Effective leadership within the civil service is essential to Government’s ability to overcome the challenges it faces. The Cabinet Office, the Government department responsible for policy relating to the civil service, is planning reforms and changes to how it approaches leadership, management, and development within the Senior Civil Service.
The Public Accounts Committee Chair’s 2023 Annual Report observed that senior leaders need the right combinations of professional skills – commercial, financial and project management – to oversee the complex programmes for which they are responsible. Gaps in the leadership curriculum and areas for improvement have been identified by the Cabinet Office as it adopts a new approach to civil service leadership capability, including a need for a more coherent leadership development programme.
A National Audit Office (NAO) report on the topic found that the Cabinet Office does not have overall objectives or success criteria for leadership capability, nor an integrated and coherent whole system approach to the issue. It further found some improvements in available measures of capability and how representative of wider society the Senior Civil Service is, but that these are inconsistent and there is further to go.
Based on the NAO report, the Committee will take evidence from senior Cabinet Office officials on subjects including:
- Recruitment to the Senior Civil Service;
- training and retention of senior leaders;
- progress on leadership capability work.
If you have evidence on these issues, please submit it here by 23:59 on Monday 10 June 2024.Please look at the requirements for written evidence submissions and note that the Committee cannot accept material as evidence that is published elsewhere.