Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service

Some things are worth waiting for. Building on around 57 years of training, this year I finished a 10k run in well under 57 minutes. Of course, not everything worth waiting for happens at such speed.

It was back in 1854 that the Northcote-Trevelyan report recommended a Civil Service Act. This year, after a 150-year wait, legislation was presented to Parliament that will finally enshrine the civil service values of honesty, objectivity, integrity and impartiality in law. It is in upholding these values that you see the civil service at its best, and that is why this element of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill is so important.

Not all the changes we’ve seen this year have had such historical roots. More than ever, the civil service has been quick and effective at reacting to fastchanging and challenging times. As a result, we have helped to reduce the impact of the downturn on the economy and households.

If we look back to the very beginning of the year, the country was facing some very tough economic challenges because of the global recession. Just as it had the year before, the National Economic Council continued to respond to those challenges, ensuring action was in place to support households and business through recession. For instance, in January the Asset Protection Scheme allowed the banks to restructure their operations to increase lending in the economy. This was followed by a significant package of measures to support business and workers early in the year.

As an economist, in some ways I felt as if I’d been preparing all my life for a moment like this. Suddenly, all the rules were broken. Thirty-three years after I’d last taught my students about the theories behind such situations, I found myself in the middle of the real thing – as did many civil servants.

Throughout this year, the civil service has been at the heart of supporting the prime minister to stabilise the crisis at home and to co-ordinate the international response. The civil service had a big role to play in hosting the G20 summit in London in April. In just a day and a half, the summit helped put in place policies that have had a role in helping to turn around the world economy.

But it’s not just on the world stage where civil servants have been making a difference this year. At the very local level, hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country have been helped this year by a thriving third sector supported by the Cabinet Office and Department of Work and Pensions staff working in Jobcentre Plus.

The figures are astounding – every working day Jobcentre Plus staff have taken on around 10,000 new job vacancies, and conducted 50,000 adviser interviews. But most importantly, they’ve helped more than 6,000 people get jobs every day.

In response to these achievements, more rules were broken; this time, though, they were my own Civil Service Award rules. This year the overall award went not to one team, but to Jobcentre Plus as a whole. The numbers are important, but even more significant are the real stories behind those numbers. Because of the work that Jobcentre Plus has done this year, there are fewer people going through the misery of long-term unemployment.

And it’s not just people looking for work who have been given extra help this year. Across the country viable businesses, hit by temporary financial difficulties, have been helped by the Business Payment Support Service set up by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) which has allowed them to spread their payments. Again, the numbers are impressive, with over 242,000 ‘time to pay arrangements’ agreed.

The stories we have seen throughout the year in Jobcentre Plus and at HMRC have shown us all just how quickly circumstances can change. It is very clear now that there will be significant financial challenges ahead. This means the civil service will need to be even more flexible, adapting in faster and smarter ways, and always looking to delivering more efficiently. And this is where our Capability Reviews have continued to make a difference this year.

Twenty-two government departments have been reviewed, and 16 re-reviewed. Over the course of the last four years I have seen the programme significantly improve the capability of the civil service, helping to identify and then address areas of weakness across all departments. I am particularly proud of the way that permanent secretaries and departments have responded and learnt from what has often been a challenging and public process. This, of course, won’t stop with the end of the year. The downward pressure on public spending makes it more important than ever for the reviews to focus on delivery, and next year they will be extended even further to include key arms’-length bodies.

Our Capability Reviews have pushed change, but they have also underlined the importance of opening up the civil service. To make sure we continue to deliver important public services to the very best of our abilities, the civil service needs a workforce that fully reflects our increasingly diverse society. In October we published our latest diversity figures, which showed that the proportion of women at senior levels has almost doubled since 1996 – hitting 34 per cent – and that a quarter of our top management positions are held by female staff. Compare this to FTSE 100 companies, where just 11.7 per cent of directorships are held by women. What these and other figures show is just how much progress we have made – although there is still more to be done.

Improving diversity isn’t the only area where the civil service has shown it is at the forefront of current thinking on people management. This year, we replaced our existing staff surveys with the 2009 People Survey, which was conducted across the whole of the civil service. More than 344,000 people took part in the survey – a crucial resource for improving performance.

Throughout the year, I have spoken with many civil servants about finding ways of having better public services, while economising on money. It was exactly this challenge that the Government addressed last week in its action plan Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government, which set out plans for improving our use of digital services, delivering better services locally and streamlining central government. In the year ahead, this will be a challenge for us all. We have got to do even more to play our part in reducing the deficit and we will need to be smarter and more professional than ever before.

It will be tough, but we have already laid the foundations. As the figures I’ve already mentioned show, we are already much more diverse and much more regionally spread than previously, with 73 per cent of civil servants working outside London and the South-East.

But while there will need to be more changes, and some of them will be difficult, some things will not change. The civil service will continue to focus on attracting the best people. It is interesting that this year applications to our fast stream are up 20 per cent. And we will continue to go that extra mile to deliver the best possible outcomes at home and abroad – whether it’s tackling poverty in Africa or getting people back to work here.

As the year comes to an end, civil servants in many departments – particularly the Department of Energy and Climate Change – are working on ways to tackle global warming. The meetings in Copenhagen are literally about saving the planet. And we will continue to work in partnership with our magnificent armed forces to create the space for an effective political strategy to work in Afghanistan and to safeguard our own national security.

There is, of course, one more thing we will not lose. Northcote and Trevelyan may have been working in the 1850s, but they got it right. Ever since their report, our traditional values of honesty, objectivity, integrity and impartiality have been seen as the right thing to have. In challenging times, we need them more than ever.