UK civil service ‘all a twitter’

17 April 2012 

The British civil service for generations has been seen as the epitome of bureaucratic effectiveness. Potential leaders, selected for academic excellence benefit from accelerated careers where their abilities have matched their intellect. If the Independent is correct the shine has gone from those careers. The likes of Sir Humphrey are abandoning ship. Many are resigning.
 
The Opposition claims that this reflects low morale and an ideologically discomfort with working for a Conservative government after many years working to Labour Ministers.
 
The shadow Cabinet Office Minister commented that “the exodus of highly experienced senior government staff may explain in part why we’ve seen David Cameron’s government’s reputation for competence plummet to such depths recently with more and more examples of mistakes, incompetence and poor policy-making.”
 
The churn has occurred in most Departments. Some like the Serious Fraud Office may have lost as many as 50% of senior managers. Treasury is reported to have lost more than 30%.
 
The senior branch makes up about 1% of the civil service. It comprises the top four grades. These are the ranks of deputy director, director, director general and permanent secretary. There are currently about 3700 officers. This is about 650 fewer than two years ago. However in June 2011 when the Guardian published a list of all civil service numbers, the senior civil service was listed as comprising 3877 officers. This means the reduction of 177 over the last 10 months would appear to be nearer to 4%.
 
A more cynical assessment could be that the senior civil servants have seen advantage in giving effect to government policy. That policy is to reduce public sector numbers by 700,000. The Government proposed in the 2009 White Paper ‘Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government’ that the senior service would be cut by about 20% .
 
Voluntary redundancy is incentivised by payments, generous by New Zealand standards, of 1 month salary (up to a maximum salary of £149,820) for each year of service to a maximum of 21 months. As actual salaries range from £74,999 to £229,000 with most being less than £100,000, there may be little advantage in remaining in post for anyone nearing retirement.
 
The Department for Communities and Local Government has lost 43% of its senior civil service. One of them has been appointed as the new Head of the Civil Service. In what is a marked departure from the traditionally low profile maintained by senior civil servants, Sir Bob Kerslake took up social networking contemporaneously with his new job. His intent is to “do anything to kill off the stereotype of the Whitehall mandarin…”
 
He hasn’t yet tweeted about redundancies in the senior civil service to the 1579 people reported by the Independent to his following.
 
 
 
 

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April 17, 2012

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Is transparency just a “pervasive cliché”?

 
16 April 2011
 
The Open Government Partnership has its annual meeting in Brasilia this week. The eight founding states and 43 others that have joined the Open Government Initiative will be sharing their action plans.
 
A characteristic of the OGP is that community groups – civil society organisations – have participation rights alongside the member governments. The expectation is that this CSO participation will minimise the likelihood of the OGP becoming a talkfest of good intentions.
 
A big risk for the OGP is that governments want the feel good factor of taking part but will baulk at the reality. That is why membership requires scrutiny of country action plans by the wider organisation; and why the enthusiasm and expertise of CSOs is invited.
 
The Open Government blog, launched three weeks ago to promote OGP awareness, has a post from a Chilean commentator warning that aspirations may be frustrated. He is concerned about  
  • CSOs pushing too hard for an “all in” transparency agenda in action plans, provoking robust opposition from governments
  • governments that smile to the camera every-time the word “transparency” and “participation” is mentioned, but do not understand that “participation is about dialogues and not monologues, about agreements and not notifications”
  • governments, praised for their OGP, membership becoming uncomfortable when required to make concrete changes
  • replacing small cosmetic transparency policies in country action plans with real and substantive reforms
  • agreeing governance processes for implementing change without traditional legally binding international instruments
 
It may be that the New Zealand and Australian Governments have not shown interest to date because they anticipate that these challenges will neutralise the OGP. The United States media is not excited by the OGP either. At a briefing of the Secretary of State’s engagements for this week, including travelling to the Brasilia OGP conference, no question was asked about open government.
 
