Cabinet Office

Any Questions?

Reporting to the Prime Minister - who is also Minister for the Civil Service - the Cabinet Office plays a vital role at the very heart of the administration of the United Kingdom, with the responsibility of ensuring that the Government achieves its goals. One of the ways it does this is to work with government departments to modernise administration.

Effective human resources management is key to such reform. The Cabinet Office sets frameworks within which government departments and agencies recruit, reward and train staff and measure performance.

Civil Service Corporate Management and Reform (CSCMR) is the Cabinet Office department that has the specific responsibility of reforming the Civil Service to deliver higher quality service to the public. It is doing this through a number of policy initiatives. These include measures to make the Civil Service a better place to work, capable of attracting talent from different sections of the community. In particular, the CSCMR is actively encouraging the recognition and development of diversity to ensure that civil servants reflect the nation's full range of backgrounds and experience.

However, it is one thing to announce an ambition or a policy objective on diversity, quite another to pursue it effectively and monitor the change. To do this requires accurate information and trends analysis. The Cabinet Office needs to be able to answer questions such as:

• Does the percentage of people with a minority ethnic background in the Civil Service reflect the composition of the working population in general?
• To what extent are women represented at the higher levels of the Civil Service?
• What proportion of Civil Service staff have a physical disability?

Such information is essential in setting policy objectives to ensure that diverse backgrounds and experience are properly represented throughout the Civil Service.

Providing such information is the responsibility of a team led by Keith Folwell, Head of Personnel Statistics Data Management. The team collects Civil Service human resources records from all of the Government's individual departments to provide a centralised source of information on human resources issues. This is quite a task, considering the size and spread of the Civil Service. There are more than 475,000 civil servants, two percent of the United Kingdom workforce. Contrary to the commonly held view, four-fifths of them work outside London, and a growing number (currently 13 percent) are part-time employees. Civil servants work for approximately 150 departments and executive agencies, each with their own arrangements for managing human resources.

"Information gathering is quite a task, but it is further complicated by the increasing pace of change within the service," comments Folwell. "When people join or leave the service or transfer between departments we need to be sure that their HR records - which have an impact on diversity analysis - reflect the new reality." Typically over 40,000 people join the Civil Service each year, while approximately 25,000 leave. Inter-departmental moves are also becoming more common.

Folwell's team must produce detailed and accurate information at very short notice. "Douglas Alexander MP, Minister of State for the Cabinet Office, has to answer MPs' questions relating to Civil Service human resources. We often have to provide the information within 24 hours," says Folwell. Currently the Government has to answer roughly 30 such parliamentary questions per year. In addition, Folwell's team has to provide information to brief Ministers and Permanent Secretaries within similarly short timeframes. For example, they want to be informed about progress on diversity. In 1998, targets were set on the representation of women, ethnic groups and the disabled within the Civil Service, and the aim is to achieve these targets by 2005.

"Ministers are responsible to Parliament. When they answer questions it is a matter of public record, so their credibility is on the line. Consequently there is no margin for error," says Folwell.

Sarah Kissack, a Diversity Team Leader at the CSCMR says good information is crucial to tracking progress. "We work closely with Keith's team, and have the confidence of knowing that the standard analysis is reliable and that further analysis will not be constrained by the software," says Kissack.

"SAS was chosen because of its analytical power and flexibility," says Folwell. "At the moment the biggest benefit for us is the ability to validate the input data extremely thoroughly. This is essential given the pace of change and the demand for completeness and accuracy in our analysis. There is a lot of data attrition, and SAS helps us identify and correct the losses.

"Moreover SAS offers a clear path forward. We want to make the information freely available on a web site and in future we will also be doing more analysis of the impact of policy changes," adds Folwell.

With the help of SAS software, Folwell's team is ensuring that the Cabinet Office can answer any questions on Civil Service human resources issues - from Parliament, the press or the public.