Interesting to hear Helen Ghosh, permanent secretary at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, speculating yesterday (Tuesday 7 July) about the possibility of creating a “national centre of civil service excellence”: a kind of clearing house for innovative ideas and best practice.

Speaking after watching the Lion’s Lair video – which features her and other ‘lions’ interrogating civil servants’ ideas for improving the efficiency or efficacy of the civil service – Ghosh noted that several ‘ideas champions’ hadn’t noticed that their ideas are already being put into practice in other parts of the civil service. Ghosh summarised the role of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) – which, she said, gathers in ideas, identifies the best and most innovative ways of delivering healthcare around the UK, and keeps NHS bodies informed of its findings. We need “a NICE for the civil service”, she said; a body that “gathers in the best of the best, and distributes it” to avoid civil servants reinventing wheels around the country.

Ghosh’s comments chimed with those of Sir Suma Chakrabarti, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice (pictured), who – speaking earlier in the day at a Civil Service Question Time session chaired by first civil service commissioner Janet Paraskeva – said that he’d “like to see the Cabinet Office operating as a centre of excellence”. Chakrabarti was responding to a question about which departments panellists would like to create or abolish. He noted that no formal advice or guidance is available to civil service managers tasked with breaking up or forming departments following reshuffle decisions made by the prime minister: civil service leaders, he said, have to rely on “talking to people who’ve done it before”.

So two permanent secretaries feel that there’s a need for a ‘centre of excellence’ in the civil service to identify and distribute best practice. The National School of Government and Cabinet Office are not, then, seen as offering this service. I’m sure that either or both would be happy to do so, given the right additional funding; as to whether they’d be willing to drop some of their existing activities in order to fund such work themselves – well that, of course, is a different matter.