, he explains: all the regulations in a particular field are put on a website for public comment, then his 13-strong team trawl through the responses before the relevant departments undergo “quite a rigorous process of challenge, culminating in a ministerial star chamber.”

Scrutinising and paring down the stock of regs, Cavendish argues, will help support economic growth. “Everything that we can do to make it easier for employers to take on new employees, without driving a coach and horses through fundamental and important employment rights, has got to be the right thing to do,” he says. “There are 15-17 processes that an employer has to go through to take on a new employee; that has to be wrong.” Employment tribunals and EU regulations have also burdened businesses with excessive responsibilities and paperwork, he says.

Nearly 30,000 people and organisations have left comments on the website, says Cavendish, providing “genuine, frontline evidence” on regulations’ impacts – and enabling his team to “lever open the conversations” with the defensive guardians of government rules. The backing of key figures is crucial to Cavendish’s influence here: the PM and cabinet secretary regularly urge their colleagues to cooperate, he says, and the prospect of facing the star chamber also focuses minds.

At the end of each scrutiny process, Cavendish and his team agree with departments which of the regulations are “redundant and obsolete” – and should thus be abolished – and which should be streamlined and simplified. His approach is unashamedly ambitious, he says: “We’re trying to put to ministers the options to make significant deregulatory decisions, particularly in areas like environment, employment, health and safety – where there are really important social policy goals, but the way you [achieve them] can be quite different. I’m proud that we’ve enabled ministers to make quite big decisions.”

There are 8-10,000 regulations “that have substance”, he adds, and ministers have so far made a final decision on about 1,500: more than half will be “scrapped or improved”, with that proportion reaching 84 per cent in health and safety and 73 per cent in environment. A further 2,000 regulations are currently being scrutinised, says Cavendish, and within 6-9 months all of them will have entered the process. “There will then be a longer period of implementing the decisions, whether that’s revising guidance, reducing data requests, aligning and simplifying regulatory processes, or taking repeals through the Houses of Parliament,” he explains: many departments are adding deregulation clauses to existing bills, and the Queen’s Speech announced an Enterprise and Regulatory Repeals Bill to sweep up many of those remaining.

Getting on with it
As if all this wasn’t enough to keep Cavendish busy, he has a third role – perhaps the most important of all. In February, the Treasury’s Performance and Reform Unit – which used to be called the PM’s Delivery Unit, and tracked departments’ achievements against their objectives – moved into the Cabinet Office as the 31-strong Implementation Unit. Now it “gives the leaders of the organisation timely and accurate information about whether the things they really care about are happening or not,” says Cavendish, and “understands, if things aren’t going to plan, what can be done about it.”

This is a “high challenge, high support model”, he adds, “where we understand what the centre wants and needs; express that as clearly as we can to our counterparts across Whitehall; and work very closely with them to unblock whatever is stopping it from happening.” The team’s tools include departmental business plans – it approves them, and monitors progress – plus PM-initiated “stock takes” on key policies.

This government has, of course, often expressed frustration with what it sees as the slow pace of policy delivery – labelling civil servants as, in Nick Clegg’s words, “obstacles” to progress. Yet Cavendish points out that “it’s almost normal for a government two years into its mandate to feel that it’s done a bunch of quite significant policy reforms, and then to ask the question: is it now happening on the ground?” The impetus to get on with delivery is, he says, “almost inevitable and a natural part of the political timetable.”

So what barriers to progress does Cavendish encounter? “Sometimes it’s a question of prioritisation: is it really at the top of the list?” he replies. “Sometimes there’s a question of working between departments: cross-Whitehall working isn’t necessarily as strong as it could be”. Other obstacles include “competing demands on the time” of key individuals, or the fact that “the delivery or implementation chains aren’t clear”. And occasionally, he adds, the policy leads are “almost too expert in that area and not able to stand back a bit and be as critical as someone with fresh eyes”.

There can also be, he says, “a question about the original policy design, and whether the implementation of that policy really is as well thought-through when the policy is announced as you’d want.” Readers will be able to come up with examples of this problem; in such cases, says Cavendish, departments may “need to look at that again and ask whether this policy can succeed”.

