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The Conservative manifesto sets out plans for wholesale reform in many aspects of civil service operations and management. Indeed, as Mark Rowe finds, the Tories envisage transforming Whitehall into a ‘civic service’.

The Conservative manifesto leaves no doubt that creating a cultural change in the civil service is high on the party’s agenda. The traditional Conservative philosophy of shrinking the state emerges here in the form of a commitment to decentralising power – both to local authorities, and indeed to communities. The document’s foreword declares that the plans “represent an unprecedented redistribution of power and control from the central to the local, from politicians and the bureaucracy to individuals, families and neighbourhoods.”

Under a Tory administration, departments would be busy overseeing the devolution of such powers to voluntary, private and community organisations, as part of what David Cameron calls the switch from “big government to big society”.

For the centre, this means cuts. Over the course of a Parliament, the Conservatives have pledged to cut Whitehall policy, funding and regulation costs by a third, saving £2bn a year, and to save a further £1bn a year by dissolving quangos. Any quangos that do not perform a technical function or a function that requires political impartiality, or act independently to establish facts, would be abolished.

In part, the party hopes to achieve these savings by better financial management. The Tories say they’d publish a set of cost measures capturing the key drivers of departmental spending; help departmental finance directors to manage resources more efficiently; implement clear financial performance targets for senior civil servants; and create a focus on delivering strong financial management across government.

Along with the HR, IT and procurement professions, the finance profession would get a new, full-time head of profession. The Conservatives say they’d create strong financial discipline at all levels of government, and place an obligation to manage taxpayers’ money “wisely” at the heart of civil service employment contracts. Departmental finance directors would have a strengthened role and more universal representation on departmental boards, which would themselves be beefed up and chaired by secretaries of state with the aim of holding permanent secretaries to account: underperforming officials could, in effect, be removed by the board.

In order to ensure greater continuity of management on major projects, permanent secretaries would be put on fixed-term contracts, and a more rigorous appraisal system would be introduced throughout the civil service. Departments would be held to account not against public service agreements, but against business plans. And a new system of ‘regulatory budgets’ (similar to the plans axed by incoming business secretary Lord Mandelson when he rejoined the government) would stipulate that any department introducing a new regulation in one field would have to drop a greater regulatory burden elsewhere. Shadow Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has also argued that civil service redundancy packages should be diluted further, bringing them down to the kind of level typical in the private sector.

Meanwhile, the Tories believe that greater transparency in finance and recruitment would help drive down costs. There are plans to open up Whitehall recruitment by publishing central government job vacancies online, and the party would publish in full online government contracts for goods and services worth more than £25,000, while increasing the accountability of EU spending by publishing details of every UK project that receives more than £25,000 of EU funds.

Public bodies would be required to publish online the job titles of every member of staff, plus the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the senior civil service pay scale. Any public sector official paid more than the prime minister in the public sector would have to have their salary signed off by the Treasury. Some senior civil servants are unhappy with this approach – particularly with the plans to publish civil service expenses. They are expected to argue that, while pay bands could be made public, publishing individuals’ expenses could raise security issues and lead to the media demonising individuals who’ve done nothing wrong.

The Conservatives have often criticised the government’s major IT projects, and the party has said that IT projects worth more than £100m are unlikely to be approved by a future Tory government. The party’s manifesto on technology, published in March, said that it would place an “immediate moratorium on planned IT procurement projects” to make sure they are accessible to small and open source suppliers; all government tender documents for contracts worth over £10,000 would be published on the Supply2Gov website, opening up contracts to SMEs by breaking up large ICT projects into smaller components. Meanwhile, Francis Maude has warned that civil servants who sign expensive IT contracts in the run-up to the election without a direct order from a minister will be “held to account” by a new Tory government.

The party would strengthen the role of the chief information officer “to get a grip on government ICT projects”, and appoint senior private sector non-executives with strong ICT and operational experience to departments where ICT plays “a significant role in delivering services”. The Conservatives also support the creation of a small in-house IT innovation team, dubbed a “government skunkworks” after arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin’s development unit, which could develop low-cost IT applications and advise on larger procurements.

Finally, the manifesto explains that the Conservatives want the public perception of the civil servant to change. To help stimulate social action, says the manifesto, “we will transform the civil service into a ‘civic service’ by making sure that participation in social action is recognised in civil servants’ appraisals”.

Giving public sector workers ownership of the services they deliver is a powerful way to drive efficiency, the manifesto reports, “so we will support co-operatives and mutualisation as a way of transferring public assets and revenue streams to public sector workers... We will encourage them to come together to form employee-led co-operatives and bid to take over the services they run.” So the Conservative manifesto has some strong plans for reform of the civil service’s operations – but perhaps the document’s most ambitious plans are those to foster culture change.

Last updated 751 days ago by Civil Service Live