Labour's civil service reform plan in the spotlight

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Prospect highlights shortcomings in Labour's civil service reform plan

Civil service reform will not succeed if structural pay problems are not resolved, says Prospect deputy general secretary, Leslie Manasseh.

He was responding to speech by Michael Dugher, shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, to the Institute for Government in September.

Although the shadow minister made some good points, Manasseh said the speech did not deal with the major weakness of the current civil service reform plan ie it does not define the current and future role of the civil service as the basis for making any proposals to reform it.

“The speech appears largely to endorse the direction of civil service reform taken by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, but criticises him for being ineffective.

“Although the shadow minister attacks the cuts as ill-thought-out and chaotic, he does not commit to reverse them in any way. It was also disappointing that there was no mention of pay,” said Manasseh.

Manasseh welcomed some parts of the speech which reflected points that the union had put directly to the shadow minister in recent meetings, including:

  • the commitment to address departmental silos to get more joined up thinking and delivery
  • recognition of the hollowing out of skills, expertise and experience
  • the commitment to an audit of capabilities
  • the commitment to review specialist professions
  • the idea that professional groups should be at the heart of deploying people across the entire service
  • the acknowledgement of low morale and the need to rebuild it
  • the commitment to diversity targets.

One notable problem in the speech was the reference to the “culture of consequences for poor performers”.

Manasseh said: “While we believe it right to address poor performance, this is made much more difficult in the context of a performance management system which does not work well or command the confidence of civil servants as it is based on a forced distribution of markings. The shadow minister’s reference is therefore over-simplistic.”

Interestingly the ambition of increasing external recruitment and bringing in more commercial experience, may simply expose the enormous pay gap in key areas with the private sector.

 “Prospect will seek to maintain a dialogue with the shadow team and we hope to expand on these points in the future,” concluded Manasseh