PM’s representative sheds light on a wide range of new measures, covering the recruitment, performance management and training of officials, all in a bid to ‘move fast and fix things’
As part of a sweeping range of proposed reforms, Darren Jones has pledged to dismiss underperforming senior officials who don’t improve, promote more “doers”, and give bigger but fewer cash bonuses in a speech setting out his plans to rewire the state.
In a speech last week, the chief secretary to the prime minister promised that the government will “move fast and fix things” after years of low public sector productivity.
As part of which, hiring criteria for senior civil servants will be altered to “promote the doers, not just the talkers”.
“This means that, with time, at the top of the civil service, we will have less experience of writing policy papers, but more experience at frontline delivery, innovation and from the private sector,” Jones said.
He also pledged that senior officials assessed as under-performing who fail to improve will be dismissed using a performance KPI system.
Jones said only seven in 7,000 senior civil servants were reported to be on a development plan for underperformance last year, and only two of them were dismissed for poor performance.
”Given the number of problems we face, I just fail to believe that that can be true. And so quite frankly it’s ridiculous we have a system where this poor performance is just not dealt with,” he said. ”So from now on, top senior civil servants will have their performance marked against KPIs directly set by ministers, and those underdelivering will be held to account. Instead of the so-called sideways shimmy to another team or another department if you are not performing, if you fail to perform, I’m afraid you will be sacked.”
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Asked by former senior civil servant Tim Leunig what number of firings would make him think he’s ”achieved something worthwhile”, Jones said he would not be setting a target but that he needs “people to know there’s a bit of jeopardy”.
Jones also promised changes to the bonus system for senior leaders in the civil service to ”reward the doers”.
Currently, 55% of senior civil servants receive some form of a bonus. Jones said this means bonuses are spread too thinly among officials ”for generally doing your job”.
”That’s what your salary is for,” he said. ”So, from now on, we will award higher but fewer bonuses to those exceptional civil servants who are delivering, innovating and going above and beyond.”
Under this change, the total bonus pot is expected to remain the same.
In the speech, Jones also announced the return of a national school for civil servants, to be called the National School of Government and Public Services.
Jones said the school will be a ”new centre of world class learning and development within the Cabinet Office” and is being paid for from existing budgets ”and crucially savings recently agreed across government to end expensive outsourced contracts training”.
He said the school will bring high quality training in-house with a proper curriculum that will boost the state capacity and give the skills needed to civil servants on technology and AI and strategic thinking ”that’s needed to build the state of the future”.
”In the process, we’ll not only establish the new school, but we’ll save tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money too,” Jones said.
