FORWARD OPERATIONS

ver the last year that Alex Chisholm has been chief operating officer of the civil service and Cabinet Office permanent secretary, very much has been said about Whitehall reform. It was a high-profile priority of the prime minister’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings, whose pre-No.10 writings on the subject – and indeed some when he was in the building – meant the inner workings of the government machine suddenly had an unusually high prominence in the national discussion.

Concrete details on what changes might be in the offing have been slow to emerge, though – understandably, since the civil service has had one or two more pressing priorities to focus on.

But as the UK starts to emerge from the worst throes of the coronavirus pandemic – and now the country has finally left the EU – the gears are turning again.

As well as the not-inconsiderable tasks of helping guide the civil service through a pandemic and the Brexit transition period, Chisholm has been working behind the scenes on turning those gears. A civil service reform plan is in the works to be published “shortly” – he won’t be more specific than that.

“It’s been a tremendous year from the perspective of the challenges that we’ve had to face and we’ve risen to. I’m filled with admiration, genuinely, for what the civil service has been able to do. We’ve all had a really powerful sense of mission – that’s never been stronger,” he says, listing some of the many huge pieces of work civil servants have pulled together since the pandemic struck – among them the furlough scheme, the vaccine rollout and the Universal Credit support for people who lost jobs.

While all of that has been happening, “we’ve been biding our time [on reform]… but we haven’t wasted that time, because there’s been a terrific element of consultation across the civil service,” Chisholm says. “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.”

Data has been a big focus of the government’s work this year, with analysis of stats from across government informing the Covid response and datasets being opened to the public, and Chisholm says he wants to build on civil servants’ skills in that area to improve the way services are delivered.

He also wants to encourage what he calls, in classic mandarin style, “integrated solutions to interconnected challenges” like the government’s levellingup agenda; the net-zero-goal; economic recovery from the pandemic; increasing trade under the “Global Britain banner”. All of these cut across departments and UK administrations, “so it is enormously important that we are really joined up in an effective way,” Chisholm says.

As part of that, he has been working with No.10, the Treasury and the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, on a “one centre approach” to coordinating work towards these ambitious goals. That thinking has shaped government’s approach to planning this and last year’s spending reviews, the management of government's more than 200 major projects, and the introduction of new Outcome Delivery Plans (see box).

He is also working to embed a new approach to risk management, he says, referring to external reviews such as the one being conducted by Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy non-executive director Nigel Boardman in the wake of the Greensill scandal (see box), and a review of the Cabinet Office by one of its erstwhile ministers, Lord Francis Maude.

Chisholm acknowledges that all of this – along with addressing the Conservative Party's 2019 manifesto commitments – “hasn’t had the same level

“If the profile of the organisation is that you need to be in an oldfashioned building in Whitehall, that is much less inviting than something which is in a town or city near you”

of attention” it normally would, given the dual crises civil servants have been working on in the last couple of years. “So I’m keen to make sure... that we really redouble our efforts to make a success of those things and tackle inequalities that have become even further exposed during the experience of the pandemic.”