Francis Maude MP: Fixed-tenure Permanent Secretaries - and much more. Our next steps in civil service reform.

Francis Maude MP is Minister for the Cabinet Office and MP for Horsham

It is over a year since Sir Bob Kerslake and I published the Civil Service Reform Plan. The plan was never our last word on reform. But it did include a series of practical actions which if they were implemented would begin to transform the Civil Service. Yet 12 months on, too little has changed. There have been some successes – our work to modernise terms and conditions is well underway, and we are preparing to move a first wave of twenty five public services online.

At its best, Britain’s Civil Service is excellent. We are rightly proud of much that it does: the 2012 Games were an outstanding success watched by the whole world; our security services work night and day to protect us; and my officials in the Cabinet Office have overturned decades of Whitehall secrecy with our transparency agenda, and through efficiency reforms driven savings worth £10 billion last year alone.

Francis Maude MP: Over 100 quangos scrapped. £100 saved for each household - but there's more to do...

Francis Maude MP is Minister for the Cabinet Office.

ConHome readers are rightly wary of politicians’ promises to quash quangos. After all for years they’ve heard plenty of that sort of talk.  But despite all the promises the quangocracy spiralled ever bigger.

Labour didn’t just leave us the biggest ever peacetime deficit. We inherited a bloated collection of 900 unaccountable quangos. These burned through billions of pounds of your hard-earned money without ever having to answer to the public. When we came into office in 2010, government didn’t even know how many of these bodies there were. So we took a long hard look around and worked out the lay of the land.

Francis Maude MP: National Citizen Service will teach our teenagers about socal responsibility and help bring Britain back together

Francis Maude is Minister for the Cabinet Office.

"Older people have misconceptions about young people.  What they don't realise is that young people have misconceptions about other young people".  That's what I was told by one of the 16-year-olds who took part in the 2010 National Citizen Service pilot.  It's one of the challenges we're trying to address through this ground-breaking programme.

Too many teenagers feel disaffected from society - and from each other. Too often we see passionate and idealistic young people, who want to make a difference, slowly drift into disorder and disobedience. They don’t feel connected to their communities and they are unsure what direction their lives should take.

National Citizen Service (NCS) will help change that. A kind of non-military national service, it’s going to mix young people from different backgrounds in a way that doesn’t happen right now. It’s going to teach them what it means to be socially responsible. Above all it’s going to inspire a generation of young people to appreciate what they can achieve and how they can be part of the Big Society.

So what is it? It’s a two-month programme, which will mix sixteen year olds from a variety of backgrounds, and will include a two week stay away from home. The first two weeks of the programme will be based in residential accommodation and will involve tough physical activities that are designed to challenge the young people, boost their confidence and build their teamwork and leadership skills. They will then return home and spend a further five weeks working in teams to develop a project that will help to change something they don’t like about their communities; this could be a social action project to help regenerate a community centre, teach young kids sport or care for old people.

Francis Maude MP: Our plans for government transparency continue apace - but we must uphold the highest possible standards of personal data protection

Francis Maude MP is Minister for the Cabinet Office.

Our coalition government has achieved much in these early months. We have worked hard to correct the profligacy endemic in the last government and rein in the record deficit. We have rooted out the wasteful spending in Whitehall and imposed freezes on consultants, IT, advertising and websites. We have also started to free our public sector workers from Labour’s stifling system of top-down targets and diktats. But perhaps the most startling difference between this administration and the last is the degree of honesty we have with the public.

There has been a marked shift from the Labour era in making government more transparent and accountable. For proof, just look at what we have achieved in less than five months. We have released a huge array of data that the previous government had refused to publish, ranging from the Treasury’s COINS database of government spending to the salaries of senior civil servants and quangocrats. This is symptomatic of a change in culture in Whitehall. 

We have put government transparency at the heart of our approach and we believe it will contribute to tackling some of our most important policy challenges; when we set ourselves the ambitious target of cutting government emissions by 10% in just 12 months, we published online the real-time energy consumption of buildings across Whitehall to help drive behaviour change and reduce energy use. This is already having an effect. And when we dismantled Labour’s disastrous PSA targets, we replaced them with a radical framework of government transparency that puts unprecedented information and power in the hands of the public, allowing them to scrutinise performance properly and drive up standards.

