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Five government departments will be required to provide clearer guidance and complaints procedures for staff keen to set up public service mutuals, under new proposals designed to maintain the momentum behind the government’s public service reform agenda.

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.

Exploitation of the vast quantities of subjective data from social media sites and internet forums offers Whitehall decision-makers new opportunities to fine-tune policy based on public opinion, experts told a civil service seminar yesterday.

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

The changes to the Fast Stream outlined in the Civil Service Reform Plan last week are a “brave experiment,” Mike Emmott from the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development has told CSW.

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.

The new job of director general for civil service reform has been awarded on an interim basis to Andrew Campbell from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Civil Service World has learned.

The coalition’s plans for energy markets put the government centre stage, with a key role in setting prices. Stuart Watson explains the pressures on this key area of policymaking, and examines the energy department’s plans

When the House of Commons this week began to debate the government’s House of Lords Reform Bill, it was dealing with a proposed piece of legislation which has at its heart two objectives: to make the Lords more democratic; and in doing so, to maintain the primacy of the Commons. It fails on both counts.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs wants to establish a commercial joint venture to run its science lab in York, the department’s permanent secretary Bronwyn Hill said at Civil Service Live last week.

Reforms designed to hasten procurements are being undermined by delays in securing spending approval from the centre, a Home Office official has warned.

Permanent secretaries will be covered by the new rules on performance set out in the Civil Service Reform Plan, Sharon White, director general of public spending in the Treasury, told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Monday. This means that the poorest performing 10 per cent of permanent secretaries will be identified and given extra support and training.

The government’s reform plans fall well short of the aim of creating a more professional civil service, says Dai Hudd

The open data and transparency agendas must fit their needs

Central departments must communicate better with councils, the National Audit Office (NAO) has said in a report published today.

Senior civil servants’ career progression should be tied to their efforts to reform the civil service, the Institute for Government (IfG) has said in a report published this week.

Ministers are poorly placed to ensure that their special advisers do not breach codes of conduct, the chair of the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) suggested yesterday.

Two government departments are preparing to publish “choice frameworks” enshrining people’s rights to make key decisions over the public services they receive, the official leading the ‘open public services’ agenda has told CSW.

The new set of business plans show that government departments completed 90 per cent of the “reform actions” planned for the 12 months to June 2012, according to the Cabinet Office. But changes to the plans’ format mean that in future the government will report less frequently on progress against deadlines, while some targets are to be sidelined in annexes to the business plans.

Despite the rhetoric, government has failed to engage with the charity sector. Just look at the Work Programme, says Stephen Bubb

Fraud is widespread at government contractors A4e and Working Links, their former head of audit, Eddie Hutchinson, has said.

The Department of Health’s new information strategy sets out plans to standardise data collection in NHS bodies, and to share and use it more effectively. Colin Marrs examines a trailblazer for the open data agenda

A solicitor representing David Owen, a civil servant suing the Treasury for unfair dismissal, has said that officials are threatening to ignore the judge’s decision should he rule in Owen’s favour.

Three ground-breaking ‘carbon compacts’ have been signed, bringing together the spending power of departments and private businesses in a bid to push suppliers into cutting carbon emissions.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) failed to plan out the skills it will need in the long term before cutting its civilian and military workforces, according a report published by the Public Accounts Committee on Friday.

Cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood is “angry” at attacks on the civil service in the newspapers over the past month, and the prime minister and deputy prime minister share that anger, Heywood told the Public Administration Select Committee last week.

All departmental communications functions are to be assessed over the next 18 months as part of a new capability review process, CSW has learned.