An interesting side exercise as part of the Brasilia meeting was a mapping party organised yesterday when some conference attendees gathered to explore Brasilia and add references to the openstreetmap of the city. OpenStreetMap – the wikipedia of maps –has the most extensive maps of the world. A community of over 545,000 registered users have added more than 2.7 billion GPS traces. It is all open data and available for reuse. “The real power of OpenStreetMap is that if something isn’t on the map, you can just add it.”
 
 
 
 
 

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April 16, 2012

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New Zealand holds its own in the digitisation world

13 April 2012

The 2012 Global Information Technology Report (GITR) was released last week. The World Economic Forum and the European Institute of Administration (INSEAD) have measured changes in the “hyper-connected world” since 2002.  This year’s survey involves 142 countries accounting for 98% of global gdp. Each country is measured on a series of ICT readiness “pillars”.

New Zealand moved to 14th place overall, up from 18th last year and passing Australia which has remained in 17th place.

Sweden was again rated best, with the rest of Scandinavia not far behind.

New Zealand  has a conducive environment to developing and leveraging ICT.  Our public institutions are assessed as particularly well functioning and efficient (3rd place). We are seen as having a high degree of readiness, “thanks to the excellent skill base of the population” (6th place) and world-class infrastructure (9th place).  Affordability is “the only real weakness of New Zealand” (63rd place).

The Report claims that success in the digitisation world requires that policymakers and business leaders build “right-to-win” capabilities. Digitisation is more than access. It multiplies the impact of connectivity. Incremental value is shown in job creation and economic growth.

It also results in social well-being and government transparency. This is evident from a strong comparability between GITR ratings and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.  With the exception of  Taiwan, Israel and Korea, the top 20 countries are within a ‘dozen or so’ places of a similar rating on the CPI.

The top 20 places in the 2012 Global IT report are as follows:

Sweden

Singapore

Finland

Denmark

Switzerland

Netherlands

Norway

United States

Canada

United Kingdom

Taiwan

Korea

Hong Kong

New Zealand (14th)

Iceland

Germany

Australia

Japan

Austria

Israel

http://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_IT_Report_2012.pdf

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April 13, 2012

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Political advantage in being virtuous

 
12 April 2012
 
In most United States jurisdictions politicians must publicly disclose their income and their tax declarations. Judges are in a similar position. Some have been tripped up. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid back-tax this year, apparently on becoming aware during campaigning that he had under-paid tax. Last year, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas had a similar epiphany, learning that he had not declared five years of his spouse’s income.
 
The US Government gathers data on its employees and federal contractors who default on tax obligations. Reports earlier this year were that unpaid tax by current and retired employees amounted to $3.4 billion, and $7.7 billion was owed by contractors. The purpose of the Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act making its way through the House of Representatives is to make “serious delinquents” ineligible for government work. Some provisions relating to suppliers already exist.
 
This practice would not raise an eyebrow in Scandinavia. Everyone’s tax returns are available on line in Norway, Sweden and Finland.
 
By the end of last week, candidates seeking election to the London mayoralty were competing to be the most transparent about their tax obligations, after a critical media response to the initial reluctance of one of them. There is a prospect now that disclosing tax returns may become a requirement for UK parliamentary candidates. The Prime Minister, Deputy PM and the Chancellor are said to be sympathetic.  Spokesmen for all political parties seem to be advocating that candidates for public office must disclose their tax payments, if not all their income. Each year in Britain, about £13bn is lost through avoidance of personal tax liabilities.
 
New Zealand MPs are required to make returns to the registrar of pecuniary interests, but are not required at any point to disclose the value of those interests. That is a major difference from US practices where copies of declarations, with details, are published.
 
There is little likelihood that State servants – excepting perhaps chief executives – will be required to make similar disclosures. There is already the duty to be trustworthy; to comply with the standards of integrity and conduct.
 
