FROM THE EDITOR

Dominic Cummings’s marathon seven-hour evidence session before the health and social care and science and technology select committees last month was compelling Whitehall theatre. Here was the man who until late last year had been the prime minister’s top adviser giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the government’s pandemic response as ministers and officials grappled with unrelenting waves of Covid-19.

The unprecedented event is being met by an unprecedented response in the pages of CSW this month. Not one, not two, but three of our regular columnists look at the session and try to weigh up Cummings’s assertions: Dave Penman takes on the crossgovernment claims, Andy Cowper the alleged failings at the Department of Health and Social Care, and Colin Talbot the pandemic preparedness – or lack thereof. All are worth reading and cover the initial skirmishes of what will likely be the ground that is contested at the looming public inquiry.

What struck this observer watching the session, though, was that much of Cummings’s critique of how the government failed was familiar to those who have studied his writings on the civil service before.

He said at one point that the failings that were revealed by the government’s coronavirus response were “programmed by the wiring of the system”.

He added: “If you have something this bad and you have got tens and tens of thousands of people who have died who did not need to die and massive economic destruction... that did not need to happen if we had sorted things out earlier, everyone in this country needs to face the reality of this.”

These comments chime with his 2014 comments that the “huge system in Whitehall, in my opinion, is programmed to go wrong, it can’t work”.

Perhaps Cummings had been right all along and Covid simply exposed problems in the system that he had long spotted – and to some extent, that is probably the case. But it is also telling that after well over a year in government, Cummings was still more able to describe the problem than to have solved it.

This is perhaps no surprise – the civil service is a large and fairly decentralised organisation, and it takes time to change anything. But we will soon begin to see the fruits of the reform drive that Cummings will always be associated with. In this issue, civil service chief operating officer and Cabinet Office permanent secretary Alex Chisholm sets out the next steps for reform, saying that after a period of “biding our time”, a plan will be published “shortly”.

There has been consultation on with civil servants for ideas on what should change.

“We’ve also been quite reflective about what we can take from the pandemic and, indeed, from the EU exit process, the Integrated Review and other experiences about what needs to be done differently and better,” Chisholm tells us.

We await details of what these changes will be, but the tale of Dominic Cummings has another lesson – events can, and will, get in the way. Life is what happens when you are making Whitehall plans, but for civil service reform to work, it needs to be clear what the problem is that is being solved, what plan is to change it, and what clear steps are to get there. The best civil service organisations share this clarity of vision and leadership, and as the country emerges fom the pandemic, we will need it for the recovery.