My experiences at the heart of multiple public service reforms
I have had an unusual career – flipping between senior leader, researcher and successful reformer. But it has given me some quite distinctive perspectives across the whole of the public sector.
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Over the last 35 years I have co-created and led some of the most notable reforms and interventions in national and local government. I have been a significant agent of change in UK public services. I have managed, developed and nurtured some of today’s best public sector leaders. I have embedded novel methods and approaches into successive organisations.
Amidst my roles as a senior leader in local and central government I have had two spells leading research - in a think tank (the Institute for Government) and in a regulator (the Audit Commission). Both organisations sought to produce practical wisdom for public servants and politicians. I have published a wide range of reports and articles on delivery, government effectiveness, capability and reform. More importantly I have engaged with a wide range of public servants and politicians across the public sector to help them reflect on both their organisation and their personal practice.
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In parallel to my day jobs I have been a serial non-executive or advisory board member for 23 years at: the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government (6 years); Deputy Chair of Middlesex University (9 years), ESRC advisory panel for public services programme (4 years), and Kaleidoscope Health and Care(6 years ongoing).
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I am a senior fellow at the Institute for Government (IfG), and an Associate of the Centre for Effective Services(CES), a Dublin based think tank which connects policy practice and research, with the aim of ensuring the implementation of effective services across the island of Ireland.
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My most eye opening and life changing work experience came as a director, and then Head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU) from 2002 to 2009. I was new to central government and as a lifelong politics junkie it was thrilling to be so close to a new government. As head of the unit after the departure of Michael Barber I advised the Prime Minister on prospects for delivery of his top priorities and worked with departmental Ministers and Permanent Secretaries to help them turn around performance.
But the project I am most proud of in my career came from the appointment of a new Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, in 2006. I was asked to create the programme to address his key priority: challenging departments to transform their capability to deliver government priorities. A case study I produced on the programme can be found here. I look back in wonder at the ambition and quality our team brought to this very intense intervention. We drew on the best of various reforms that had gone before to create the Capability Review programme. It was new and scary territory for many of the Permanent Secretaries. It made them have uncomfortable conversations and face up to challenges to their personal leadership. It changed how they saw their jobs and what they were held to account for. And it created a quite different agenda for civil service effectiveness and leadership development.
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This was now the third of five slightly bonkers, high stakes start-up type teams and missions that have characterised much of my career (the first being creating and then reinventing the new inspection regime for local government at the Audit Commission, and the second being co-creating PMDU in the early years). I am drawn to these sorts of project and the excitement and challenge they provides.
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A turning point in how I thought about my career came when I was interim Director General in the Cabinet office leading the PMDU and leading the creation of the Capability Review programme. The obvious career move at that point was to set my sights on substantive promotion to more and more senior roles. However, I had a strong feeling that what I was good at and what I enjoyed was less and less a key part of those most senior roles. This informed my choice to step sideways into the Ministry of Justice as Director of Strategy and Change.
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Following my stint in the Ministry of Justice working with the top team and 150 most senior managers on their Transforming Justice programme (making justice better whilst taking out 25% of the budget in response to the financial crisis of 2009) - my next mission was at the IfG.
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I was recruited by Andrew Adonis in 2011 to try to create a guiding coalition of 18 reformist permanent secretaries and director generals and support them in an intensive 6 month inquiry. Our intention was to help them to establish an agenda and create momentum for essential cross civil service reforms. The inquiry culminated in two days with the top 200 civil servants. We helped these leaders to reflect on the strengths and weakness of their organisation and agree what most needed their collective leadership attention. It was the ultimate facilitation challenge. These reflections led directly to the main strands of the 2012 Civil Service Reform plan.
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Later at the IfG I managed to create some room to do research that not only allowed me to reflect on the reforms I had worked on myself, but also to look more widely at previous highly successful reforms from the late 1980’s onwards. The key output of that work was Civil Service Reform in the Real World (Panchamia and Thomas, 2014) – the research I am most proud of from my time at the IfG.
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Nehal Panchamia and I investigated the factors that explain successful civil service reform in the UK. We did this through the lens of five reforms seen as more or less successful in the past 25 years to understand what lay behind their success: Next Steps (1987-97); Bringing In and Bringing On Talent (1999-2002); Public Service Agreements and the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (1998-2010) and Capability Reviews (2005-12). Throughout the project we shared and tested our emerging insights with serving senior leaders with reformist instincts.
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We developed a framework for understanding civil service reform and identified a number of key factors that can lift up or drag down a reform at various stages of its life. We subsequently used the framework with the team leading the refocusing of the 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan to help them challenge whether the 10 main interventions in that plan were well set for success.
Since I left the staff of the IfG I have run my own advisory business working with local and national government in the UK and Ireland. I have worked with a wide range of leaders across the whole public and voluntary sector to help them: reset their ambitions; develop strategy; build capability; and work more collaboratively and productively. Out of my international work advising governments on reforms of the centre of government, I had the opportunity to produce a report with my colleague Caterina Alari (Alari and Thomas 2016) which took a critical view on the potential and pitfalls of adopting UK reforms in other countries. [link] We concluded that cultural and political context, local engagement and priorities trumped any virtues of particular methods and structural solutions.
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Amongst the 80 or so projects I have carried out as a freelance adviser, there is a series of civil service reform projects carried out with colleagues in Northern Ireland, and Ireland. My role as associate of the CES has come from this work. These projects ranged from advising and facilitating Ireland’s first civil service reform pathfinder project (on young people’s mental health) to partnering with the Dublin Institute of Public Administration (IPA) core team to evaluate a donor funded programme designed to support the public service reform agendas in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
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An offshoot from this evaluation was an invitation to produce an article for the Dublin IPA (Thomas 2020). In it I reflected on the importance of capability building to the success of public service reforms and argued that capability is a product (or not) of the interaction between the skills, experience and methods of an individual – and the culture, structures, processes of the organisation they work in. I received a lot of feedback and interest in this article from my extensive network on Linked-in. This has fuelled my desire to go deeper into these issues.
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References and links
Alari, C. & Thomas, P. Improving government effectiveness across the world: can lessons from the UK’s reform experience help?: Institute for Government, 2016
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Panchamia, N. & Thomas, P. Civil Service Reform in the Real World. Patterns of success in UK civil service reform, Institute for Government, February 2014.
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Panchamia, N. & Thomas, P. Civil service reform case studies: Capability Reviews. Institute for Government, February 2014.
Thomas, P. ‘Building transformative capability through civil service reform’, Administration, vol 68, no.4 (2020), pp73-96