Data Handling Procedures in Government: Interim Progress Report

[Peter Tomlinson]

Roger Hird wrote:
> In article <4791E622.1010008@iosis.co.uk>,
>    Peter Tomlinson <pwt@iosis.co.uk> wrote:
>   
>> I would have preferred an agreement, first with the First Division Assn 
>> and then further down the string of unions, for business process 
>> re-engineering throughout the civil service (and, it now seems, the 
>> armed forces), but that would probably put some Sir Humphreys more at 
>> risk of early retirement than anyone else.
>>     
> As a former Civil Servant - and former member of the FDA - I lived, over
> two decades, through repeated major changes in the way we worked and
> organised ourselves and responded to legislative changes and responded to
> repeated ministerial initiatives  and .. and  ...  and ... - and never
> once was there any hint of anyone talking to the FDa about it - nor indeed
> would I really have expected there to be.
>
>   
So why, in the summer of 2006, did the FDA get upset about something 
from their masters to do with the quality of their work? [1] Then they 
quickly went quiet, which suggested to me that some arrangement had been 
made with them about the reform of public service that (at least one of) 
their masters wanted. Was it Brown who made peace with them?

At the time I quoted from an essay in ‘Re-inventing Government Again’:

“The top-down approach, fashionable for large parts of the late 
twentieth century, has now largely been abandoned by forward-looking and 
successful organisations, and it is time for it to be replaced in the 
public sector. A new value-based approach…” [2]

Peter

[1] https://www.fda.org.uk/Resource.phx/pubman/templates/18.htx?id=117

[2] p148 of Reinventing Government Again: Ch 9, Reinventing Reform (but 
in the contents list it is Reinventing Policy) by Greg Wilkinson, 
published by the Social Market Foundation in 2004