Finger on the pulse of government

CMI Companion Lord Bichard shares his views on coalitions, quangos, facing up to public sector budget cuts and the meaning of the “big society”. Interview by Sue Mann

During his career Michael Bichard has worked his way up from local government to the very top of the Civil Service tree, as permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Employment. For the past two years he has been using his vast knowledge and experience to establish the Institute for Government (IFG), an independent charity helping to improve government effectiveness.

So who better to ask about how the Prime Minister’s “big society” might impact on the machinery of government?
The main challenge, as he sees it, is that everyone with the potential to deliver services support to the most disadvantaged in our communities needs to work together; unfortunately, at the moment they don’t.

“In the sense that the “big society” means not just engaging all people in civil society but actually getting people in statutory and non-statutory organisations to work more effectively together, I think it is a strong idea,” says Lord Bichard.
 “One of the things we have not done well enough is to create a genuine partnership between civil society and the statutory sector because the statutory sector has been overbearing and rather arrogant in that relationship.

“I think the “big society” is about making better use of resources that exist in society. A lot of money is being wasted by the way in which we don’t operate together and the way we don’t involve the voluntary sector constructively in providing for communities.”
Lord Bichard sees the imminent budget cuts as an opportunity for those at the sharp end to think about how they can do things differently and work more effectively together to make up for some of the money they are not going to get.

“That’s the reality of it. We are wasting a lot of money. Clearly it is going to be tough but the only way we will reduce the deficit and stand a chance of delivering better services is by facing up to some of the things that are wrong with public services at the moment. If all we do is shave money off and leave services otherwise roughly as they are, I think we are heading for a fall.”

This month, he is stepping down as executive director of the IFG to give more of his time and energy to the Lords, as well as other interests.
In the run-up to the general election this year the IFG ran development programmes for ministers and for members of the opposition parties too.
“We did a lot of work with the Conservatives in particular before the general election. We ran about 15 different seminars on preparing for government, which they were kind enough to say were really, really helpful.

“I think the Civil Service has done a really good job in making this coalition fly, and we played a small part in helping them to do that effectively. We talked to a lot of departments in government about what a coalition might look like, and how they might deal with it, and we talked to them about government transition – the political implications of this and what the implications were for the government machine and the impact on the Palace as well. I think we were quite instrumental in getting the pre-election work in order between the Civil Service and the Palace.”

Well before the election it decided to research coalitions. “Looking at the influences on elections, it seemed to us it was by no means clear 18 months ago that there was going to be a single party majority. We started looking at coalitions around the world – how we might handle them in this country and, of course, as we were doing this it became more and more likely that there would be a coalition, which is what happened.

“If you like, we staked out the coalition territory, we became the experts on it. We also did some really interesting work on ‘how do you transfer power?’ or ‘how in this country have we transferred power from one administration to another – what is the transition?’ Peter Riddle, from The Times, did that work and is working with us increasingly.”

After coalitions have come quangos. In July the organisation published Read Before Burning: Arm’s Length Government for a New Administration. The report suggests a complete reorganisation of the way ALBs (Arm’s Length Bodies – apparently the euphemism for quangos in the corridors of power) are classified to bring at least 11 confusing categories down to just four. It recommends regular set reviews and more transparency to ensure that their value and purpose are clear so that decisions about their future are based on accurate information.
Top of the list for the chop is the oxymoron ‘non-Ministerial departments’ because they do have ministers but are not necessarily part of a department!

Bichard will continue his involvement with the IFG as a senior fellow taking forward his work on Total Place - a concept he is credited with pioneering and which is helping government rethink the design of public services to become more effective across ‘silos’.

“We have the most centralised system of governance in the world. We need devolution but also connectivity. There is no point just devolving. If all you do is devolve you end up with lots of smaller silos on the ground. There has got to be some connection if you are going to deliver good services for clients at the best cost.
“Total Place has been quite galvanising and influential. Discussions are taking place now about area-based budgets, devolving budgets on an area basis rather than down in silos as a natural progression of the Total Place thinking.”

He says that under normal circumstances he would not have stepped down from his role at the IFG but his place in the Lords was offered on the basis that he would do some work in the upper house and didn’t feel he could just keep adding ever more responsibilities.

During his time in Whitehall Bichard oversaw the merging of the departments of education and employment, becoming permanent secretary of the enlarged Department for Education and Employment. After leaving government he served as rector of the University of the Arts London, and conducted an inquiry into the infamous Soham murders in 2004.
With such an extensive background and experience it is just too tempting to ask him what he would do if he was running a government department now.

“One of the things that leaders of public agencies have got to believe is that there is a way through this. The first thing is to ask yourself, do I believe we can find a way through this, am I confident, am I optimistic? If they aren’t, their staff will recognize that very quickly and I think that would be pretty difficult.
“So, ‘do I believe it?’, ‘can we get through it?’ and ‘how can we redesign services rather than structures so that we are delivering better value for less cost?’
“We have not invested anywhere near enough thought into redesigning services around clients, so that is where I would be starting.”

Extract from an interview with Lord Bichard featured in the September issue of Professional Manager

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