Enemies of enterprise
Cavendish hasn’t named the civil service as an obstacle. Does he encounter resistance among officials? “I don’t think we find civil servants reluctant to implement what’s been asked,” he replies. “Overwhelmingly, I think civil servants want to understand what ministers want and to implement that as best they can. I don’t hear people sounding grudging or disheartened.”

However, he acknowledges that there can be “questions of capability and orientation.” The government’s approach requires officials to adopt a new set of techniques, he says – so rather than instinctively turning to taxation or regulation as a policy tool, for example, civil servants might “boost transparency, or get some competition going, or deregulate, or boost local growth, or get the big society working. That’s the philosophy of this government that’s new and different, and of course it takes a bit of time for us to feel that we’re totally confident about that world and how it works. Any new government that comes in often finds that the civil service can take a little bit of time to get with the government’s philosophy and approaches.”

Civil servants may also have been distracted from delivery by the departmental programmes of reform and redundancy instigated as the cuts bit. “I think that did lead those departments to be a little bit more focused on the reorganisation for a period, but I think most, if not all, are through that now,” he says. “I’m not sure it’s an obstacle that we come across any more.”

Cavendish also suggests, very gently, that officials should work harder to show ministers that they’re not the ‘opposition in residence’. “Ministers come in, quite rightly, with strong views about their priorities and how they should be realised,” he says. “The civil service has to be good at understanding those viewpoints and having a grown-up conversation with ministers about the best way of achieving them. We shouldn’t be saying: ‘You’re wrong to have that view.’ We have to get it: to listen to what ministers really care about, and to be excellent at working out the best way of doing it.”

On the other hand, he adds, civil servants “do want the civil service leadership to be really clear with ministers about what can be done, given the resources available: to prioritise, and to be fair about what can be achieved.” People need sufficient time and resources to do the job, Cavendish says: “If they feel that’s the case, people come at it with energy and a glad heart.”

Projecting forward
Cavendish does call for one further change to civil service practices: to “stabilise more the leadership of major projects over time.” The Public Accounts Committee often complains that by the time it examines a failed scheme, the relevant project chief has long since gone. “You can’t stop people from changing jobs or getting promoted,” he comments, “but I think we need to really grapple with the question of how we get more continuity in the leadership of major projects.”

Overall, though, Cavendish argues that the civil service is impressive both in its commitment and in its fortitude. “There are negotiations around pension rights, and worries about the economy and what the public sector’s going to be able to afford in the future,” he points out, yet “morale, as measured by the staff engagement survey, has held up reasonably well. Against that backdrop, the professionalism and enthusiasm of civil servants is remarkable.”

Given all this, Cavendish argues that it’s quite right that the policy teams in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office largely comprise civil servants rather than special advisers – despite the grumbles of right-wing commentators. “You’re speaking to someone who’s unusual in being a former special adviser and now a civil servant, so I can see the virtues of both parties,” he points out. “The advantage of having civil servants in a policy unit is that they have the detailed knowledge and skills and understanding of how government works.”

Of course, here Cavendish is not a disinterested party: after all, he clearly enjoys his civil service job – a job that allows a former Labour Party staffer to hold a key policy role under the coalition, following a varied career that appears to point in several different directions. What’s the common thread in his working life? “I’ve always been motivated by something which I almost certainly inherited from my mother, which is: do what I can to leave the world a better place”, he replies. “If there’s any golden thread that runs through – whether it’s working in Africa, in the World Bank, as an academic, on environmental issues, in politics or the civil service – it’s been trying to look in the mirror and ask: has anything I’ve done helped?”

To help, of course, you need traction: a position that enables you to make a difference. And in the Implementation Group, Will Cavendish has found a catalyst of progress not just on individual government policies, but on the whole culture, approach and mindset of government. From that base, he wants to help turn the civil service – once a group of “monks sitting behind impenetrable walls” – into “a 21st century civil service that’s more open, more fluid, more dynamic, with the confidence to engage with frontline communities, with businesses, with stakeholders.”

“Instead of being monks we’re going to be more like controlling intelligences, running networks and making things happen for people in different ways,” he adds. “That means a fundamental change in the way the civil service thinks about itself. And the big challenge for those who want to lead the civil service in the 21st century is to create that type of civil service: a more open, more confident, more flexible, more dynamic organisation; one that engages very wisely and doesn’t see itself as the monopoly of wisdom, but that coordinates and catalyses excellently.”