Sir Chris Wormald introduces the 22nd edition of Civil Service Quarterly. The lead item is a new interview with Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service Sir Mark Sedwill, while other articles focus on subjects ranging from the National Security Council, a decade after its creation, to how UK Research and Innovation is changing the way research is funded.
The way the UK regulates has changed dramatically in recent years. The Civil Service has been exploring what the next wave of change for modern regulators might look like. In this article, Martin Donnelly, Permanent Secretary at the Department for …
Operational Delivery is the Civil Service’s largest profession. In this article, James Bishop sets out the innovative work now taking place to help the profession’s 280,000 members learn new skills, progress their careers and ensure the Civil Service has the right operational capabilities for times of crisis and beyond.
Our Editor and Permanent Secretary for the Department for Education, Chris Wormald introduces issue 10.
The Chancellor announced the outcome of the Spending Review on 25 November, following months of work by officials and ministers across government. It marks the next phase in the Government’s plans for this Parliament, building on its manifesto commitments. It will be rounded off with the publication of departments’ business plans (Single Departmental Plans) in January.
Stephen Aldridge, Director for Analysis and Data, Angus Hawkins, Assistant Economist, and Cody Xuereb, Economic Adviser, from the Department for Communities and Local Government, write about the Public Sector Efficiency Group’s focus on improving the understanding of public sector efficiency across departments, looking at the trends in and drivers of efficiency and evidence of the scope for improving desired outcomes further.
We are all too familiar with New Year’s resolutions to stop smoking, drink less alcohol, or exercise more. Professor Kevin Fenton, Director of Health and Wellbeing at Public Health England, discusses some of the techniques used to help motivate people to make the healthy changes they need and turn them into longer lasting habits.
It isn’t easy to predict what we’re going to be doing in the future. In this article, Richard Sandford from the Government Office for Science sets out the core principles of Horizon Scanning and the techniques civil servants can use to make the future a less uncertain place.
If you run a rehabilitation programme for people who have committed criminal offences, how do you decide whether it is successful? It seems a simple question, but suppose that you are an organisation with limited resources, working with a specific group of individuals. How can you find the data to compare them to a similar group who have not been through your programme? How can you be confident that the results are not down to chance? In this article, Mark Purver and Helen Williams, from the Ministry of Justice, describe how the Justice Data Lab can provide the necessary expertise to help these organisations measure their success.
Colin Dingwall, the former Director of the Electoral Registration Transformation Programme, describes the key lessons he and his colleagues learnt delivering this fundamental change to the UK’s Electoral Registration System and what their experience means for other large scale public sector projects.
Every civil servant now gets five days of special leave a year to volunteer. In this article, Andrea Lee, Deputy Director of Strategy at the Department of Health, shows how government economists and analysts are using their professional skills to volunteer in an impactful way – helping third sector and public sector organisations in need of their particular expertise and experience.
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