In the months ahead, we will go even further in opening up government. Citizens will soon be able to see for the first time exactly how and where their tax money is being spent, with every item of central government spending over £25,000 published online from November, and local council spending over £500 published online from January. That same month, crime data will begin to be published on a street-by-street basis, providing communities with an unparalleled amount of information about crime in their area, which can then be used at neighbourhood beat meetings to hold the police to account.

But our ambitions go far beyond the release of specific pieces of data.

Francis Maude: What do you think of Built To Last?

Ahead of tonight's first roadshow event Francis Maude, Conservative Party Chairman, ignites the debate about the Built To Last document...

“I really like David Cameron.  He’s a breath of fresh air.  But I need some convincing that the Conservative Party really is changing like he says it is.”

That’s a typical public reaction.  More people today are willing to be convinced that we are a credible and appealing alternative Government than at any time since 1992.  And loads of them positively want to be convinced.  But they need to be shown that the Party really has changed from the Party they rejected three times in a row.  That we haven’t just changed our Leader, but that we ourselves have changed.

We won’t do that just by asserting it.  We’ll do it by showing in everything that every one of us says and does.  By being the change.  But we can also do it by voting for it.  This isn’t a Clause 4.  There isn’t one.  Life would be simpler if there was.  If there was a single symbolic switch to throw, as there was for Labour, how much easier it would be.  Labour had to show that it had abandoned the ideological centrepiece of an approach that had manifestly been shown to have failed, both electorally and practically.

Our problem has been a different one.  We have failed in recent elections not because timeless Conservative principles have failed or are wrong.  People have been voting against us because they thought we were “stuck in the past”, “old-fashioned”, “cared only about the rich, not about ordinary people”. 

So we need to set out what we stand for and what we are fighting for.  Built to Last, which we published in late February, sets out pretty clearly the values, aims, approach and direction of the modern Conservative Party.  It’s here.  David’s introduction captures its direction:
“Our enduring values mean we believe in trusting people, sharing responsibility, championing freedom and supporting the institutions and culture we share as one nation.  Conservatives are not ideologues.  That is why in each generation we change, applying our values to new challenges.”

Modern Conservatism means fighting to improve the quality of life for everyone in our country.  It means building a dynamic economy where we put economic stability first so people know their mortgages are safe, and a strong society.  We need to improve public services for everyone, not help a few to opt out, and we must put climate change and sustainable environmental policy at the heart of our agenda, not just an afterthought. 

We need to prove that these are our values, and show that the changes we are making to our party are real, meaningful and built to last.  And we need to show that, unlike Labour’s quick fix culture, we will take a long-term approach to the big challenges facing Britain.

That’s why we want the whole Party to debate this document.  We will be holding a series of roadshows across the country between now and late summer so that every member of the Party has the chance to express their views.  The first roadshow is this evening in Hammersmith.  You can find out where the others will be or take part in the online survey here.

This will be a vigorous debate, not least on this site.  When it’s run its course, we’ll ask members to adopt a final version of this statement of aims and values by putting it to a ballot before the Party Conference in October. 

Not all bloggers on ConservativeHome, I appreciate from my assiduous following of its threads, are fully convinced modernisers.  But they’re mostly fair-minded.  And they like an argument.  So please read Built to Last.  Take on its challenges: for example, that tax cuts will not take first place in our economic policy; that the right test for our policies is how they help the most disadvantaged in society, not the rich; that there is such a thing as society, but it’s not the same thing as the state.

Don’t hold back (as if you might).  Here goes…

Francis Maude MP: Further thoughts on a more open party...

When I submitted my blog last Monday, the editor’s reply email read: “You’re a brave man!”  Shades of Sir Humphrey: “That would be a very courageous decision, Minister”.  I awaited postings with some nervousness, quite unnecessarily; I’ve been really encouraged, and actually rather touched, by the welter of constructive, thoughtful and serious responses it provoked.

