Former United Kingdom Minister for the Cabinet Office, Lord Maude (pictured) says that under his watch senior Public Servants resisted attempts to provide them with intensive leadership training.
Addressing Parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), Lord Maude said the Public Service “continues to have some deep institutional flaws”.
“What I interpreted as complacency I’ve come since to think is a bit different from that… there is some complacency in there but there’s also defensiveness born of insecurity,” Lord Maud said.
“The Civil Service wants to protect itself from comparison with non-public sector organisations,” he said.
In August, Lord Maude was commissioned by the Government to review the Cabinet Office’s progress on Public Service reform.
Asked at the PACAC on staff development, he said that during his time in the Cabinet Office senior officials had evaded his attempts to provide leadership training.
He said before the 2015 election, he tried to send 10 top Public Servants on three-month courses run by business schools such as Harvard, Insead and Stanford.
“By the time the election came around, having constantly been told: ‘Yes, it’s happening’, one Permanent Secretary had been to a one-week course,” Lord Maud said.
“I thought we were doing something extremely positive about investing in the leadership capabilities of the people we were about to be putting in charge of huge, multi-billion-pound budgets, and yet it just didn’t happen,” he said.
Lord Maude also questioned how Permanent Secretaries were held accountable for spending.
“There is very, very little real-time accountability for how Permanent Secretaries spend money,” he said, claiming that scrutiny basically came down to being hauled before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
“I’m a big supporter of the work the PAC does… but that accountability is always inevitably in arrears,” Lord Maud said.
“Why would you assume it’s okay to only find out a long time afterwards that money has been being wasted? That’s not good accountability,” he said.
London, 14 January 2021
