No, Minister, we don’t have a Roll's Royce in Whitehall

When, a couple of years ago, Whitehall announced it was going to carry out ‘capability reviews’ on itself many of us ‘Whitehall watchers’ were deeply sceptical.

The capability reviews were successor to the ill-fated ‘peer reviews’ which had proved such a flop that they were quickly buried. The capability reviews, like the peer reviews, were to be organised by the Cabinet Office and carried out largely by civil servants (although later the external involvement became greater).

With Whitehall inspecting Whitehall, one wondered whether the reviews were a recipe for another round of cosy chats and the odd mild rebuke. Not so. The reports of the capability reviews, emerging over the past 18 months, have proved to be robust to the point of brutality in some cases.

For simplicity, the Financial Times (12 May 2008) recently gave each Whitehall department numerical scores based on their ratings in the reviews to produce a ‘league table’.

This is of course something Whitehall has been doing to much of the rest of the public service for some time, but not to themselves, so it must have come as something of a shock to see their failings — and they are unfortunately mostly failings — exposed quite so thoroughly.

The FT gave departments scores out of 40. The Department for International Development will probably, like all league winners, be feeling quite proud of coming top with 27 points, narrowly beating their rivals in the Department of Transport (26 points).

At the other end of the scale it will come as little surprise that the Home Office (pre its split into HO and Ministry of Justice) scored worst with only a miserable 14 points, closely followed by the Department of Health and Revenue and Customs, both languishing on 17 points apiece.

But even those at the top of the league do not come away from this exercise untarnished. No department scored top marks in more than two of the ten categories used. The categories covered strategy, leadership and delivery capacity. What is more, 27 out of 40 for a top score is hardly ‘Rolls Royce’ quality as Whitehall so often claims of itself. In fact the average score across the 18 departments is a miserable 21 points — barely half of what was possible.

The picture looks even worse when the content of what was assessed is examined in more detail. A comparison is useful here with local government.

Departmental Capability Reviews (DCRs) were touted by Whitehall as the equivalent of Comprehensive Performance Assessments (CPAs) for town halls. CPAs have been widely seen as reasonably fair and, perhaps more importantly, an effective lever for change in local authorities. But DCRs differ from CPAs in three fundamental respects.

Firstly, CPAs cover both actual performance and an assessment of ability to perform. The first element is missing from DCRs. Given we now have ten years worth of data from Public Service Agreements, first put in place between Treasury and spending Departments in 1998, this seems an extraordinary omission.

In fact there is no systematic analysis of PSA results across government published anywhere. There were, if you recall, the ill-fated government annual reports that featured some carefully selected PSA results but these did not last long. Apart from the annual reports, PSA results have only been reported on a department-by-department basis making comparisons very hard work.

This seems a very strange omission given that the government’s doctrine has asserted that measurement and comparisons of what has actually been achieved for public spending in terms of outputs and outcomes is a crucial part of policy and improvement strategies.

Secondly, CPA for town halls included an assessment of the political leadership of local councils. They evaluated the managerial role of councils in actually making things happen. Perhaps not surprisingly, an exercise orchestrated by, and largely consisting of, civil servants did no such thing in considering ministers’ leadership of their departments. Although it is worth noting the contrast with the fact that it is OK for unelected public officials in the Audit Commission to sit in judgement on elected local officials.

The third curiosity with DCRs is the absence of any assessment of the policy-making capacity of Whitehall departments. They looked at strategy, leadership and delivery — all downward-looking aspects of senior mandarins’ roles.

Yet they excluded the assessment of their upward-looking role in supporting ministers’ policy formulation. This neglect is even more curious in that both the centre of government and the National Audit Office made efforts to formulate and promulgate ‘best practice’ guidelines on policy-making in 2000-2002. An evaluation of the extent to which those guidelines had worked would have therefore seemed obvious.

There has been speculation that the whole DCR exercise has been so bruising that it would be scrapped or else just be allowed to fade away, as so often happens in Whitehall. However, we have been told very firmly that it will be repeated. Yet, if this is the case, DCRs should be upgraded at the very least to include an assessment of actual, as well as potential, performance and to include policy-making as a key area.

More impressive still, and giving the whole process much greater legitimacy, would be if the next round were run by someone other than Whitehall.

The Public Administration Select Committee has suggested a special office to oversee such assessments. However, why create something new when the National Audit Office is perfectly capable of undertaking this job, perhaps with external input of the type used in the current system?