Permanent secretaries are not my favourite people. I see them as a luddite Oxbridge Arts elite, with little idea of how to implement any form of IT system.
But an odd thing happens when they retire. They turn into radical thinkers, deeply dissatisfied with the way government policy is formed and implemented, and by the dysfunctional relationships between ministers and civil servants. Just my kind of people.
Such a one is Lord Michael Bichard (perm sec of the Department for Education and Employment 1995-2001), now director of the Institute of Government, a body whose remit seems to be to question the way in which the country is governed.
In a recent report it argued that it is important "to make sure policies are implementable before too much time and political capital is committed to them." This may seem blindingly obvious to the IT professional, who has experienced many public sector IT cock-ups, but is deeply heretical in Whitehall. The word "implementable", where it relates to IT, is barely understood by ministers or permanent secretaries.
Michael Bichard came to prominence in 2004, when David Blunkett got him to write the report on how to stop something like the Soham murders happening again. Bichard's answer was a national police database, so that child abusers who move around the country cannot hide in their local force's files. A year or two later, I heard him give a rather gloomy progress report to the Parliamentary IT Committee, which seemed to imply that he was getting grief from the chief constables.
Last week he gave a talk at the launch of the Guardian Professional Networks – of which the Government Computing is a part. I asked him how things were going on the police front. He was rather upbeat, saying the database was going live as we spoke.
It has taken seven years, not bad I suppose by public sector standards, but not really acceptable to anyone with young children. I hope it works, and is not abandoned after six months; big national databases are not the flavour of the month with either of the coalition parties.
But in his talk, he appeared deeply worried. He said public servants expect clarity, but get "localism", which generates uncertainty. This is at its worst in the NHS, where the "pause" suggests we will end up with a hybrid system, with GPs doing some of the commissioning and surviving primary care trusts doing the rest. No clarity there, and I hate to think what it will do to joined up healthcare computer systems.
Bichard approves of the coalition's rhetoric about breaking down the ministerial silos, but doubts the quality of leadership needed to break down the silos. He applauds the big society idea, but finds little evidence of any attempt to build and sustain community initiatives. If the big society is to work, he believes that public sector workers should be re-skilled to cooperate with community groups to create new services.
The aim is to produce better service at less cost. The public sector cannot do that alone; it needs partners. Bichard is asking whether the public sector is up to this new challenge, or is it yet even aware that it has to seek the partners? Then, a quite new kind of semi-local IT system will have to be devised to drive the wheels of the localised big society. It will be a nightmare.
Dick Vinegar has been around a while, first as a corporate executive for a computer supplier, and then as a journalist writing about the public policy of IT.
