Bob Kerslake would make a better head of the civil service if, rather than working his way up through local government to lead Sheffield’s renaissance, he’d spent more time sweeping floors. Jon Thompson would be making still faster progress at MoD if he’d cooked more squaddie dinners and produced fewer public bodies’ accounts. Lin Homer would be having more luck at HMRC if her work in Suffolk and Birmingham had involved cutting the grass, not running the council. Right?
Of course not. The reasons why it’s valuable for senior civil servants (SCS) to gain experience of service delivery are widely recognised. Work placements can help them to understand the pressures acting on public workers, and the systems and organisations within which they operate; to appreciate how policies handed down from above play out in service delivery; to acquire contacts who’ll prove invaluable for advice and guidance; and to witness how complex social and economic problems run awkwardly across departmental boundaries, helping them to step outside the narrow fiefdoms of Whitehall. All these aims are best achieved by sending SCS to spend a couple of weeks working alongside a wide range of service delivery staff – from those at the sharp end to the senior managers of delivery bodies – in roles that make use of their skills, giving them practical experience and ensuring that their hosts benefit too.
It is, then, odd that The Times – briefed by a Department of Health “source” – reported that under the DH’s work placements scheme (see news), SCS “will have to empty bedpans, push trolleys and clean hospital floors before they can get promoted”. Even the official press release talks of attacking civil servants’ “culture of aloofness”: the impression is that this is a long-deserved comeuppance for feather-bedded, ivory-tower mandarins, not a sensible way to improve management skills.
Even behind the rhetoric, the scheme looks compromised. The press release – citing the Francis report – puts the emphasis not on SCS understanding the processes and structures of service delivery, but on their developing more empathy with patients. “To understand more about what patients and service users need... civil servants need to walk a mile in their shoes,” it says. The problem, apparently, is not that SCS are wrestling with complex delivery issues, but that they’re failing to prioritise patients’ needs.
On top of that, the press release says there will be a “basic expectation” that officials spend a month each year on the frontline: the DH believes either that it can lose a twelfth of its management capacity without any kind of an opportunity cost, or that SCS will simply have to work harder.
If DH staff saw this as a way to develop the delivery knowledge so essential to good governance, many would warm to it – and the department does urgently need the skills to implement its change programme. But in its public presentation it doesn’t look like a personnel development scheme; it looks like another stick with which to beat the civil service. And if, rather than being offered new skills, officials are ordered to don a dunce’s cap and a pair of rubber gloves for a month’s toilet-cleaning, the only thing they’ll gain is an urgent desire to hail a cab back to Richmond House.
The DH has secured brief applause from the Tory-supporting press by presenting an initiative rooted in the civil service reform agenda as a way to bring mandarins down a peg or two. In fact, it could have secured a louder cheer from its own NHS workforce by promising that the health secretary is to spend a solid month emptying bedpans – and a standing ovation if it had pledged the same of his predecessor. Even that, however, wouldn’t have moved the DH an inch closer to successful policy delivery. To realise that aim, it should instead have sent Jeremy Hunt away to spend a couple of weeks working alongside a wide range of service delivery staff, in roles that make use of his skills – and, whilst he’s at it, he could probably use a short but emphatic course in people management.
Matt Ross, Editor. matt.ross@dods.co.uk