“Managerial governance in the States of Jersey was broken”

Monday 09 July 2018

The new States boss has said that he has been forced to take on lower level tasks in his first six months in the top government role than a Chief Executive should expect to do due to “longstanding weaknesses” in the way the public sector is run.

The criticism came in a report providing a “snapshot” of Charlie Parker's activities - including recruiting several senior government officials, a decision to sit in on Council of Ministers meetings and stopping departments from carrying over their unspent budgets - as he reaches the half-year mark as head of the States.

It revealed that just 58% of States employees were “proud” to work there. More than a quarter said that they were “not inspired” by working there and were only “committed for now.” Just a third described themselves as “engaged.”

In the summary, Mr Parker also blasted the “problem solving” and “granular decision making” he said his job had so far entailed because the government hadn’t been performing as it should be.

According to Mr Parker, due diligence audits uncovered “capability and capacity weaknesses in the public service, which are barriers to modernising and to delivering effective, efficient, value-for-money public services.” He added that many of the “gaps” were in senior leadership and management competence. 

Describing managerial governance as “broken”, he said that he had now made moves to take greater responsibility for the decisions made by Chief Officers. 

“The Chief Executive was nominally accountable for the public service, but had no actual authority over the departmental Chief Officers, as a result of the then corporate sole arrangements. Departments were fiefdoms in law, with a siloed mentality, which meant that there was no shared ambition, no shared accountability, no collective responsibility and little cross-cutting activity… Running alongside my review of the structure of the public service and the modernisation of services, I therefore worked closely with Ministers and senior officials to develop proposals to strengthen accountability in the public service, which the States Assembly approved in March. This makes the Chief Executive legally and financially accountable for the decisions and budgets of the public service, with appropriate delegation of accountability to the Director Generals for departments,” Mr Parker wrote.

Finance was said to be a particular area of concern, following a review led by a finance consultant within his Transition Team. “This uncovered some systemic weaknesses, poor practices and a range of risks,” he reported. 

“I have approved the launch of a finance transformation programme to address the findings of the review, build professional capability and commercial expertise, and improve the rigour and timeliness of financial reporting. I have also ended the longstanding practice of carrying forward unspent budget into the following year as a claim on contingencies – and have, indeed, eliminated contingencies entirely,” he said.

Communications was also identified as an area of weakness – a sector into which £400,000 has been poured to “transform” the way the government speaks to the public and its workers. Express revealed in June that this would involve creating a team of 34 people. 

But while the Communications team grows, the number of people at the most senior level of the States has been chopped. The top two tiers of senior leadership have been reduced from 66 to 40.

But there is still more recruitment to be done. Mr Parker has created ‘Director General’ and ‘Director’ roles to replace previous Chief Officers. In his report, he wrote that a further 20 senior roles would be recruited “over the coming months to complete appointments to key roles in Tiers 1 and 2.”

He said this would involve recruiting people both “internally and externally.”