Today’s report from the Commons public administration select committee on civil service skills may not grab the headlines but ignoring the issue is a false economy for us all.
Failures of risk management can have serious consequences for UK security and are expensive: witness the roll call of costly IT project failures and infrastructure U-turns. We need to identify and manage issues like the Passport Office backlogs and West Coast mainline problems before they damage services, finances and reputations.
The civil service plays a central role in identifying, managing and mitigating the risk facing the UK. Yet austerity has seen an exodus of expert, senior staff. Office for National Statistics figures show that at March last year, the UK had a total of 439,000 civil servants. That’s 17% fewer than in 2010. We are concerned about the impact of these cuts.
It is not only institutional memory that’s being lost, but also an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. More needs to be done to both anticipate future challenges and build corporate memory, of both successful and unsuccessful risk management strategies and approaches so that lessons may be learned. And, despite some good practice, formal mechanisms for sharing lessons across the civil service are breaking down.
In this context, I believe a properly trained civil service is a necessity. Ironically, the end of the era of majority government might actually help. Scottish, Australian and Danish civil servants say one of the benefits of “default” coalition governments is that staff are both trained and required to scrutinise new proposals. Far from being seen as policy-blocking, this approach to risk helps staff to identify risks, recommend their management and ensure proposals are fit for purpose.
I think a similar culture of training in risk would help UK ministers resist the pressure to force through sticking plaster policies. Risk management is prioritised in departments explicitly charged with compliance. But all departments should have a risk management strategy overseen by designated staff. I would also suggest the civil service’s capability plan should include a new specific risk management competency at the levels of seniority needed to make it stick.
Post election, I urge the victors to prioritise investing in the training of those “coming up the ranks” and junior specialists to ensure long-term strategic planning. And I would urge the government to follow the Financial Reporting Council’s lead in revising its corporate governance code to ensure companies assess robustly their main risks and explain how they will manage them.
Our government departments should be aspiring to the same level of operational efficiency. We have largely got away with it so far. But optimism as a means of dealing with uncertainty is not a strategy – and the civil service badly needs a strategy.
Carolyn Williams is the technical director at the Institute of Risk Management.
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