Perhaps the expectation that State servants will… “avoid any activities, work or non work, that may harm the reputation of our organisation or of the State Services” and will … “act lawfully”, means not only that they will comply with the requirements of the Income Tax Act, but that they are also liable to discipline at work if they don’t.
 
  
 
 
 
 

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April 12, 2012

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Do we sing for our supper?

 11 April 2012
 
Influencing the process of government is a continuing concern. Is lobbying part and parcel of how government works? Is it inherent in the democratic process or is it just a characteristic of financial power?
 
The Guardian today highlights how British MPs are ready recipients of the largesse of interest groups. The twist on this collation is that the benefits have been given to “all-party groups”– more than 300 groupings of MPs and Lords interested in a particular subject, which obviates partisan scrutiny.
 
Over the last 12 months the MPs’ register of gifts apparently records over £1.8 million of gifts and perhaps more concerning, funding arrangements.
 
Included is an interesting benefit, perhaps to remedy the perjorative perception of troughing snouts, of free membership of Weight Watchers. 
 
The transparency campaigner responsible for the disclosure of MPs’ expenses in the UK said that “The public has a fear that politicians are unduly influenced by people with money, and they need to work to tackle this perception. Currently, because of the opacity of funding, these groups create the perception of lobbying through the back door. If they want to be seen as a respectable part of parliament, they should disclose more information on their activities and funding. If they aren’t willing to do this, we really have to wonder why – what have they got to hide?” 
 
The move by the Greens in New Zealand to codify the access of lobbyists to decision makers is because we have no controls and minimal disclosure expectations. The OECD Governance Committee will be reporting in 2014 on the extent to which Member states have measures that reflect the Principles of Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying, adopted in 2011.
 
 
 

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April 11, 2012

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Information is what we should “do” well

10 April 2011
 
Commentary on the proper handling of information has captured many column inches recently. The Accident Compensation Corporation will have an uphill struggle defending some of its processes. But there is also an interesting contrast in the way officials in Britain and the United States have handled sensitive information. In a strange set of circumstances the British Serious Organised Crime Agency has been shown to have provided inherently harmful information about British residents to corrupt officials in the Russian Interior Ministry, allegedly involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky. In the United States, on the eve of Good Friday, and presumably to minimise media coverage, a former CIA officer was charged under the Espionage Act with leaking information to journalists regarding waterboarding by the CIA. The GAP website (Government Accountability Project) claims that charges are a measure to punish whistleblowing, that the officer was unique when he stuck his neck out five years ago, stating that waterboarding was torture.
 
In New Zealand, the Official Information Act has been with us throughout the careers of the vast majority of State sector employees. The Human Resource Survey (2011) indicates that the average length of service in a Public Service department is 9 years and the average age is 44.3 years. It can be inferred from this that most would still have been at school when the Official Secrets Act was repealed. Most State Servants have only ever “known” the Official Information Act, with its purpose to increase progressively the availability of official information to the people of New Zealand. (The complaint of the media of course is that an institutional memory of the Official Secrets Act is embedded, that secrecy is implicit in the culture of government and officials are occupationally resistant to openness in their work.)
 
Information is a primary asset of government. It is an asset that officials have a primary obligation to protect. The underpinning principle is that information shall be made available unless there is good reason for withholding it. But that doesn’t mean that the Official Information Act is a mandate for agency staff to exercise personal notions of the best use of information.
 
The State Services code of conduct includes a standard that “We must treat information with care and use it only for proper purposes”
 
“The proper management of information is central to the integrity of the State Services. We have a duty to handle official information appropriately and ensure that personal privacy rights are preserved. We must all be familiar with legal obligations relating to the protection and release of official information. Statutory privacy principles must always govern the handling of personal information. … It is a breach of trust for us to make use of information that we have learned through our work, or to disclose it in any way, unless we have permission to do so. We should always be very circumspect about discussing our organisation’s information when we are not directly engaged in organisation business… “
 
Information held by an agency belongs to that agency. Every disclosure of material not already publicly available, must be properly authorised. The Protected Disclosures Act provides the circuit breaker where agency staff learn of serious wrongdoing within that agency.The Act specifies the disclosure process and the obligation of an agency to act on that disclosure. Whistleblowing by releasing information to a foreign enforcement agency or to the media can never be appropriate or lawful.
 
