It is well-nigh impossible to get civil servants in two different departments to work together; senior civil servants have no idea what those at the front line think – and even if they did, they wouldn’t act on it; the civil service is inefficient and will throw hundreds of thousands of pounds at even the smallest project, most of which don’t even work. Right?

Wrong; or, at least, wrong in the West Midlands, where two years’ work, a tiny budget of £30,000, a three-person team and the assistance of staff in 14 departments and agencies has created Civil Service West Midlands (CSWM). Covering the 34,600 civil servants working for the 48 public bodies with offices in the region (representing eight per cent of all of England’s civil servants), the project has – among other things – made the fast stream accessible to civil servants who do not want to move to London, negotiated staff discounts with various firms, and broken down the barriers that prevent the easy movement of staff between departments (see box on facing page). Indeed, the pilot scheme in the West Midlands has proved such a success that it is now to be rolled out across all the English regions.

The story begins more than two years ago. On visits to meet some of the 116,000 staff working at various Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) offices around the country, permanent secretary Leigh Lewis kept hearing the same complaint: why are lots of civil servants, doing a similar job in different departments just down the road, getting paid more than me?

The answer, as unions angrily proclaim, is that pay decisions have been left to departments’ discretion for more than a decade. Aware that there was more chance of the cabinet secretary running naked down Whitehall than there was of the Treasury changing this policy, Lewis decided to turn the presence of thousands of civil servants in the region from a potential negative into an analloyed positive. While some of the 34,600 staff in the West Midlands might be prepared to move to London to further their careers, many will not, he says. His dream, he explains, was “to be able to offer people much more fulfilling potential careers without them having to uproot themselves and their families”.

A conversation with cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell followed, and then a phone call to Trudy Elliot, regional director at the Government Office of the West Midlands (GOWM), where the regional heads of public bodies had already been discussing coordination on areas such as staff wellbeing and skills. In early 2007, Sir Gus and Lewis travelled to Birmingham to meet all those regional bosses.

“People really began to get it as we talked about it,” remembers Lewis. “They began to see that together we might be able to do much more than if we simply went about things separately.” An office manager representing 25 staff is likely to be shown the door if he asks the local leisure centre for a discount, Lewis says: “But if you say you have 35,000 members of staff, they ask you in for a cup of coffee”.

In the two years since, programme manager Gary Lang explains, a “wish list” was produced by civil servants, and a number of regional coordination projects have been initiated and handed over to different departments or agencies (see box). Those chosen were usually already leading in an area, in order to avoid anyone reinventing the wheel. This method of getting things done has contributed to the low cost of the project, says Lang: “We have so much capability. We don’t need to bring outside consultants in; we can do a lot of this by ourselves using the people we’ve got.”

The speed with which things have come together, he says, is “because there has been so much enthusiasm for it. It is a programme by the civil service for the civil service. It was a question of us all working together, like a family”.

Talking to the people involved in the West Midlands pilot, I was struck by their commitment to and belief in the project. Lewis describes himself as “really chuffed”. “This is one of the most positive things that the civil service has done,” he adds. And Lang, noting that similar projects have failed in the past, puts its success down to the broad base of support for the idea. “We have the perm secs behind it, we have the departments behind it, we have the staff behind it and we have the unions behind it,” he says.

There is also a real sense of teamwork. Lewis says that regional director Elliot, the senior responsible owner for the programme, is “the real reason this has happened”. Elliot, in turn, says “we wouldn’t have got this far” without Leigh acting as a critical friend, constantly pushing for more, and acting as a senior authority who could bulldoze the occasional obstacle out of the way.

Such blocks, Lewis says, have been few and far between. “Once or twice we have got snared in odd bits of financial bureaucracy,” he says. “That is where having a permanent secretary that can just pick up the telephone and say: ‘I think this is a good idea, so why don’t we just do it?’ has been helpful.”

On the ground, the enthusiasm continues unabated. Ann Chinner, deputy director in
corporate tax compliance at HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), is one of the dozen or so senior managers on the CSWM steering group. She spends around 10 per cent of her time on the project; it is, she says, “quite a commitment”, but one well worth making because it is such “a completely fascinating piece of work” and because “it’s also a really good initiative for staff”.

Probably the most popular aspect of the entire West Midlands project is the change to how vacancies are advertised to existing civil servants. In many departments, jobs were traditionally only open to staff in the grade immediately below that of the vacancy, and were sometimes only advertised to staff within the same organisation. Now, vacancies in the region are advertised across every department and agency in the CSWM group, and candidates can skip whole grades if they have the right competencies.

Lang describes this as “the jewel in the crown” of the entire project, with jobs more widely advertised in the West Midlands than anywhere else outside London. “That was what this whole project was trying to do: create the opportunity that people in London were getting,” explains Lang. There have, he admits, been “sensitivities” to consider around departmental practice and union concerns. But staff have responded positively and departments are happy too, Lang says, because they have access to a wider pool of potential applicants and “are now seeing a higher calibre of applicants coming to interview”. Chinner says she and her colleagues “have been absolutely knocked over” by the vacancy scheme. “Staff and managers just love it,” she says. “We have swept away all the barriers for moving between departments. It is terrifically exciting for staff.”

