Civil Service Reform

Let me thank the thousands of diligent and hard-working civil servants who are dedicated to making people’s lives better. We want to get the best for civil servants and out of civil servants, so we are reforming the structure and the focus so that it is better placed to fulfil that purpose. That includes a number of important steps in recent weeks: robust performance management; better use of digital tools; faster recruitment; cuts to some wasteful spending; and a review of the arms-length body landscape, including the changes announced on NHS England, to return both power and responsibility to elected representatives.

I thank the Minister for his response and I am perfectly happy to accept the diligence of the civil service. Regardless, every two years a third of the civil service change their Department and countless more change to unrelated policy roles within each Department. Under the previous Government, policy expertise was completely hollowed out from the civil service. Will the Minister set out how we intend to resolve that to bring policy expertise back into the civil service and ensure we have Government teams capable of delivering for Britain?

It is probably true to say that a long-held frustration of some Ministers has been turnaround and the pattern of career progression, where people move on after a few years just as they are becoming an absolute expert in their area. Our ambition is not just to have policy expertise, but to change the way that policy is put together in the first place. That is why the test-and-learn approach, which we discussed earlier in this session, is so important. Frankly, the old way of having a group of experts writing a White Paper, throwing it over a wall and hoping it will work first time, just does not work in today’s age. What we really have to avoid is a two-speed world, with massive innovation in the private sphere and a public sphere working in the same old ways. We have to avoid that in the interests of the public.

The right hon. Gentleman talks a good game about scrapping quangos and I support the review he announced to reduce the size of the bureaucratic state. Why then, despite the rhetoric, are the Government at the same time creating dozens of new quangos?

This is another debate, which has gone on for many years and relates to the question of headcount—Governments can magically reduce headcount by creating a quango somewhere, but the headcount may not have changed at all. What is informing the drive this time is the fiction that an arm’s length body can somehow absolve Ministers of responsibility. It does not work like that in the real world. Sometimes there is a good case for having an arm’s length body, but in the end, we know that accountability will be with Ministers, and that is what is informing how we look at these things at the moment.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

I have listened with a great deal of interest to what the right hon. Gentleman has had to say on the Government’s plans to make Whitehall more efficient and to make significant reforms to service delivery, and we on these Benches very much welcome the intention behind that statement. However, announcements have been made in the media about the intention to cut 2,100 jobs in the Cabinet Office and reduce the Department’s workforce by a third. Why have we not had a statement in this House about those job cuts specifically, and when will Members of Parliament get an opportunity to scrutinise exactly what that means for their constituents and their expectations about service delivery?

I work very closely with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Treasury on this matter. The truth is, civil service headcount grew by more than 100,000 in the years the Opposition was in power. We believe that some of that can be explained by the repatriation of powers after Brexit, but some of it can be looked at in terms of efficiencies, which is what we are doing. By reducing the Government’s overhead, we can devote the resources to where they are really needed: in frontline public services. After such growth presided over by the Conservatives over the past decade, we believe that can be done.