Reponses were on three broad areas: selections, affinities, and communications in the broadest sense.  Actually all these overlap both in your responses and in real life.  Real open primaries can be done – I doubt whether a commission to study this makes sense – we need to get target seats selected by this time next year so don’t have time to spare.  But anyone else with knowledge of the previous trials – I think Warrington and Crewe and Nantwich were the open primaries – please feed in thoughts, ideas and reflections.  I really like the idea of doing this for council selections and for the London Mayor, as well as for Parliamentary candidates.  Apart from anything else it would give us terrific public exposure – in a good way we hope.

Semi-open primaries could be open to all registered supporters.  The conflict of desirable objectives in the whole of this area is between getting many more people engaged in the political process and diluting what you get for your membership subscription.  Obviously, as I suggested before and many of you agreed, we need a much more active – and interactive – programme for involving people who engage with us, whether as supporters or members.  And yes the concept of registered supporters must encompass Conservatives Direct, a brilliant idea still in its infancy.  This takes us straight into the third area, of communications.  Here there were loads of ideas – too many for us to do!  We will need serious time, money and brainpower to get this right.  But it is emphatically not just about a rehashed Heartland.

There is an emerging thought here about the creation of a parallel, almost a virtual organisation alongside our traditional hierarchies and structures.  With the right technology to replace Blue Chip, which we are currently procuring, this could be transformational and very attractive to younger and busy supporters who don’t want to show up at a committee room but who would see the point of a canvass list appearing on their PDA either to visit or telephone.

But the traditional structures still need revitalising.  We still have resources concentrated in too many safe seats while target seats struggle.  Changes to this ideally come from the ground up rather than being imposed from above.  I’m delighted to be able to report that on Friday evening a general meeting of the Horsham Association voted by more than nine to one to merge with Crawley.  This will create a single political entity with one dominant political objective – winning the Crawley Parliamentary seat for the Conservatives.  In May we had a huge swing in Crawley – nine per cent – and missed winning it by only thirty seven votes.  This merger gives us the best chance of winning it next time.

Doing something like this inevitably causes some anxieties.  How are we going to raise the extra funds needed to run a target seat?  Will it mean diluting our effort over a larger area to the jeopardy of holding council seats in Horsham?  What happens to our property?  What do we do if it goes wrong? 

Going through this process has enabled us to deal with these issues.  The property remains in the hands of the same trustees for the same purpose.  If it goes wrong – also if it goes right and Crawley becomes in a few years completely self-sufficient – the merger can simply be dissolved at the instance of either side.  On the topic of resources, both people and money, the evidence so far is that you can mobilise much more for a merged entity than for one alone. 

We are already raising more money for the future Horsham and Crawley Association, because people feel they are supporting the Party in the front line of the battleground.  And we are finding more people.  Someone showed up at our General Meeting on Friday whom none of us knew.  She said she has joined the Party as a central member because she felt Horsham didn’t really need her.  Now we were merging she thought it looked really worthwhile.  So there was a new – and young – activist emerging without us even looking.

Grateful for further thoughts and ideas…

Francis.

Francis Maude MP: Towards a more open Conservative Party

Party Chairman Francis Maude authors his second exclusive post for conservativehome.com.

I thought I’d write about opening up the Party, following on from James Morris’ excellent piece last week.

James is completely right in his observation that for too long the Party has been talking to itself.  Paradoxically those of us who have for years been on about the need for the Party to make itself contemporary have been the ones criticised for navel-gazing.  And indeed it does require us to be self-critical.  But the result of ducking this challenge is that we continue to talk only to people who already vote for us.  And we really do know by now how to get 33% of the voters to vote for us.  We’ve done it three times in a row.

Both candidates in this contest talk warmly about the need to reach out beyond that 33%.  It is surely blindingly obvious that without it we have no chance of making progress.  And to do that we do need to be a much more open party.  That’s partly about language, tone, policy and what we talk about. 

But it’s also about becoming a much more open organisation, less hierarchical, more accessible, more engaged in the daily life of contemporary Britain.  Our admirable www.conservativehome.com editor has, with others, been doing some serious thinking about how we might make this happen.  This website is just one example.  I’d like to take some of his trade away to www.conservatives.com in time, as we develop some open forums there.

And we need to think more broadly about how the party relates to its supporters.  At present the first subset of our 8 million May 2005 voters is fewer than 300 thousand members. 

