No, Sir Humphrey, we can't fix things in Whitehall as you did in your day

Sir Suma Chakrabarti has been Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development (DfID) since 2002. He is a central figure in the Departmental Capability Reviews (DCR), the wide-ranging analyses of the British Civil Service’s fiefdoms currently underway in Whitehall. Sir Suma’s department has been reviewed recently, coming out relatively well.

He is also undertaking a review of the role of the Cabinet Office as part of the follow up to their DCR. The Cabinet Office is the central co-ordinating body of Whitehall and the home of the Head of the Civil Service, Sir Gus O’Donnell.

I asked Sir Suma why the DCRs have received so little press coverage: ‘There was a lot around the Home Office’s DCR [it scored poorly last summer] because it coincided with the stories at the time … but it’s extraordinary. The third tranche that DfID was in the other day got virtually no coverage at all and that was it … the cynic in me would say that good news isn’t worth reporting. But also, I’m not sure the Civil Service is doing a good enough job at talking up the successes and being up front enough about how much more there is to do.’

How significant are the DCRs?

‘It’s a major departure in the way we look at ourselves. There had been a number of attempts to judge the capability of departments and I think that Gus and the permanent secretaries collectively felt that past initiatives hadn’t achieved as much as we’d wanted, and we needed a more thorough-going look at departmental capability. We had models that have been used by local government and the audit commission, which we weren’t using, to assess ourselves. We also want to show that we are up for the same sort of assessment process that we were ‘inflicting’ on other people.’

Where did the impetus for the DCRs come from? ‘Both outside and inside. There are certainly a number of people around who have come in from the private sector: Ian Watmore, head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, David Varney, senior adviser to Gordon Brown on the Transformational Government Strategy, and others, who have really improved our thinking about some of these issues.

‘More importantly, there is also a set of Civil Service leaders who have come up through the Civil Service — I count myself as one of these — who care a lot more about leadership and management than the leaders of the organisations they grew up in.

The management revolution has been going on a long time — the focus on the Public Service Agreements, the focus on targets — and the DCRs are the culmination of this. All this has upped the ante on performance because we are now being measured. The drivers have changed for many of us.

‘The DCR is about ensuring departments have the right skill sets for current and future challenges. We need to reform much faster. I don’t see DCRs as a turning point in history; I see it as part of a continuous surge of managerial reform which has been going on since the Next Steps agencies phase.’

With all the talk about needing to meet targets whilst improving management and leadership, has the Civil Service accepted that it needs to up its game? ‘I think certainly it has. The sort of conversations we have now around the Permanent Secretaries table, five years on from when I became a Permanent Secretary, are quite different.

‘We talk about many of these performance issues now, we don’t just talk about the latest policy issue in the way we might have done five years ago. We talk about the incentives, the skills, the structures, those sort of questions as to how we improve performance in our departments. What keeps me interested in the job isn’t just a love of development policy … it is about how to get DfID to improve its performance further.’

Regarding the centre, the Cabinet Office’s DCR revealed weaknesses around its core functions of co-ordination. How will the follow-up review deal with this?

‘In a government built on widely different businesses, with very different operating models, we have to ask what is the value at the centre and what should it look like? It’s essentially an influencing model: even if it co-creates targets with a department, it isn’t going to deliver the target — the department is. Its role is to work with a department to improve its performance.

‘That begs some questions about the skill sets in the Cabinet Office — you have to be pretty excellent in the areas that matter in order to help and for the departments to take your intervention or influence seriously. That’s the agenda we’re going to set out for Gus.’

Is this moving towards what may be termed an Australian model, one that sees a much smaller centre?

‘We are moving towards that but we’re doing some of it without thinking through what other things need to change if we are to move in this direction. Partly it’s skills, and partly it’s something to do with structures in the Cabinet Office.

‘The other factor is the constitutional position between permanent secretaries and their secretaries of state on the one hand and the Head of the Civil Service on the other; our accountability relationships with Sir Gus are somewhat thinner than the Australian model.

‘The fact that we’re responsible to him for the DCR action plan is an interesting development; it is formally making us accountable to the Head of the Civil Service for a large element of management in our departments.’

Haven’t previous reforms spoken of the need for mandarins to accept executive responsibility for their departments?

‘Yes, but it hasn’t quite taken, and one of the things we’re looking at in our review is whether to make this a more formalised process or not. You need at the same time to have clear accountability between the PM and secretaries of state to mirror this, and that of course brings with it all the usual constitutional complications.’

Are we therefore on the road, at least in this area, to a written constitution? ‘One of the things I’ve been asked to look at in my review is whether we should have a compact, not quite a constitution, but at least a compact which sets out the roles and responsibilities of the Cabinet Office and line departments. Now, compacts on their own are not much use but if you can use the compact to change behaviour then you are moving towards a different set of arrangements.’

Finally, the vast majority of commentators on Whitehall affairs seem to argue that if only their opinions were listened to, the Civil Service could operate in a brilliant, efficient fashion, infinitely better than it does today. What is your reaction to that?

‘Why do people expect things to go better in their professional lives than they do in their personal lives? In our personal lives, nothing is 100 per cent perfect, so I always find it very odd when politicians or civil servants give you 100 per cent certainty about anything or guarantees about success. I operate an 80-20 rule: getting 80 per cent of what I want is a pretty good success rate — and if I haven’t achieved that, then I ought to worry — but if I’ve achieved more than that I’m amazed.

‘However, I find this divorce between what happens in our personal lives and our professional lives quite strange. We ought to be more careful as civil servants not to reinforce the culture of certainty by watching out for over-optimism when we appraise and give advice on options.’

Dr Jon Davis teaches Political History and is Secretary to the Mile End Group at Queen Mary, University of London.