Written evidence from The Better Government Initiative to the Public Accounts Committee Inquiry into Civil Service Capability

The remainder of this submission considers what safeguards exist to secure the effective delivery of public services and to protect individual civil servants from the consequences of pressure to cut corners, and how, in the view of the BGI, such safeguards might be protected or enhanced. [...] The report of the Laidlaw inquiry in December 2012 into the lessons learned for the Department for Transport from the InterCity West Coast Competition said: “The scale of the franchising programme and the number of other concurrent significant and complex transactions meant that the DfT’s resources were being stretched at the same time as expenditure on external advisers generally, and financial a. [...] To take another, earlier example, the Haddon-Cave review into the loss of a Nimrod aircraft in Afghanistan in 2006 included the following commentary on the “organisational” causes of the crash: “There was a shift in culture and priorities in the MOD towards ‘business’ and financial targets, at the expense of functional values such as safety and airworthiness. [...] The ever present risk that Ministers chafe at the time or cost of “doing it properly” will surely increase as they face the demands of Brexit, as will the risks of the PAC and other Parliamentary Committees treating failures as wholly the fault of responsible individuals while ignoring the underlying resourcing issues. [...] Finally turning to the role of the PAC itself we believe that it should shift its focus increasingly from holding departments accountable for the delivery of individual projects and programmes - important though that will always be - to challenging them to demonstrate that they are adequately resourced and skilled to deliver the totality of the demands upon them.