 
 
 
 

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April 10, 2012

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“In judging men and things ethics go before dogma…” (Acton)

 
8 April 2012
 
In an interesting coincidence this Easter is the 125th anniversary of Lord Acton’s famous letter to the Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887) which included the observation that “…power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely…”
 
Lord Acton was a Roman Catholic who was not reluctant to question church teachings. He did not accept the notion of papal infallibility “…I cannot accept …that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong…”.
 
The chrismal address at St Peter’s on Maunday Thursday by Pope Benedict XVI had an interesting perspective that may have got Lord Acton saying “I told you so”. The address was about a movement for change in church policy regarding celibate priests, ordination of woman and recognition of divorce ( none of which reflect unequivocal biblical statements ).  The pope, unmoved by representations from Austrian clergy, echoed his predecessor… “the church had received no authorisation from the Lord on this matter…”
 
In rejecting arguments for change, the pope reiterated the importance of teachings of old. “Is disobedience a way of renewing the Church” he asked rhetorically.
 
There has been no media reporting of the pope asking questions about the corrupt practices in the Vatican, disclosed earlier this year.  Biblical statements about corruption seem to be unequivocal.  
 
And intriguingly, Bishop Creightons’s wife was the suffrage activist Louisa Creighton, who in today’s circumstances, would no doubt champion the ordination of women.
 
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”  (Lord Acton)
 
 
 
 
 

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April 8, 2012

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Forgetting to walk the talk brings down agency leaders

 
5 April 2012
 
The Better Government Services report explores how political aspirations for greater efficiency and focus can be given administrative effect. Interestingly the Prime Minister, when setting targets last month, did not speak of effectiveness which can be regarded as analogous to pursuing outcomes. he spoke results. 
 
There may not be further substantive reshaping of agencies – well not before the fall out from the MFAT experience loses its news-worthiness – but there will be a drive for improving services and reducing costs  to deliver those better results.
 
Those notions were behind the establishment of the Government Services Agency in the United States over 60 years ago. GSA was to provide expertise in management and support to departments, centralise a specialist procurement and accommodation service, and stimulate cost minimising policies across government. It is currently one of the smallest of departments by size (12,000 civil servants) but with a budget of over $26 billion, spending $66 billion on procurement and managing $500 billion worth of federal property. It may be the model for the joined up back office that New Zealand Ministers seek.
 
But as a centre of excellence, this supposedly efficient back office has had a bad fall from grace recently. The GSA has been pilloried by its Inspector General for profligacy in running a training conference. A number of the top officials have gone from the agency this week and others are “on leave” according to the Washington Post.
 
With echoes of the CYFS at Taupo, a conference at a luxury Las Vegas hotel for 333 staff, costing almost $3,000 a head with travel and accommodation, became a media circus. The President was reportedly troubled by “excessive spending, questionable dealings with contractors,  disregard for taxpayer dollars and called for all those responsible to be held fully accountable.”
 
The boss fell on her sword, confessing to squandering funds. Language is now of the Inspector General being “appalled” and the President being “outraged”.
 
A Treasury official has been appointed to restore core principles, eliminate excessive spending and promote efficiency, with a mission ‘…to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.” Ironically just days before resigning, the predecessor was speaking at a conference  of the Department’s cost cutting, efficiency drive and delivery of cast-iron value, … “It’s what we do, and we do it well.”
 
