The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the House of Commons public spending watchdog, has produced another scathing report about the lack of commercial skills in the public sector. The civil service doesn’t place much value on commercial expertise, the MPs say, which has always been recognised by clever career civil servants who know they should take other paths if they want to advance.
These sorts of reports are increasingly common but, as the PAC notes, little is done by government as a result. No surprise then that attention is switching away from the beleaguered civil service towards the Cabinet Office.
The latest report – Transforming contract management: progress review (see News) – calls on the Cabinet Office to ‘raise its game’ and challenge government spending departments to better manage the contractors who deliver all sorts of services and projects across the public sector.
Attracting and retaining key staff with appropriate skills is a problem facing organisations of any size, but it is one that the public sector seems to be fairly clueless about, according to the report. Key contract management posts are not being filled and it is proving difficult to impossible to attract the sort of candidates needed. Staff are leaving for better paying private sector jobs or careers with greater status and job satisfaction elsewhere in the civil service.
To help counter some of this the PAC says promotions to senior civil service roles should demand some level of commercial competence, although they don’t say much about how it is to be acquired. The ball has been thrown into the Cabinet Office court with a call from the PAC to report back before the year end on the progress made by each government spending department on improving contract management.
Departments that fail to make progress should be ‘singled out’ they say, which means named and shamed. The Cabinet Office is also to explain how it will deal with those who continue to underperform.
There is undoubtedly a shortage of commercial skills in the civil service that would ensure the successful delivery of the increasingly large and complex projects that a modern society depends on; but there is an increasingly glaring shortage of the skills at Cabinet Office level that will be needed to identify the problems and ensure that the proper strategies are adopted to solve them.
Part of the problem is that in the Whitehall culture the Cabinet Office has limited authority to make the spending departments do their bidding. The Cabinet Office has some influence, but little power to make departments that are themselves accountable for performance change their behaviour. Time for a culture change?
Nick Barrett
Editor