MOD Civil Secretariat team supporting troops at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. Picture: Sergeant Alison Baskerville, Crown Copyright/MOD 2011
The Civil Service Reform Plan isn’t a report sitting on a desk somewhere in Whitehall. It’s a series of practical, meaningful changes that are transforming the Civil Service for the better – right here, right now. So I was particularly pleased to see two more measures announced last week which will affect most civil servants directly. These measures will also contribute to changing the bigger picture, by making our organisation faster, more joined-up and more focused on achieving results.
On Thursday we announced the publication of a new competency framework, the first that applies to all civil servants across government. Whether you inspect livestock for Defra in the Pennines, support our service personnel on the ground in Afghanistan, or help people into work in Bristol, ultimately we are all part of one, unified, Civil Service, working toward the shared goal of delivering exceptional public services. The arrival of a unified framework is therefore good news for everybody. Civil servants will find it easier to apply for jobs in different departments, while managers and HR professionals will have a simple, single standard for recruitment, performance management, and career development. The new framework will help ensure we can deliver government priorities in an agile and responsive way and will enable us to develop key capabilities like digital, commercial and project management skills.
I’m grateful to the departments which have already launched the framework, as thanks to their early efforts and feedback we are in a position to roll it out smoothly across the remainder of government from April this year.
The second Civil Service Reform announcement was about the creation of the first Independent Shared Service Centre, which will initially serve the Department for Transport, but will eventually provide HR, payroll, finance and transactional services to multiple departments and arms-length bodies.
For civil servants, greater standardisation across back office functions will bring the benefits of shared expertise, reduced errors and simplified procedures. But by generating efficiency savings through sharing services in this way, the Civil Service Reform Plan can also make a direct contribution to the Government’s efforts to reduce the deficit, without undermining our ability to deliver the first class services that the public rightly expect from us.
Paul Marriner’s team has worked really hard to produce a comprehensive Strategic Plan for Next Generation Shared Services and has now delivered the first element on schedule. There is more work to follow, and it will take time for these changes to bed down, but after all the preparation it is satisfying to see Civil Service Reform building momentum before us.
