The new team being established at 10 Downing Street will strengthen policy communications between the centre of government and Whitehall departments, the Number 10 permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood has told Civil Service World.

Speaking in his first interview as Number 10 chief, Heywood said that the Policy and Implementation Unit will ensure that “Number 10 and the deputy prime minister are better informed at an earlier stage of the policy development and delivery performance of individual departments.”

The team will also work to “make sure that departments understand the perspectives of both sides of the coalition,” he explained. “That’s something that can sometimes be done better from the centre, where we live and breathe that every day, than in departments, where quite often they’ll have a more narrow departmental perspective rather than thinking coalition-wide.”

Comprising “eight or ten senior civil servants” and led by new head of policy development Paul Kirby, the new team will “make sure that the prime minister and deputy prime minister get advice early on in the process of policy development, and give them an opportunity to think through their ideas so they can feed them back to departments,” said Heywood.

“It might also help departments to understand more fully which of the ideas they’re working on are likely to find favour here [in Number 10] and with the deputy prime minister, rather than waiting till the end of the process and then finding that either the prime minister and the deputy prime minister, or one or the other, isn’t particularly attracted by what they’re doing.”

Asked whether the new team’s establishment is a response to the government’s recent U-turn on forestry sales, Heywood responded: “No, we were thinking about doing this well before the forests issue came to public attention; for several months now.” Number 10 began an open competition for the jobs in December, he said, adding that the team will “give us a little bit more capacity on the policy side compared to what we’ve been doing for the last nine months.”

The team will meet weekly under the chairmanship of Cabinet Office minister of state Oliver Letwin and chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, Heywood explained, “to make sure that we’ve got an idea of priorities, and to keep track of the projects that are being commissioned.” Each team member is likely to handle communications with a couple of departments, he added, and some may manage “cross-cutting themes as well.”

Team head Paul Kirby is a former Cabinet Office civil servant who left government to work at the BBC and then KPMG, where last June he produced a report arguing for much more outsourcing of services, empowerment of the frontline and service users, and the rapid expansion of payment by results.

Kirby will work alongside Kris Murrin, the former management consultant now working as Number 10’s head of implementation, and new director of political strategy Andrew Cooper. The PM has also recently recruited former BBC news head Craig Oliver as director of communications, replacing Andy Coulson.

The full interview with Jeremy Heywood will appear in the 9 March issue of CSWand online shortly afterwards.

Written by Matt Ross