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...and you’ll see the reform plan undergoing a mutation

Richard Heaton, the first parliamentary counsel, has been appointed as a part-time permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office, and started the job on Monday. He replaces Melanie Dawes, who took on the role in a temporary capacity following the sudden departure of Ian Watmore in June after only six months in the job.

The coalition has outsourced policy research on sharpening civil servants’ accountability to ministers because it would be “very odd to ask the civil service itself to do that” and might prompt accusations that the advice is “self-serving”, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has told Civil Service World.

The next spending review is likely to encourage departments to pool budgets to tackle cross-cutting challenges, the cabinet secretary and Cabinet Office minister have said.

The current rate of turnover of permanent secretaries is “problematic”, the government’s lead non-executive director Lord Browne has warned in an exclusive interview with Civil Service World. Browne’s comments come in a period that has seen the surprise departures of two permanent secretaries and a host of other senior civil servants.

Moira Wallace, the permanent secretary of the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) resigned last month, days before a critical report by the Commons’ Energy and Climate Change Committee (ECC) was published. The report, which examined her department’s flagship Energy Bill, said that continued rows between DECC and the Treasury have made the policy “unworkable.”

The Ministry of Defence says it’s balanced its budget, and can now afford to honour all its spending commitments. But as Joshua Chambers reports, this has come at a cost both to personnel and to equipment programmes.

The Ministry of Defence wants its staff to use social media – but there’s always a danger that unguarded use will create a security risk. Suzannah Brecknell reports on how the MoD can both have its virtual cake, and eat it.

For Foreign Office chief Simon Fraser, his relationships around Whitehall are as crucial as those with Washington. His main mission is to increase trade, he tells Matt Ross, and that means working with a host of other departments

Soon after the 2010 election, the coalition beefed up departmental boards and recruited a set of powerful non-executive directors. Joshua Chambers meets Lord Browne, the ‘lead NED’ reforming Whitehall from the inside

The government’s chief information officer, Andy Nelson, has accepted charges made in a new report on the government’s ICT strategy, which says key targets in the document are likely to be missed.

Some 80 per cent of civil servants believe that replacing IT systems will be an important step on the way to producing ‘more for less’, a CSW survey has found.

The FDA Union has pledged to fight any proposals that threaten the political neutrality of the civil service.

The relationship between ministers and the civil service must improve and both groups’ accountability must be clarified, Dame Gillian Morgan, the retiring permanent secretary of the Welsh Assembly Government, has told CSW.

A senior Foreign Office official has warned that the UK’s economic standing in the world could be damaged if the British public ever voted to leave the European Union.

Sir Mark Walport is to become the government’s next chief scientific adviser in April 2013, it has been announced. He was chosen via an open competition, and replaces Sir John Beddington.

The civil servant leading the G-Cloud purchasing programme has admitted that more could be done to promote the benefits of the facility to officials across government.

HMRC should introduce a deliberate error into the taxation system so that it overclaims taxes and has to repay them at the end of the year, Dr David Halpern, the head of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, has suggested.

Does the quality of your work make your time more valuable than that of your peers? Four top officials gave their thoughts on performance-related pay during a panel discussion. Suzannah Brecknell was listening

In an increasingly open society, even MI6 has to change the way it operates – and at Civil Service Live, the Secret Intelligence Service’s head Sir John Sawers made a rare public appearance. Joshua Chambers reports