Such opportunities for staff are a real boon at a time when departments are reducing their headcount. One of the people who’s already benefited from the scheme is John Taylor, an administrative assistant (AA) at the DWP’s Disability and Carers Service in Birmingham for the past ten years, who has skipped the administrative officer (AO) grade to become an executive officer (EO). Before the vacancies scheme, Taylor imagined that he would wait another ten years before he was an EO – partly, he says, because so many vacancies are being filled by people whose roles have disappeared as part of the headcount reductions.

“I was looking for either a promotion or some kind of move, even if it was horizontal, just to do something different,” says Taylor – but for family and financial reasons, that search was limited to jobs near his home in West Bromwich. “I had done pretty much everything you can do at AA grade and, to be honest, I was quite bored,” he says.

Taylor is also aware of CSWM’s benefits beyond its effect on his own career. “It has really highlighted the fact that there are a lot of civil servants in the area, that we are all part of an organisation and have the same goals,” he says. “Hopefully that is going to help people in the West Midlands more generally. As we become more joined-up, we are going to be able to provide a better service.”

The part of the CSWM programme that is looking at joining-up estates and sharing facilities could produce one-stop shops, Lang says; indeed, some of the other English regions involved in the next stage of the rollout have been asked to look specifically at this area of joined-up working. Already, says Lang, in the West Midlands “cross-department working has really picked up at all levels: people are now picking up the phone and speaking to people they didn’t know existed before”. Such closer working could mean some financial savings for departments and the taxpayer, but Leigh Lewis is at pains to emphasise that economies have never been the driving force for this project. “That would be a really welcome outcome, but that is not what this is about,” he says. “What this is about is being able to offer more to the civil servants who work in our regions.”

The programme may primarily benefit staff, but it will also provide solutions for a number of the challenges that the civil service has set itself. For example, by creating real career prospects outside London, CSWM may help the drive to move civil servants out of the South-East. It should also make the civil service more diverse: women can access senior roles without having to move their families to the capital; women who take time out to have children can return to work, skip a grade on promotion and catch up with their male colleagues; the drive to improve community engagement (see box) should mean Civil Service West Midlands comes to represent the ethnic make-up of the region; and greater ease of movement between departments will mean that if some units improve the diversity of their staff, those benefits can spread through the civil service.

As part of the scheme’s national roll-out the cabinet secretary is now appointing permanent secretary champions for each region – initially in the South-West, North-West and East Midlands. None of these will get full-time members of staff running their programme, as the West Midlands did, but they will get to build on the pilot region’s experience. However, expanding an idea from a pilot is always full of risks and it is very important that the new regions enjoy the same levels of buy-in and enthusiasm – and resulting success – as the West Midlands has had.

The next stage of the rollout will not include the vacancies scheme until permanent secretaries make a decision on the recommendations contained with the evaluation report that Lang and his team are working on; its consultation phase has just been completed. Whatever the sensitivities might be, the civil service should endeavour to overcome them. It would be a crying shame if civil servants outside London – and, now, the West Midlands – were to miss out on these hugely improved career prospects, the jewel in the crown of the whole exercise.

Regional networks: what’s in it for staff?

Apprenticeships: The first cross-government apprenticeship programme has seen 124 people start training for national vocational qualifications in areas such as customer service, business administration and information technology. Khalida Yeasmin, CSWM’s programme administrator (pictured left), is doing her apprenticeship in leadership and management, with regular classes on the theory and practicalities of being a manager. Currently these apprenticeships are available only to existing staff, and there is a waiting list of 117, but the aim is to open them to local unemployed people.
Lead: Learning and Skills Council (LSC).

Corporate and social responsibility: This includes engagement with the community. Lead: HM Revenue & Customs.

Discounts: Money-off deals for staff have already been negotiated with Civil Service Sports and Leisure, the Civil Service Benevolent Fund, B&Q and Asda. Lead: Home Office.

Diversity: Underpins every part of the CSWM programme, says Lang, from community engagement to career opportunities. Lead: Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Estates management: With departments working together, the aim is to provide more pleasant facilities for staff which are more sustainable and, potentially, better value for money. Estates lead: MoD. Sustainable development lead: Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission, funded by the Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

Health and wellbeing: Best practice advice for departments on everything from stress to workplace accidents. Lead: Department of Health and the Health & Safety Executive.

Fast stream: Applicants to the national civil service fast stream can now specify that they would like to do their placements in the West Midlands, rather than London, and departments in the region have been asked to identify roles that are available for this. Lead: Cabinet Office and CSWM project team.

Fast track: Currently in development, this talent-management programme is intended to speed capable junior officials up the career ladder. Lead: CSWM project team.

Secondments: Something that staff asked for and that is currently in development is the chance to spend a few weeks in another department. This could be a precurser to applying for a job, or just give an insight into how a related department works.
Lead: the Crown Prosecution Service.

Skills for Life: Union learning representatives have been working on a West Midlands skills network. This could lead to departments sharing training provision, Lang says. Lead: the Council of Civil Service Unions.

Vacancies: All West Midland civil service vacancies are open to any official in the region, regardless of their grade or their current employer, as long as they have the right competencies. Lead: CSWM project team.