Ursula Brennan
Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice
How did you tackle the biggest challenges facing your organisation in 2014?
Although we have lots of ambitious reform underway, our biggest challenge is keeping on delivering vital public services while living within a tough spending settlement. We have to make savings of around £2.5 billion between 2011-12 and March next year, a reduction of 27% in real terms, and we’re on track to deliver. Much of the savings have come from improved efficiency – getting rid of unused capacity, taking out layers of management, reducing back office costs. But we’ve also had to deliver policy changes like the cuts to legal aid. Despite the emphasis on savings we’ve also made some big strides in improving services, like the step-change improvement in timeliness in ‘public law family’ cases, where the average time taken on cases for children being taken into care has come down from 52 weeks to 30 weeks in two years.
What are your department’s top priorities in the last months before the general election?
Our top priority on change is to complete the opening up of the rehabilitation market to a wider range of providers and extend support to prisoners serving short sentences. We’ve announced the preferred bidders for the new Community Rehabilitation Companies and they will bring both innovation and efficiency, allying professional management skills with practical voluntary sector experience of working with offenders in a range of settings. This is a radical departure for the rehabilitation of offenders and represents an investment in reducing reoffending for the long term.
A different sort of priority is improving our capabilities in contract management, in response to the problems with electronic monitoring (‘tagging’). The NAO said our improvement plan has the potential to be transformative, and while we’ve streamlined our processes and governance, and increased the number and the expertise of commercial staff, this remains a big priority over the next few months.
What’s your favourite Christmas treat? And what makes you say: ‘Bah, humbug!’?
Treat: marrons glaces (I made some one year – but they went mouldy before anyone got to eat them!). Bah humbug: Christmas decorations on sale in September!