Richard Heaton
Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office
What were your biggest policy and delivery challenges in 2013? How did you handle them?
Major projects dominated much of the year. Individual electoral registration is the biggest change to how people register to vote for over 100 years and will make the process easier and more secure, affecting all 46m people on the electoral register. We have been testing in preparation for the change next year, and we’re confident. Another of our big programmes with nationwide reach is the National Citizen Service, which has inspired 80,000 young people this summer. We’re about to ask the new NCS Trust to take on the running of the programme.
We also found ourselves doing some pretty creative event management. We co-ordinated a successful G8 in October, at Lough Erne. We welcomed governments and civil society organisations from 60 countries to the Open Government Partnership summit at the end of November in London: it was energetic, informal, and very engaging. Earlier in the summer, in Olympia, Bristol and Gateshead, we put on “Be Exceptional”, the annual Civil Service Live event, which I hope brought civil service reform to life for many people.
Where have you made the most progress in implementing the Civil Service Reform Plan, and what are your reform priorities for 2014?
Open policy making is moving ahead well, with the launch of a new portal, Civil Service Quarterly and Contestable Policy Fund all behind us. The next phase will be a programme to ensure these initiatives have impact and that open policy-making becomes embedded as the default way of working. We successfully signed contracts for Shared Service Connected Ltd, a brand new company part-owned by Cabinet Office, to take on the delivery of shared services for 13 departments and agencies. Government Digital Service is helping departments design and deliver 25 priority digital projects – and in Cabinet Office, as elsewhere, we are building up our digital and data capabilities.
We’re also taking a new approach to designing and delivering the technology on which we depend and with which we can do so much. This programme is moving fast, and getting it right is a major reform priority for me in 2014. It’s business-critical, and it’s also an important part of the ‘modern workplaces’ theme in the civil service reform plan.
What are your key challenges in the last year of the Parliament? How will you tackle them?
The last session of Parliament will be a short one, with formal dissolution in March 2015; so there’ll be even more pressure on legislative time. Bills will need to be ready early in the session, and there’ll be little room for error or unnecessary legislation. As ever, the Cabinet Office will be at the centre of things: helping the PM and DPM ensure that priorities are implemented, that departments are working well together, and that the coalition government continues to function well.
What would you most like Santa to bring you this year? And what should he take away?
Bring good health, good law, and some of that nice stollen cake. And take away rancour, unpleasantness, and acronyms.