 
 
 
 

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April 5, 2012

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Ethics of politicians undermined by self interest

4 April 2012

 
New Zealand scores better than the United States in a range of surveys that evaluate the ethics of public service. That is because New Zealanders understand a question about public service to relate to government agencies. They may not have much understanding of the machinery of government and distinctions, for example, between Public Service departments and other departments, or Crown entities, agencies associated with a portfolio, or State Owned Enterprises. Americans by contrast understand public service to mean officials, many of whom are  elected. Americans think of politicians as public servants. New Zealanders don’t.
 
A consequence is that career officials in New Zealand don’t seem to be affected much by the indiscretions of politicians. Perceptions of the trustworthiness of officials are largely untainted by generally high levels of distrust in politicians. Media reports of self centred behaviour by politicians feeds this distrust.
 
Survey findings published in the US last week by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) provide more evidence that will reinforce prejudices about the motivation of politicians.
 
CREW in the report titled “Family Affair” claims that politicians “…still haven’t learned that it is wrong to trade their positions as elected leaders to benefit themselves and their families …. conduct like this reinforces the widely held view that members of Congress are more interested in enriching themselves than in public service…”
 
The report is of 248 members of the House of Representatives ( of the 435 members ) improperly syphoning off millions of dollars of campaign contributions for babysitters, family trips, and well paid jobs for relatives. CREW found 82 cases of family being paid directly by Congress members and 44 cases where relatives were engaged in related activities. Examples include a Representative, salary $174,000 employing his wife as his secretary at more than $512,000, and a Presidential hopeful who employs six members of his family as campaign staff – one of whom has criticised the report as “a sad attempt by…insiders …to grab cheap headlines”.
 
New Zealand politicians should be chastened by the list of their ilk posted as “Significant Parliamentary Scandals” on Kiwiblog yesterday. The numerous comments then contributed by a former MP who describes himself as “a total disgrace” suggest that MPs may be attracted to notoriety rather than being notable for integrity.
 
 
 

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April 4, 2012

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Australia moves to trap dishonest staff

3 April 2012
 
Staff in Australian enforcement agencies may find themselves tempted by new integrity tests. The Home Affairs Minister is to promote legislation that will enable federal agencies – the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, Australian Federal Police, the Australian Crime Commission, and Customs and Border Protection – to develop processes that will entrap dishonest officers. Many United States jurisdictions have ethics tests – tempting officers by leaving cash or easily misappropriated valuables in situations where the loss appears unlikely to be noted or detection seems improbable.
 
The Australian Government appears convinced that additional measures are needed to discourage an emerging threat to the community flowing from dishonest officials. The Minister has rationalised the move as law enforcement officials are being targeted by criminals.
 
Knowing that the offer of an apparently corrupt benefit may actually be an official sting is seen as a way of strengthening the resolve of officials to conduct themselves lawfully. And the scale of the inducement will not disclose the likely source. Over the last four years more than $10 million was sent offshore as bait to persuade top politicians and police officers in several Asian countries to show their hands as part of a drug and money laundering network which sent more than $1.2 billion worth of drugs into Australia.
 
Each agency head will be responsible for any integrity testing of staff, using processes authorised by the Integrity Commissioner. The Commonwealth Ombudsman and a Parliamentary Joint Committee will have oversight of tests and the outcomes.
 
Media reports are that unions are lukewarm about the proposal.
 
Promoting the trustworthy obligations of all employees in New Zealand government agencies is seen as achieving a similar outcome. The State Services Commissioner’s publication Understanding the code of conduct – Guidance for State Servants sets out the meaning for the following trustworthy standards
 
  • We must be honest
  • We must work to the best of our abilities
  • We must ensure our actions are not affected by our personal interests or relationship
  • We must never misuse our position for personal gain
  • We must decline gifts or benefits that place us under any obligation or perceived influence.
 
Staff must not only be regularly exposed to discussions about these standards – talking the talk; but these messages must be incorporated into the way agencies work –walking the walk, influentially managers at all levels must model the expected behaviour – by walking the talk.
 
 
 

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April 3, 2012

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