Improve accountability
Download the full report in PDF format.
The rituals of parliamentary accountability play a quiet but profound role in shaping the default behaviours of ministers and senior public servants.
Select Committee or Public Accounts Committee hearings are almost always a ‘red pen’ exercise – they happen after things go wrong, or when they are very obviously about to. This turns them into performative occasions, in which committee members attempt to tease out admissions of failure while witnesses go on the defensive. Candour is rare. And in any case, by the time a hearing takes place, the issues in delivering the programme are usually far too advanced for a committee’s recommendations to make much difference.
Hearings like these don’t do much to improve outcomes. But they do encourage a certain set of skills to prosper in the senior ranks of the civil service. Being able to turn in a credible and compelling committee performance fronting up a programme that is falling apart is a valuable skill.
Select Committees can only call civil servants above a certain grade of seniority as witnesses. These people tend to be generalists; genuinely deep experts in science, technology, data, design, even economics, rarely get a look in. And lower grade civil servants, who have the knowledge of the daily realities of public service delivery their senior management lack, never get invited at all. The fact that very few of the civil servants who’ve deployed the kind of approaches described in this report (or come from civil service professions that think in these ways) have risen to the point of taking part in these committees is a real problem.
Select Committees have very limited resources that they can bring to bear in investigations. Even the Public Accounts Committee, supported by the National Audit Office, is constrained in how far and in what directions it can dig. The language is also telling—‘audit’ is an activity intentionally looking for malfeasance, or picking through the bones of failure. It is bound to look for flaws to address, rather than flagging opportunities to improve.
We need mechanisms for public scrutiny of progress towards delivering missions that are real-time rather than post-hoc, bring expertise from multiple fields to bear, and subject the government’s highest priorities to robust, informed, and constructive feedback. We also need them to recognise and celebrate success, as well as traducing failure.
Applying greater transparency is one approach to improve this. Openly publishing real-time data on progress towards achieving outcomes in order to inspire genuinely data-driven decision-making would be a good first step. Encouraging departmental boards to care deeply about service performance data the way private sector boards care about quarterly profits does not sound like an ambitious aim, but it would represent a radical shift in thinking. Creating regular public ceremonies built around live outcomes data would also help turn more senior attention towards taking those numbers seriously.
More radically, we could reframe the roles of ministers, Senior Responsible Owners (SROs—the senior official ultimately accountable for a programme), and Parliamentary committees themselves. Make them more oriented around missions or outcomes, rather than departmental lines of accountability. Create the constitutional space for select committees to confer honours for exceptional public service, to position them as advocates of great work as much as those holding poor performance to account.