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In a bid to reduce costs, complexity and confusion, the Cabinet Office is launching a new pan-Whitehall ‘protective marking’ system. Stuart Watson listens in at a round table convened to explain and examine the changes

A council’s education expert explains to Philip Bevan the impact of recent reforms to the schools system.

The chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Sir Christopher Kelly, has warned in an article written for Civil Service World that new ways of providing services – including academies, clinical commissioning groups, and increasing delivery by the private and voluntary sectors – will place extra pressures on ethics in public service delivery.

I think most civil servants would say that they are pretty sensitised to the public service values that are supposed to govern their behaviour. I suspect few would be able to recite word for word the seven Nolan principles of public life – but that is hardly surprising. For civil service purposes, they have been condensed into four: integrity, honesty, objectivity, and impartiality. The last Civil Service People Survey showed 88 per cent of civil servants were aware of the Civil Service Code.

Less than a tenth of civil servants questioned by CSW believe the current model of financing trading funds is the best way to realise the coalition’s open data goals.

Stephen Lovegrove, chief executive at the Shareholder Executive since 2007, has been appointed permanent secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. He will take up his new post on 4 February. The role was originally set to be taken by David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, but prime minister David Cameron vetoed Kennedy’s appointment last year.

The civil service must make the most of expertise built up whilst preparing for the Olympics, according to a report published yesterday by the Institute for Government (IfG).

As the British task force neared the Falkland Islands in 1982, cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong sent prime minister Margaret Thatcher a briefing note raising the question of whether the UK should consider ceding some British territory in the south Atlantic to the Argentinians, documents released under the 30 year rule reveal.

Most Whitehall departments will have to move their transaction services – meaning HR, payroll, and accounts processes – into a shared service project by 2014, according to the Cabinet Office’s shared services strategy, published in December.

Jonathan Rees

Director General, Government Equalities Office

Philip Rutnam

Permanent Secretary, Department for Transport

David Pitchford

Executive Director, Major Projects Authority

Ministry of Justice CIO and Chief Information Officer, Government

As the National Security Council (NSC) has been evolving, the Home Office has been “looking at the types of subjects it has been taking”, home secretary Teresa May told the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on Monday.

The lack of a senior responsible owner for the West Coast Rail franchise project was the “biggest problem” behind the failure of the bidding process, Sam Laidlaw told the House of Commons Transport Committee yesterday.

The Ministry of Defence is struggling to build a financial management system that determines a “single version of the financial truth” and there is a “high risk to delivery” of the department’s strategy for setting out clear management information (MI), according to the Defence Review Annual Report published yesterday by Lord Levene.

The Ministry of Defence is struggling to build a financial management system that determines a “single version of the financial truth” and there is a “high risk to delivery” of the department’s strategy for setting out clear management information (MI), according to the Defence Review Annual Report published yesterday by Lord Levene.

A set of new ‘masterclasses’ that aim to help the voluntary and community sector (VCS) to secure public sector contracts were announced by the Cabinet Office  last week.

Nearly £50m was saved in 2011-12 compared to 2009-10 by cutting the use of fossil fuels and reducing waste and water consumption across Whitehall, the Cabinet Office announced last week.

The sale of Ministry of Defence (MoD) radio frequences could raise £1bn, the Financial Times reported this week. Two radio bands are being sold, with two industry experts telling the newspaper that each is likely to net £4-500m.

HMRC’s customer services operations have improved from their low point of 2010 but still represent poor value for money to the taxpayer, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) concluded yesterday.

The Welsh Government has entered into negotiations to nationalise Cardiff Airport, first minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, announced yesterday.

The Department for Education (DfE) should not make the National Pupil Database (NPD) available to the public, according to the Open Data Institute – a publicly-funded organisation dedicated to helping departments publish information and the private sector benefit from public data.

The government is not sufficiently prioritising some fields of government IT work that could produce big savings, delegates at an IT conference last December said in an electronic survey.

Last week the Civil Service Commission published its response to two proposals in the Civil Service Reform Plan for greater ministerial involvement in senior civil service appointments. The most discussed proposal would give ministers the right to choose their permanent secretaries from a number of candidates judged suitable by a selection panel. In our response, the commission actively supports the involvement of ministers in permanent secretary competitions and has agreed some further changes to strengthen that involvement. But we stop short of giving ministers a choice. That would, we believe, be a step too far.

Simon Fraser

Permanent Secretary of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office

Jon Thompson

Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence

We were both honoured to attend and be part of the Civil Service Awards last month. From Stranraer to Bournemouth, the outstanding work of civil servants was celebrated – whether they’d delivered roads or the Olympics, run prisons or Jobcentres. In one evening we recognised the very best of the civil service and left in no doubt that we lead some of the most talented professionals.

The government’s new Open Data Institute launched yesterday with an additional $750,000 (£466,000) investment from philanthropic body the Omidyar Network, run by the founder of eBay.

Civil service head Sir Bob Kerslake has told CSW that the turnover of permanent secretaries in the past two years has been too high, and that “in an ideal world” there would not be as much change.