Wednesday, February 25, 2004

CIVIL SERVICE UPDATE

Peter Kemp, one of the key architects of change in the Thatcher Civil Service, has responded to the leaked Gershon Report.

Kemp runs a careful eye over the plans which would involve considerable remodelling of the structure of how the machinery of government delivers and a substantial change to the way in which Civil Servants work. Surprisingly, he's not totally convinced that increased outputs are possible with reduced inputs.

Accountability, though, is more problematic for Kemp, as Gershon would break the traditional "silo" structure of departmental government:

"Who is in charge when things go wrong? It is not clear who would answer for these new "super agencies" nor how they would be accountable, whether to the minister in charge in the ultimate service, or indeed to parliament. Nor is it clear where the blame would lie when things go wrong."

Yesterday also saw Tony Blair outline the plans in a bit more detail. I've not read the full speech, but from what I've seen reported elsewhere there are a lot of questions, like how is this plan going to be implemented, how do you retrain the thousands of generalists for "front line" work, what that front line work will be and what do civil servants deliver? Pizza?

:: Posted by pete @ 14:13