The targets’ range

“Just what do you do?” is a question often heard by civil servants, many of whose job titles are based on unique traditions or management-speak. The publication of permanent secretaries’ objectives – which were released for the first time in 2012, and updated at the end of last year – is an attempt to explain to the public exactly what our top civil servants do, with the aim of improving transparency and accountability in Whitehall.

Britain is the first country in the world to publish its top officials’ objectives, and the idea has been welcomed. Professor Colin Talbot of Manchester Business School says that “it’s a good thing to do: if you have a large-scale organisation trying to deliver things, then you want to have an idea of how you are doing.” Guy Lodge, associate director at think tank the IPPR, adds that “good government depends on such clarity.” And Bernard Jenkin MP, chair of the Public Administration Select Committee, says that the targets’ publication “shows there is thinking going on about how the role of permanent secretaries should evolve.”

But what do the most recent set of permanent secretaries’ objectives reveal about departmental priorities, and how useful are they for monitoring civil service chiefs’ performance? CSW has spoken to select committee chairs, the Cabinet Office, think tanks and academics to gather their views.

How they stack up

As was the case with the first compendium, published at the end of 2012, the objectives apply to heads of department and comprise three themes – business delivery, building capability and corporate aims – with measures of performance and corresponding milestones set out for each. This time, three departments make their bow: the Home Office, the Office for National Statistics, and the Department for Energy and Climate Change. Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service, Home Office and NHS have changed their chiefs, so those objectives have not been published this year.

These gaps are due to the less-than-permanent nature of permanent secretaries: Mark Sedwill had only just moved to the Home Office when the objectives were set to be published; NHS chief David Nicholson, says a Cabinet Office spokesman, is “no longer part of the civil service permanent secretary cadre”; and the CPS’s Keir Starmer left office in November. Some commentators, though, wonder why objectives can’t be agreed before an appointment is made.

“I understand that you may need a month to get your feet under the table,” says Julian McCrae, deputy director of the Institute for Government, “but it would be a good idea if the objectives were part of the job application process. We don’t see why you shouldn’t be setting objectives whilst someone is moving posts.”

The Cabinet Office confirmed that another anomaly is being addressed. To date, objectives have been published in December, nine months into the time period to which they relate. The third set of objectives, for 2014-2015, will be published this spring.

The latest set of published targets “are better than the first set: they are a little bit more refined, people are a little more used to them,” says Guy Lodge. Yet McCrae, while pleased that they place greater emphasis on departments talking and working more closely with one another, believes that in general the objectives are insufficiently tightly worded to be meaningful. “You find these references to ‘cross-cutting’ and ‘support government reforms’ in the objectives,” says McCrae. “That’s fine, but what should the permanent secretary be doing to implement this? The objective should be highlighting that, but it doesn’t.”

Jenkin says that “these objectives suggest we are still addressing the wrong questions,” adding that they indicate a “sterile relationship between ministers and lead officials, which I’m sure in reality is much more personal than the objectives suggest. There needs to be more of a joint understanding between ministers and the civil service about the future direction of the civil service and exactly what the vision is.”

Woolly wording

In places, the wording of the objectives – if not the concepts behind them – has been tightened since the first set, with fewer lines such as “[to be] agreed with the Cabinet Office”. In 2012-’13, this lack of precision characterised the milestones and measures for Simon Fraser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. But his new objectives are more specific, and include “delivery against milestones in agreed Efficiency and Reform Group action plan”.

Dame Anne Begg MP, chair of the work and pensions select committee, feels that the objectives still fall short of achieving precision – both in their outlined targets, and in the language used. Begg welcomes the idea of publishing objectives, describing it as “eminently sensible.” However, she says they need to be more focused and, above all, lucid. “The problem is there is a lot of management speak here: ‘maintaining strong progress’, ‘creating effective management’.”

Jenkin also feels the wording of objectives needs further tightening. “They are a start,” he says, “but the cabinet secretary’s objectives include a need to ‘embody the principles of civil service reform’. That’s fine – except I don’t think anybody knows what the principles are. You end up wondering just how engaged each permanent secretary is in the agreement of their own set of objectives, or whether these are off-the-shelf job descriptions.”

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office acknowledges the objectives remain something of a work in progress. “Permanent secretary objectives need refining, so we will be overhauling the system for next year,” he says. “Our philosophy is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good; permanent secretary objectives were never published before the last general election.”

Professor Talbot is sceptical that the revised objectives can achieve meaningful improvements in the performance of permanent secretaries and their departments: “It is good that they are publicised, it’s worth trying, but [the government] shouldn’t over-inflate what it is looking to achieve by doing this.”