From their number we expect to raise all the money we need for a modern campaigning party, and to recruit the activists we need to run it.  And yet we know how reluctant people – especially younger people – are to wear the tee-shirt that says “Conservative Party member”.  There must be – there are – hundreds of thousands more who would be willing to register as supporters, be kept in touch with us, contribute ideas, take part in surveys, perhaps deliver a few leaflets from time to time, perhaps give us some money occasionally.  People who are willing to be part of a virtual organisation but not a physical one.  And if we made it possible for these supporters to take part in candidate selections – even leadership elections? – who knows where it would take us?

I suspect there may be some cynics (are there any on this website?) saying: “Can this be the same Francis Maude who only weeks ago was trying to take the decision on the leadership away from members and give it back to the  MPs?”  Well, yes, it is.  And yes it is perfectly consistent.  The Board’s proposal was put forward at the request of the voluntary party as well as the MPs, was supported by nearly 60% of the Convention in the vote, and by a rather higher proportion of the membership, if the polls were any guide.  There is no theology in how to elect a leader.  It is done in very different ways in different places. 

Our challenge is to become the kind of organisation that is institutionally and culturally outward-looking, forcing us away from our Westminster focus, and outward from our internal hierarchies and structures.  Then we’ll have a chance of appealing beyond our 33% to the next 10% that we need if we’re going to win.

There’s never any shortage of trenchant views on this website.  What do you lot think?

Francis Maude MP: Let's keep this contest honest and good humoured

Francis Maude writes the first of a series of regular posts about the Tory leadership election.  Later today MPs Paul Goodman (for the Davis campaign) and Michael Gove (for the Cameron campaign) will post their first contributions.

As about the only MP who the leadership candidates don’t talk to about the election, taking my neutrality admirably seriously, this website has been a goldmine for me – it’s my only way of finding out what’s going on.  The threads are a heady mix of gossip, rumour, speculation, philosophy, leavened with a sprinkling of malice.  Not too much of the last, I’m relieved to see.  One of the really encouraging things people have said about the Party Conference was that people were being nice to each other and nice about each other.  And people outside really noticed it – we seemed a warmer, friendlier, more generous party.

So it was disappointing to hear our delightful Editor’s near namesake on the Today Programme on Friday spouting unpleasant rubbish.  Even after more than twenty years in public life I’m still not really accustomed to people who know nothing about you thinking it’s absolutely fine to attribute the basest and most dishonourable actions and intentions to you.  Feeble, I know, but do we really want all of our politicians to be so hard-boiled that they stop minding this kind of stuff?  No, I’m not going to sue him for slander, although slanderous he certainly was.

But what I really object to is that what he said was quite simply untrue, and he must have known it was untrue.  The rules have not been somehow changed to disenfranchise some members.  The rules have been unchanged since soon after the 2001 leadership election, when some very minor changes were implemented.  They aren’t particularly straightforward, and the Editor helpfully posted them on Saturday.  In any event I don’t decide who gets a vote; I’m not the Returning Officer, thank goodness.  That’s Michael Spicer, the Chairman of the 1922.

I was a little disconcerted when I called this other Mr Montgomery on Friday to alert him to the mischievously misleading nature of his comments.  He answered his mobile, said the signal wasn’t good – it sounded fine to me – and would call back on his landline.  He didn’t, nor did he respond to text messages, voicemails and further calls from my office.  In the meantime hundreds of distressed party members were calling CCHQ and their local offices because they believed him.  His broadcast on Friday was grotesquely irresponsible, causing real distress to real people and real damage to our party.

I thought my former PPS David Davis was bang on the money in his conference speech when he quoted Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment: “Never speak ill of a fellow Conservative”.  We’re never all going to agree on everything, but we all belong to the same movement.  How can we expect people to think good things of us if we don’t think and say good things of each other?  How can we expect people to respect us if we don't seem to respect each other?

So far this post-election period and leadership contest has been good for our reputation.  We’re being talked about, and for good rather than bad reasons.  We’ve seemed open and honest, better attuned to today’s Britain, able to conduct a serious debate about the future of the party and the country in a way that is mellow and good humoured.  Do let’s keep it like that…