A new model of governance introduced at the Home Office last year has improved the “robustness” of the department’s performance management, according to its lead non-executive director.
Robinson was asked in spring 2023 by the then-home secretary Suella Braverman to review the Home Office’s governance model “to ensure it enables optimum delivery for the British public with clear accountability”.
In the department’s 2023-24 annual report, Tim Robinson, who became lead NED in February 2023, sets out how the new Home Office "operating system" has “transformed” the department’s governance structures.
Robinson said that, six months on from the operating system’s implementation in late 2023, Home Office leaders “have seen increased robustness in departmental performance management, particularly around major programmes, commercial contracts, risk and resource management”.
He added he is “confident that the system will help the department to better serve the public and be more resilient in responding to future challenges”.
Explaining how the new model works, Robinson said it “ensures that we focus on delivering the board’s highest priorities as set out in the Outcome Delivery Plan as well as creating a clear, coherent way for the department to respond to new priorities and pressures”.
ODPs are a performance framework in which departments agree to three-to-four objectives, as well as several cross-cutting goals that involve multiple departments, and spell out how they will deliver them. Throughout the year, the Cabinet Office monitors the extent to which real-world outcomes are being achieved.
Robinson said the decision to carry out the review followed a regular independent evaluation of the board's effectiveness carried out in 2022-23, which found that the department’s board was “most valuable” when NED board members “can use our external expertise to assure and challenge progress against Outcome Delivery Plans”. He said Braverman then decided to commission a governance review in place of conducting another effectiveness evaluation in 2023-24.
Expanding further on how the new system works, Robinson said it has also introduced the principle of accountability through the line-management chain, as well as through standardised performance reporting and presentation of data directly linked to the department’s performance objectives, culminating in monthly stocktakes with the permanent secretaries and their direct reports.
A summary of these stocktakes is considered at the department’s executive committee – with any issues being escalated to the home secretary and ministers as necessary by the permanent secretary and, where appropriate, the board.
“As the system embeds, this structure will be used at all levels of the organisation to drive accountability for performance,” Robinson said.
He said the system has also “streamlined" the Home Office's committee governance. The department has replaced its finance and investment committee with an investment committee, with finance now primarily managed in the perm sec stocktakes, and abolished its risk and delivery committee and effectiveness and organisational change committee.
Robinson said this has led to "a material reduction in bureaucracy and time spent by officials in committee meetings”.
Robinson’s background is in the technology and science sectors. Most recently, between 2013 and 2021, he was chief executive and then chair of LGC, an international life-sciences company which was a government organisation until its privatisation in the mid-1990s.