Skills in the Civil Service
The report has a "ripped from the headlines" recommendation about "porosity" (expertise moving between the Civil Service and the Private Sector). It says ACOBA is the gatekeeper that limits ‘revolving door’ abuse of government insider knowledge "(but)...there are.no firm sanctions for those who break the rules, and those who follow them are unlikely to be the people behaving improperly. " So,"...the system needs a thorough overhaul."
As I said here, it's clear the problem lies on the top shelf of the oven, and I hope any remedies don't end up dripping down to the bottom levels.
As far as the findings on skills goes, I still felt a bit of residual pride that HMRC is identified as a bit of a leader here with a large number of civil servants who are members of a profession that involves knowledge, expertise and skills.
The report explodes the myth that the Civil Service is full of generalists. "More than half of civil servants are Operational Delivery specialists, working directly with citizens to run and deliver public services in different settings." That includes HMRC, the Department of Justice and the DWP.
As well as specialist skills, the report acknowledges that many will have a wider set of service delivery skills. "Many will have developed the ability to communicate difficult things clearly and with empathy where needed."
The report also goes on to say that the Civil Service doesn't know enough about the "transferable skills" of its staff. I expect this is referring to departments other than HMRC, which should know all about transferable skills. This was the only upside I could see of colleagues being made redundant because of their physical location by the "Building Our Future" cull. People who'd spent 30 years working for the Civil Service were quickly offered other jobs by employers who recognised and wanted to exploit their transferable skills (admittedly on short term contracts, probably less well-paid).
The report goes on to say that Brexit and the Pandemic have shown that the Civil Service can move staff around, but it doesn't always move those people based on an accurate assessment of their skills.
At the risk of sounding biased, I don't think that senior management was too bothered about individual skills for staff. The trend over the past ten years has been towards automating every process so that you can pull someone in off the street to do the job. It's what the bish-bash-bosh merchants called "Once-and-done". And you would be done.
I'd better make it clear that I'm making a distinction between what they called "Tax Specialists" (what some accountants still call Tax Inspectors) and the processing side of Operational Delivery. Even in the days of HM Customs and Excise, it seemed to me that there were limits to how you could develop staff. Some of them could develop great expertise on the day-to-day work, but they earned just as much as people sat next to them. Unless they were willing to take on management roles, there was no way they could progress. The best you could hope to do would be give them a cash bonus as part of the reward and recognition schemes.
As a tax specialist, you could learn and develop and progress from Assistant Officer, to Officer, to Higher Officer without necessarily being sucked into line management. In Operational Delivery, the staff budgets meant there was little chance of making it past AO unless you swallowed the line management pill.
The report says "Managers need to be held directly to account for their team's development". Training needs to be shifted from "an optional extra" to a fundamental part of the job. "It has become common for civil servants to minimise the importance of training courses, preferring to emphasise skills picked up as part of the day-to-day job, and to take a broader view of development. ‘On the job’ learning is clearly important, but the balance in the civil service between that and taking time out for self-improvement has moved too far"
Another good suggestion. Staff development always used to be part of a line manager's job in HMRC, although as I've said above it depended which part of HMRC you were in just how meaningful that development really was. Let's just say we've all played the game where we've agreed some training, just so that we can tick the development box and then never think about it for the rest of the year.
If I was still working for HMRC I'd just be praying that this didn't mean another new initiative being driven through with little real impact.
As the report acknowledges - the pressures of Brexit and the Pandemic have had a big effect. Just before I left HMRC, I was talking to one of the staff on a helpline. He'd rung up to ask about a particular process, and I could see from looking at the system that he'd gone all round the houses rather than taking a shortcut. He was doing this to answer a question that had come up in a phone call - so a short cut would mean he could answer the caller's question in ten minutes rather than thirty. So I emailed him a link to a piece of official internal training that showed how to use the short cut.
He came back and said, "Thanks. But we're not allowed to do training. We're supposed to spend all our time on the phones."
Now, there's several potential answers there: he was new to the job. Did he know the distinction between "training" (how to do the job) and "development" (how to do the job better)? Was it "training" that they were barred from, or was it just "development"? And did his line management know what was needed to do the job?
I was told by a senior manager that line managers didn't need to know the job they were managing. Technical training was a waste of time for managers. As long as they monitored the stats and used "common sense" everything else would fall into place. I could see his point, and having had experience of managing a job I knew nothing about, I could see it working 90% of the time. But, as a wise man once said, "sometimes we don't know, what we don't know."
