Former Cabinet Office minister concludes that centralised functions should have a greater mandate to impose standards and spend controls

Credit: PA

Government’s central functions, including digital, data and technology, should be given a stronger mandate and given greater authority to hold departments to account – particularly in the enforcement of standards and spending controls, a report has concluded.

Former Cabinet Office minister Lord Francis Maude – who was commissioned by his former department to conduct the review – has made a series of recommendations to improve decision making, capability and “often poor” value for money in government spending.

Lord Maude said central government functions – primarily commercial, IT and digital, property, major projects, finance, and HR – play an important role in holding departments to account on delivery and spending, but that their mandate in these areas should be strengthened.

He said finance ministries like the Treasury are concerned primarily with individual departments’ budgets, and their “interest in how the money is actually spent tends to diminish”. They are “not always well equipped to analyse the cost side” of the cost-benefit equation, making horizontal spend controls operated from the centre of government but outside the Treasury useful.

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When properly exercised, spend controls enable departments to work together in a more joined-up way; push departments to plan ahead more effectively; and “build visibility and data” about overall government spending in particular categories like IT or property.

But delivering these benefits requires “strong and capable central leadership” of government functions, to ensure “good and timely” spend control decisions are made. This means spend controls and the functional model are “inextricably linked”, Maude said.

Strengthening this link and making it more explicit could improve accountability over spending – which he said was needed because of a “notable lack of clarity, even honesty, around the extent to which departments are accountable to the centre for operational delivery and value for money”.

Maude called for central functions to be given greater powers not just to set standards across government, but to enforce them.

“This means sanctions for non-compliance, and a power for the central function to require real-time visibility where they have reason to believe that a department may be falling short of full compliance,” he said.

The imposition of service standards spending controls was recently moved from the Government Digital Service to the newly created Central Digital and Data Office, another Cabinet Office entity to which around 100 former GDS staff have been transferred. The CDDO now also sits at the head of government DDaT’s function.

He noted that while during the course of the review, he was often told that “nobody today disagrees with the functional model”, some civil service leaders have embraced the model to only a “limited” degree.

“Too often I heard that the central functions exist to ‘support the departments’. Of course they should support the departments. But their mandate must enable them to intervene to prevent departments from going down the wrong path before the damage is done,” he said.

The functions should also be empowered to set – and critically, to enforce – cross-government strategies, Maude said.

“In a perfect world, the development of these functional strategies would precede the comprehensive spending review,” he said, noting that while some functions are “strong enough to have put together a compelling cross-government strategy to inform the spending review”, others are not yet.

Recruiting the best leaders
Strengthening the authority and mandate of the functions requires strong functional leadership, Maude said.

Leaders of each of the functions should therefore be at the top of their field, be able to “inspire, persuade and take people with them”, and be recruited from both inside and outside the civil service.

But Maude said that contrary to conventional wisdom, which says that to attract the best functional leaders from outside, government must pay enough to compete with the private sector, experts are attracted to the civil service by to “opportunity to drive change and deliver results, making a difference on a grand scale that benefits their country”.

“The biggest deterrent for these top players is concern about how they will be treated when they join,” he said, pointing to the “outdated class divide” between policy officials and professional specialists.

“Parity of esteem is essential, and we are still some way short of it,” he said, noting that policy officials see more of ministers and “usually still get the top jobs”.

And he said the civil service still needs to overcome “deep cultural issues” – namely a reluctance to “absorb and benefit from those recruited from outside”.

To be effective, Maude said functional leaders need higher status – and so they should be appointed at either permanent secretary or director general level.

And the government should consider revising civil service recruitment principles to ensure a “sensible and proportionate process similar to those used in the private sector” to appoint functional leaders, he said.

A strong centre
The functional model – which was enthusiastically championed by former civil service chief executive Sir John Manzoni – “introduces a strong central authority for these functions” by making them horizontal structures running across government, rather than verticals within departments as in many other governments, according to Maude.

“Too often I heard that the central functions exist to ‘support the departments’. Of course they should support the departments. But their mandate must enable them to intervene to prevent departments from going down the wrong path before the damage is done.”
Francis Maude

Maude said some elements of the model, which was introduced in the five years up to 2015 when he was Cabinet Office minister, have been “spectacularly successful”. For example, the Government Digital Service has become a global brand that has been emulated by a number of other governments, while the Major Projects Authority, which later became the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, had turned a failure rate of 70% into a success rate of 70% in just two years, he said.

The former minister also noted that while permanent secretaries are supposed to be accountable to parliament, the Public Accounts Committee scrutinises spending “late in the day and often when the permanent secretary responsible has departed”.

“The reality is that permanent secretaries are remarkably immune from real time accountability for, and oversight over, how they spend public money,” he said.

There should therefore make a “clear statement” that the centre of government will provide real-time oversight and direction over operational and capital expenditure.

This oversight should come via not just normal Treasury controls, but also updated Cabinet Office spend controls and strengthened mandates for the central functional leaders, Maude said.