Situational awareness
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It is striking how little ministers or senior officials know about how well a department’s services are performing. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) reported in September 2023 that public services “often lack… timely metrics on costs and performance which are essential foundations for identifying existing costs and tracking efficiency improvements.”
This lack of situational awareness is not for want of governance meetings, risk registers, and other project management documentation. There’s plenty of that. These processes and artefacts are failing to provide leaders with a level of data and candour that leads to action.
No large failing government programme has hit the rocks because it didn’t have enough meetings. At their worst, the documents and discussions become rituals divorced from the reality of what is actually going on.
This is a cultural issue as much as a process one. The PAC report referenced above also says that “programme resets are typically viewed negatively, government bodies continue to try to resolve unresolvable issues, leading to wasted effort and costs, rather than admitting the need for a reset.” In other words, even when the management information is available, decisive corrective action tends not to happen.
Capability Reviews (2003-2012) were instituted as a way of holding departmental leaders to account for improving their department’s competence to deliver. The then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, said these reviews were intended as tools for “exposing the improvements needed, getting the right people into the right senior posts to deliver the improvements, ensuring they get the support they need, rewarding success, and taking tough action in response to failure.”
Used alongside Public Service Agreements (PSAs) that tracked the government’s public service priorities, these frameworks provided hard levers for applying focus and accountability to performance across Whitehall.
The Coalition administration dismantled this system, before the idea was revived in the form of Outcome Delivery Plans (ODPs, in 2020). These were supposed to capture long-term objectives framed in terms of real-world outcomes. Conceptually ODPs were a good idea, but lacked teeth. Departments had little incentive to break down their outcomes into measurable progress, and ministers paid no attention to them.
Given sufficient political impetus and focus, we think a mission-centric version of Capability Reviews could be a powerful driver for filling the enduring leadership, strategy, and delivery capability gaps across government.
There are other simple behavioural steps ministers can take to enhance governance around service delivery. For example, the 2012 Budget announced that new online services could only go live if the responsible minister was able to demonstrate they themselves could use the service successfully. Reducing the distance between political power and the realities of frontline public service delivery does not have to be complicated—though it may sometimes be uncomfortable.