Fundamental flaws, argues Talbot, undermine the objectives’ potential benefits. “It’s very difficult to get ministers to take setting these objectives seriously, to stick to them, and to get them to focus on something they might see as boring. In practice, you end up with permanent secretaries setting their own objectives and the ministers rubber-stamping them.”

Structural problems

Lodge believes that the woolliness of the objectives reflects structural flaws at the heart of Whitehall – but argues that they can be made more specific by linking them to the provisions in fixed-term contracts as they’re introduced for permanent secretaries. “The objectives are too abstract: you need to embed them with the fixed-term appointments of permanent secretaries,” he says. “And the head of the civil service needs to be a full-time role, with a core responsibility to hold permanent secretaries to their objectives, and the support and resources to make it all happen.”

MPs could help to test perm secs’ performance against their targets, but they’re not that interested, argues Talbot. “Parliament could hold the permanent secretaries to account, but it doesn’t really take these things seriously; and select committees aren’t really doing that either.”

However, Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (see interview, p9), recognises the potential role for the select committees. “There is a much stronger role for all departmental select committees to enhance what they are doing around scrutiny,” she says. “It’s not a complicated challenge; the select committees just have to prioritise it.”

If MPs do turn their attention to this task, their job will be made easier where departments have linked targets directly to policy delivery. At transport, Philip Rutman must ensure that preparation for HS2 is “carried forward cost effectively and quickly”; at health, Una O’Brien must prepare the “delivery of a full response” to the report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust Public Inquiry. McCrae wonders how these sit alongside the tasks of organisational change. “There’s a sense that these are the key objectives of the government,” says McCrae, and “they contrast with the longer-term objectives of a permanent secretary. I don’t think there is a problem with that, but it would help if the permanent secretary had a proper set of objectives that was more meaningful. The permanent secretary will not be carrying out the objective themselves; the objective needs to look at what the department is going to do to get the job in question done smoothly.”

Aligning milestones and objectives

The new objectives and their ‘milestones’ are not always aligned. Sir Jeremy Heywood has 15 bullet points on his to-do list – but only two deadlines. One of these – for him to oversee permanent secretaries with cross-cutting briefs – has already passed: it reads simply “mid-year reviews completed November 2013.”

Over at HMRC, Lin Homer has a whopping 51 bullet points – up from a mere 36 in 2012-2013. Along with refreshed targets to improve the way her department engages with the public, she now faces precise metrics to measure her success in improving staff engagement – including the requirement that she “improve the proportion of people who clearly understand where decisions are taken in the organisation and their own accountabilities.”

Homer’s ticker-tape of objectives is proof, says McCrae, that the government has overcooked things. “Each permanent secretary has on average 18 objectives,” he says. “It seems to have been designed by the Christmas tree process: everybody gets to stick their own bauble or objective on. Once you get beyond six or seven objectives, you are probably adding on things that may not matter. Such a great number suggests you are still failing the test of knowing what really is the core job of each permanent secretary. There’s a real sense of permanent secretaries not having clarity. That’s the epitome of a poor structure.”

Measuring performance

One major discrepancy remains from the first set of objectives: an absence of data on performance against last year’s objectives. In September, a Public Accounts Committee report labelled the accountability arrangements for permanent secretaries “inadequate”, with no clear sanctions for those who miss their targets and few metrics against which to gauge their success.

McCrae is inclined to cut the government some slack on this point: this set is more focused than the last, he says, pointing to “a slight improvement” in the proportion with deadlines or measurable attributes. “It’s a long way from perfect, but 90% of the objectives have some kind of measurability,” he says. “The wider point might be that if the objective is not particularly specific, then it’s difficult to know what the measure is.”

Another thought occurs to some observers: perhaps the objectives are often blurred because their authors do not anticipate too much scrutiny. “The appetite among permanent secretaries for these sort of objectives is very low,” says Talbot. “They don’t mind having very vague and woolly targets because it is hard to nail down specific [metrics] for those; and they don’t mind long-term objectives either, as they won’t be around to be held accountable.”

“There is a case for arguing that the objectives are window dressing; that Whitehall is blasé about them because it doesn’t really take them seriously,” agrees McCrae. “The real question is whether they are going to be taken seriously externally. It may be that publishing the lists of objectives is just a part of the process of improvement – a Darwinian process.”

In Douglas Adams’ book ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’, people spent years waiting for the answer, only to discover that it was 42 and they should have been more concerned with nailing down the question. There are echoes of that here. Permanent secretaries’ objectives do display a level of transparency not seen elsewhere in the world, but they still don’t tell us much about the core priorities and performance of Whitehall’s most senior officials.