From the summer of 2010 till now, barely six months before the election, no single permanent secretary or other Whitehall accounting officer has asked for a letter of direction – giving formal notice to the comptroller and auditor general (and the public) of their anxieties about the value for money of a decision a minister might be about to take.
Lord O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, talked the other day about permanent secretaries having conversations in which they would say ‘We’re getting into direction territory, minister’. But we don’t know whether such talks have taken place and whether, as O’Donnell said they should, they have steered politicians away from bad decisions.
He admitted bad decisions have been made: the aborted introduction of universal credit is an obvious example. We have to conclude that because Robert Devereux at the Department for Work and Pensions has not asked for a formal letter of direction, we assume he has been satisfied with what Iain Duncan Smith asked him to do.
Obviously, whatever his private conversations, they had no effect on his bull-headed and dogmatic secretary of state. But suppose Devereux didn’t want to publicly shame Duncan Smith and risk his own already shaky tenure as permanent secretary.
Is there any other channel open to him, even in theory? Perhaps a private word with Sir Nicholas Macpherson at the Treasury, alerting him to the spending consequences of pursuing the mega project at a time when the DWP is coping with benefit policy changes and major cuts in staffing? Or a drink at a Pall Mall club with Sir Jeremy Heywood, in the way perm secretaries might once have consulted Lord Butler and former heads of the civil service.
Both options don’t apply. It’s not just that Macpherson isn’t a collegiate type (if he’d wanted to chum with his colleagues, he could have put himself in pole position to be head of the service). Nor is it that Heywood, now both cabinet secretary and head of the service, has a huge number of different fish to fry and HR for permanent secretaries isn’t a priority. It’s a structural thing, and is spelled out in the latest report from the Public Accounts Committee.
Whitehall lacks a “centre”. There is literally no place where pan-Whitehall issues (including the integrity of the civil service and threats to the position of individual permanent secretaries) can be addressed. The PAC held an extraordinary and fascinating hearing back in July at which, like four men who’d never previously met, Heywood and Macpherson sat in front of Margaret Hodge and colleagues, along with Sir Bob Kerslake, by then already on his way out, and Richard Heaton of the Cabinet Office, who has disappeared completely from the Whitehall firmament.
Talk about stiff body language and a party line. Hodge was puzzled by why Francis Maude, publicly and privately, deplored the lack of a strong and coherent centre yet the permanent secretaries had told her in no uncertain terms that Whitehall is inherently “departmental” – siloed. What the session proved was that as a matter of fact they are right: government isn’t joined up and doesn’t want to be. The Treasury does not want to intervene in what departments do, as long as they stick to budgets. The Cabinet Office has no heft or consistent right of oversight.
And all that’s despite the efforts of Maude and predecessors and the creation of the Major Projects Authority and pan-Whitehall attempts to supervise consultancy and PR spending.
Not long after the committee sat, John Manzoni’s appointment as chief executive of the civil service was announced, but you could imagine that when the PAC carries out its follow up study on the “centre of government” in a few months’ time he either won’t be able to or won’t want to say anything has changed.
Whether that’s good for governance, value for money or the effectiveness with which public policies are delivered is another matter altogether.
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