Civil Service lacks data, digital, project management skills, says report

A new report examines the skills that the Civil Service has and those it needs to meet the demands of government in the coming years - and claims that Whitehall urgently needs to commit to collecting more information on skills, and senior leadership should set up a programme of systematic data collection.

Finding the right skills for the Civil Service claims that the size of the Civil Service - over 430,000 employees as of September 2020 - makes it hard to identify the skills that exist and those that are needed.

A cross-government approach to skills management and deployment is hindered by departmental independence. As a result Civil Service leaders often do not have clear data on the skills that exist in their departments or how they are distributed.

Information is often lacking and different systems of data collection across departments leads to variation in content and quality and makes it very hard to understand and map civil service skills.

Rupert McNeil, Chief People Officer of the UK Government, told the Public Accounts Committee in November 2020 that the Civil Service remained a number of years away from knowing what skills individual civil servants have. Without this knowledge, the civil service cannot redeploy them effectively.

Notwithstanding this lack of clarity, the expensive hiring spree of consultants over the past 12 months has highlighted a lack of critical data and technology skills within Whitehall.

The report does endorse the Government’s current work to develop civil service skills, building on reforms that started in 2013 under Lord Francis Maude and John Manzoni, then Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chief Executive of the Civil Service respectively.

They worked to improve the way the civil service conducted activities that relied on specialist skills – such as delivering projects or managing commercial contracts – by creating government ‘Functions’ to develop and deploy expertise in a consistent fashion across all departments and arm’s length bodies. There are now 14 such Functions with around a quarter of civil servants (120,000) belonging to at least one:

1. Commercial
2. Communications
3. Counter Fraud
4. Debt
5. Digital, Data and Technology
6. Finance
7. Grants
8. Human Resources
9. Internal audit
10. Legal
11. Project Delivery
12. Property
13. Security
14. Analysis