In the teeth of determined civil service opposition, it was brave of the government to commit 750 top posts in the Treasury to Darlington and 500 in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government to Wolverhampton as part of the imminent Whitehall relocation programme and levelling-up agenda.
The administration of the government estate can be traced back in history to the time of the Anglo Saxons. Throughout this history it has posed civil servants great challenges; with a renewed surge in activity and strategy, the risk today is that government fails to learn from these challenges and repeats the mistakes of the past.
In the teeth of determined civil service opposition, it was brave of the government to commit 750 top posts in the Treasury to Darlington and 500 in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government to Wolverhampton as part of the imminent Whitehall relocation programme and levelling-up agenda.
The Institute has produced a thought-provoking piece as Government prepares for a programme that will see 22,000 civil servants relocated to the English regions and devolved nations during the current decade. But there some important gaps in the paper with too much emphasis on the costs and too little on the very real savings and improvements that can be made, both in the short and the long term.
The BBC’s news today about the Leeds DWP office failing to enforce social distancing following an Health and Safety Executive inspection brought back many memories of Quarry House – a building which carries the rather unkind soubriquet “The Kremlin”.
For Boris Johnson’s shellshocked government, there has been little instructive from the worlds of ed and med in recent weeks.
Blame has flown and political heat applied to previously little known quango Ofqual and the much criticised Public Health England (PHE) before its demise and absorption into the National Institute for Health Protection. Before this, the secretary of state for health and chief strategic government advisers were, apparently, unaware that they had the power all along to direct and control PHE.
Serco was awarded a track and trace contract valued up to £400m, apparently without competition.
Actually, there was a competition – kind of. Serco competed for, and won a place on a government “framework” contract. In effect, it is a catalogue – enabling governments to call off goods and services, without the need for further competition. In this case, the contract was for call centre services, and awarded by the Crown Commercial Service.
In his March budget the chancellor indicated the government’s intention to move 22,000 civil servants out of London by 2030. Michael Gove, in his recent Ditchley speech, spoke of relocating Whitehall decision-making centres to not only the main regional centres such as Manchester and Bristol but different parts of the UK.
But this will be nowhere near enough, and the leisurely timescale will provide ample opportunity for further delay and obfuscation, as it has done in the past. What is needed is a truly ambitious programme to relocate the majority of the 85,000 civil servants in London leaving only a core elite of a few hundred.
The demand and financial pressures on the public sector are not going away; but policy activity from central government could nevertheless be the basis for far-reaching local transformation – well beyond the aims of the individual strategies – for the benefit of those who really matter: local citizens. That was one of the conclusions of a recent DGMI round table, hosted and facilitated by Kinnarps.
In his interesting piece in The Times on the 20th January, Matthew Parris uses the recently published ONS figures that highlight the severe health inequality across the nation. The figures present a jarring picture of imbalance between the London population and the rest of the country…