Numeracy and innumeracy in public life
In the heady days of the Truss premiership last October, a group of 70 people from all over the United Kingdom gathered at the Friends’ Meeting House in Manchester. Among their number were a clutch of senior civil servants, senior local government officers and academics from leading universities. The event had been organised by the…
Speculation has been growing about Dominic Cummings’s plans for the civil service. We have been told he will merge departments and impose pay caps, move entire agencies out of London and single-handedly reform defence procurement. Earlier this month the great man himself broke cover to reveal his plans for overhauling No.10. But here is the…
Around this time last year, when I was still working at the think tank Reform, I was commissioned by the Government to carry out “a broad assessment of improvements in the quality of policy making since the publication of the Civil Service Reform Plan in June 2012, including the extent to which policy advice takes…
The answer to why civil service reform is failing might be a little too close to home for comfort for government ministers.