thetorydiary

Tomorrow's Guardian is reporting that Shadow Chief Secretary Philip Hammond - "increasingly seen as a pivotal figure in a future Cameron government" - is to make a speech in the morning which will be about embedding a new culture of efficiency and productivity in the civil service.

According to the paper's report, his proposal include:

• Civil servants would be put under a statutory duty to protect public money, with the honours system being discreetly used to reward those civil servants who dedicate themselves to improving productivity;
• Civil servants would receive a week's pay for each year of service in redundancy (rather than the current month's pay for each year);
• There would be a presumption that government services would be contracted on a strict payments by results regime, with  Whitehall departments gaining the right to bid to run another's services;
• All public sector property would be handed to the private sector for management, requiring Whitehall departments to pay rent on the property and giving them incentives to sell surplus land and assets; departments would then become tenants and pay rent, giving them incentives to use property more efficiently.

The paper also suggest that David Cameron will ask senior shadow cabinet members to agree their future spending budgets "as a condition of being offered their departmental portfolio at the time of the election".

Read the full report here.

Jonathan Isaby

Last week George Osborne pledged to cut Whitehall by a third. Relations between the civil service machine and the Conservative Party may be further strained by news in this morning's Times that ministers rather than permanent secretaries will chair the boards that oversee the operations within government departments.

Francis Maude MP, head of the Tories' Implementation Team, is overseeing the likely changes:

"Mr Maude is planning to fill these boards with non-executive members from the private sector and, for the first time, give them powers to recommend firing permanent secretaries. The most senior civil servants would be put on fixed-term contracts and the salaries."

One "senior official" told The Times' Jill Sherman: "People are ****ed off generally about the plans.”

Bringing in more private sector expertise is only one of the means by which the Conservatives hope to improve the effectiveness of Whitehall:

• A stronger Downing Street operation - with George Osborne and David Cameron merging the offices of Numbers 10 and 11 - is at the heart of the Tory plan to shake up Whitehall.
• There are rumours that all Cabinet ministers will be located together - outside of their departments and civil servants will come to their central location for meetings. This 'beehive' model already operates in New Zealand.
• Individual ministers may be given very specific jobs. Rather than, for example, Mr X is appointed as Minister for Transport, they will be appointed as Minister for High-Speed Rail. They'll be given security of appointment for a definite period (barring significant misdemeanours) and will be judged on their progress in negotiating contracts, financing etc.

One thing that won't change radically will be government department configuration, however.  More traditional Departments for Education and Trade and Industry are likely to emerge from the Mandelson and Balls empires.  There will be some form of social justice body created but it may be a powerful Cabinet committee (under Iain Duncan Smith's chairmanship) rather than a new department.

Tim Montgomerie

Interesting piece by Lord Digby Jones in the Mail on Sunday about his brief experience of government.  His key points include...

• How can Jacqui Smith with no experience of running anything in her previous life have expected to master a department like the Home Office?  He writes: "Jacqui Smith is a good woman, trying to change the world for the better as she sees it. But expecting her to deliver in the post of Home Secretary without a scintilla of experience or training was not only unfair on her but damaging to us all."
• Government ministers are expected to do too much: "No other major developed economy demands so much of their Ministers. All have constituencies and re-election to worry about. All have to deal with the highly centralised control-freakery of No10, something started by the Thatcher administration and happily continued by her successors... My Red Box was full every night, often with documents to sign that I had never seen before. I was expected to take responsibility for matters in which I had had absolutely no involvement."
• Gordon Brown's 'GOATS' experiment was on to something important: "Since becoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has done some things badly and some well. One thing he did recognise was that the current system of delivery of services did not work and he introduced his GOATS.  By introducing specialists such as Alan West from the Royal Navy into Security, Ara Darzi from the surgeon’s table into Health, Mark Malloch-Brown from the United Nations into the Foreign Office and me from the CBI into overseas trade and investment promotion, he was not only on to a good thing but he had the courage to face down his own party and other vested interests to do it... Let us have senior Ministers who are skilled in the field in which they are asked to operate."
• Civil servants are too risk averse: Jones quotes the greeting he received from one civil servant: "‘I know you intend to do things differently round here,’ he said, ‘but just remember you’ll be gone in a couple of years while we all have careers to build and no one here is going to harm his or her career for the sake of this new idea.’"
• There are too many MPs: "Let us have fewer of them. India, with a billion people, has recently elected just 500 MPs to serve them. We have 675 to serve just 60million."

David Cameron will enter government with a very inexperienced ministerial team.  Of existing frontbenchers only Alistair Burt, Ken Clarke, Liam Fox, William Hague, Francis Maude, Andrew Mitchell and David Willetts have held government posts (Oops! 11.30am correction: I missed Simon Burns, James Clappison, Cheryl Gillan and Patrick McLoughlin from my list).  What should he do?  Some quick thoughts:

That is the question asked by Philip Stephens in this morning's Financial Times.

He contends that a couple of years ago, before the economic crash, the answer "seemed obvious enough":

But now, Stephens continues, having accepted the need for widespread cuts (while wanting to spare health and overseas aid budgets from cuts), the party finds itself "stranded in a political no man’s land".

Is this really fair? Whilst there is some debate within the party over the wisdom of immunising certain areas from spending reductions (and it is unclear at this stage exactly what state the of economy will be in a year's time in any case), there remain a number of areas where the Conservative agenda for government is  distinct from that of the current Labour administration.

My instinctive three-part answer to Philip Stephens' question would be: 

• To restore civil liberties to people which have been taken away over the last decade and transfer power from the state to the individual in a wide range of areas;
• To fix the "broken society", covering a whole gamut of issues including tackling illiteracy, family breakdown, welfare dependency, and associated crime, addictions etc;
• To negotiate a new settlement regarding Britain's relationship with the EU on the basis that we are unwilling to accept the Lisbon Treaty as the settled will of the British people.

What do you think a Conservative government is for?

Jonathan Isaby

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