The House has risen for Easter recess and Whitehall can breathe a small sigh of relief. But 1 April marks anything but a rest for civil servants. It’s not just the first day of the government's new financial year but the start of 80% of the planned spending reductions.
As our sixth Whitehall Monitor shows, the Central Office of Information (COI) already lost 35% of its staff in the last quarter of 2010, whilst the Department for Business, Information and Skills lost 10%. This is not the voice of doom however. As I said to the Public Sector Expo conference in March, there are opportunities here too. The civil service does have the capability to be entrepreneurial but those making the decisions need to get behind their teams and support them in this challenging time.
Making government policy more effective will be crucial under the ambitious reform agenda. We will soon publish our Better Policy Making reports. As part of our research, some of you attended our policy reunions – the last in this series will look at the smoking ban and you can listen to them here. Our work to improve government IT was welcomed by government and IT professionals, and I was pleased to see that the new ICT strategy for government takes our recommendations to the next step.
I will complete my elected city mayors tour this month. Leicester is holding its first election of a mayor in May. The cooperation in this project from the authorities in the 12 cities has been invaluable. I will be writing about my findings to the Communities Secretary very soon, and we’ll publish them together with our international research on how mayoral systems work.
Don’t forget to sign up for our Coalition – one year on event in May.
