Thursday 10 November 2011
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Thursday 10 November 2011 |
Sir Gus O'Donnell is a hard act to follow but one person should take on all his roles
By Sir Leigh Lewis
When he retires at the end of this year Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, will leave the organisation in a far better place than he found it six years ago.
That is not to decry the work of his predecessors. All made real improvements. But none saw the role as a visible leader in quite the way that Sir Gus has done. None set out a passion for how the Civil Service could and should be better in quite the way that he has done. And none instituted so many tangible steps to bring about improvements.
And this achievement has not been purely in the corridors of power. Sir Gus has taken his message, and himself, out to civil servants throughout Britain in a way few had done before him. There cannot be many departments or agencies where civil servants work that he has not been to - often many times - in the past six years. That has had its reward. On one visit with him to Leeds I remember how very junior civil servants felt that they could speak to him simply as Gus, and clearly believed that he knew and cared about what they did.
Does any of this matter? I think it does. The vast majority of civil servants working in places such as Jobcentres, tax offices and the courts are not paid a king's ransom and, contrary to popular belief, will not retire on large pensions. They recognise that jobs are going and that times are difficult. But they want to feel valued for what they do and they want to think that someone will stand up for them publicly when they feel unfairly criticised. In short they want - and deserve - leadership.
That is why not everyone in government welcomes the decision to split Sir Gus's job after his retirement, with Jeremy Heywood becoming Cabinet Secretary and an existing permanent secretary - still to be chosen - becoming Head of the Civil Service. But this new Head of the Civil Service will also have to carry on running a Whitehall department.
Mr Heywood is hugely respected by those who know him and will fill his new role with distinction. And a number of current permanent secretaries undoubtedly have the ability to step into Sir Gus's leadership shoes.
But structures matter. I worry that what is proposed will leave no one able to provide the strength and clarity of leadership to the Civil Service that Sir Gus has done.
The risk is that no one will see this as their main job; Mr Heywood will undoubtedly see his first responsibility as being to the Prime Minister for the smooth running of government; but the new "Head of the Civil Service" will still have his or her own department to run - hardly a part-time occupation. Could one run, say, the Department for Work & Pensions and still be effective in this demanding new role? And however effective personally, he or she will inevitably not have the influence or the access to the Prime Minister that Sir Gus has had. A number of the most senior former civil servants voiced similar concerns to the Commons Public Administration Select Committee last week.
The next few years are going to be exceptionally difficult for the Civil Service. Notwithstanding that it is now at its smallest since the Second World War, more jobs will have to go.
Whatever the outcome of current negotiations, terms and conditions for civil servants are unlikely to get any better. Whether justified or not, that will not be remotely easy for the mass of civil servants, some 40 per cent of whom earn less than £20,000 a year. And public expectations of the quality and efficiency of civil servants' work will, rightly, continue to rise.
This is the moment when we need to be strengthening - not weakening - the top leadership of the Civil Service.
I know from my own time in government that by the time a decision like this is announced, the arguments will have been debated for months. I have not been privy to those arguments in any way and I do not know what view Sir Gus himself will have taken; he is far too consummate a professional to let that be known.
But as someone who was privileged to be the leading civil servant in the largest single department in government I hope that there is still time to think through the arguments again. At the very least we need to ensure that the Civil Service continues to have powerful and visible leadership. That is the least that civil servants themselves deserve.
Sir Leigh Lewis was Permanent Secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions from 2005 to 2010