I think Margaret Hodge was talking mainly about the RPA.  To be fair, Dame Helen inherited from Sir Brian Bender a bit of a mess.  Arguably five years was never going to be enough to sort it all out.

But Dame Helen made a big difference to Core Defra.  

She introduced Flexible Staff Resourcing with a view to getting civil servants out of their "silos".  I think the jury is still out on whether that worked, but it was an interesting idea.  

She also radically shook up the whole approach to performance management in Defra, below SCS level, with her Individual Performance Management system, introduced in 2008.  This adopted the "bell curve" approach to ranking individuals' performance against their peers, something that had been imported from large US companies.  The DWP had been an "early adopter" here.  IPM enabled the "top" 30% of staff in any given performance year to be allocated non-consolidated bonuses on a systematic basis, even if not all staff agreed that the results were objectively justifiable; at the same time it involved labelling a lot of staff as less effective. Some thought this to be unnecessarily demoralising, divisive and inconsistent with the supposed "collegiate" ethos of the Civil Service.  The system has not gone down well with staff or the unions, but sometimes that goes with the territory of being a "leader". I have no idea whether it has been continued, whether in its original or an amended form, under Bronwyn Hill, and if so how well it is working.

At the end of the day Margaret Hodge's comments merely, perhaps, reflect the increasingly (and refreshingly?) robust handling of senior officials by MPs.  See also her treatment of Anthony Inglese recently during the HMRC inquiry, complete with some constitutional analysis with which many commentators have taken issue.

Mark Benney 188 days ago