Guide to the Centre of Government

Part I: The Role of the Centre

Each of the three organisations at the centre of Government - No 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury - has a role in pulling together the activities of other departments. In this section we describe this coordination and support role in general terms. Activities of the central departments that do not have a regular impact on other departments are outside the scope of this guide.

Ministers in charge of departments have formal responsibility for the discharge of Government business. The three central organisations’ coordinating activities flow from their special functions.

No 10 Downing Street provides support and advice to the Prime Minister on the whole range of Government business. It gives strategic direction to departments on the basis of the Prime Minister’s views and orchestrates the presentation of Government policy.

The Cabinet Office aims to ensure that the Government delivers its priorities. It does this by supporting collective consideration of key issues by Cabinet and its Ministerial Committees, and by working with departments to modernise and co-ordinate government, aiming at excellence in policy making and responsive, high quality public services.

The Treasury manages public spending and aims to get the best public service outputs and outcomes for the resources the country can afford. It pursues this by setting spending plans; agreeing departmental objectives and targets in Public Service Agreements and Service Delivery Agreements; and promoting cross-departmental work where it is likely to deliver better value for money.

Some of the oldest central functions are core activities such as the Treasury’s relationship with Parliament on public spending matters and the role of the Cabinet Secretariat in supporting collective government. The centre also carries out certain shared services including the role of the Cabinet Office in Civil Service pensions, the purchasing advice services brought together in the Office of Government Commerce and the accountancy advice services provided by the Treasury’s Financial Management Reporting and Audit Directorate.

Much of the recent growth and development of the centre of government has been in activities which are designed to add value to the work of individual departments. The centre provides strategic direction by ensuring that departmental objectives are aligned with the Government’s overall strategic priorities; and that the wider public is well informed on the Government’s actions. Public Service Agreements (PSAs) set out the key objectives and targets for each department. Strategic direction also means the centre taking the lead on policy issues which span a number of departments eg social exclusion, drugs strategy and women’s issues. More generally the centre promotes policy coherence and rigour, through central mechanisms for coordination of Government business and collective knowledge, and resolution of disputes.

The centre aims to support departments in delivering improvements in performance for the end users of services. This include developing tools and advice (eg Civil Service reform, better business planning, use of the Excellence Model, Charter Mark, benchmarking and leading the drive to electronic government) and facilitating corporate learning (eg through peer review and policy evaluation). The centre also challenges departments to make sure their approach to key issues are robust (eg Better Quality Services, consumer focus, Service Delivery Agreements (SDAs) and impact of regulations). The centre has a continuing role in ensuring standards like those set out in the Civil Service Code, are maintained.

Wiring It Up listed three preconditions for effective intervention by the centre of government:

i. it should not try to do everything itself but draw upon the expertise and knowledge from business units and beyond;

ii. it needs to understand the business units well enough to avoid destroying value by the wrong sort of intervention;

iii. it needs the right sort of skills, eg facilitation, cross-cutting working.

The centre must be clear about its own objectives and must be able to communicate them to the rest of government. It has to be selective in its interventions, because the individual units in the three central organisations are mostly very small and should not second-guess everything departments do; and, more importantly the primary responsibility for delivery still rests with individual departments.

The centre aims to: