To get his job done, Will Cavendish – the head of the Cabinet Office’s Implementation Group (interview, p7) – needs the backing of ministers as he works to ensure that departments deliver coalition policies, and the support of civil servants to unpick burdensome regulations and fashion ‘open’ public services. This is a man who can’t risk offending anybody.
His tone, then, is diplomatic – but his messages are clear. Civil servants need to fundamentally change their attitudes and techniques, he says, for the coalition’s approach to policymaking to take hold. They must improve cross-departmental working, priorisation, continuity in project management and implementation planning. Officials will find ministers more ready to listen to alternative means of realising objectives, he adds, if they’re convinced that civil servants are wholly focused on ministerial ends.
Cavendish also urges top officials to ensure ministers are “fair about what can be achieved” given the resources available – and this brings us to his messages for politicians. Ministers must not allow their understandable frustration at the hurdles facing policy delivery to be misdirected at those managing the race, he argues. Civil servants “overwhelmingly want to understand what ministers want and to implement that as best they can”, he says; given the means they’ll “come at it with energy and a glad heart.” Some of those hurdles may be unnecessarily high – and Cavendish leads the deregulatory drive to lower them – but others are simply essential ways to check that a policy really does have the legs to run the course.
Will Cavendish, chosen by the PM to dismantle the regulatory, cultural and organisational barriers to enterprise and delivery, is plainly not an ‘enemy of enterprise’. So while civil servants must heed his calls to challenge themselves to do better, it is just as important that ministers listen carefully when he argues that civil servants are not themselves the obstacles holding up policy delivery, but instead politicians’ essential partners in dismantling those barriers.
Matt Ross, Editor. matt.ross@dods.co.uk