WIREDGOV

12 months since the Prime Minister unveiled the business plans, all departments have missed deadlines for their reform plans, with many failing to deliver more than a quarter and one department missing over 50%.

In data published recently, the Institute for Government reveals that of 17 departments analysed, Cabinet Office has missed the most actions overall with 38 over-due for a month or more in the last year. Where over-due actions are represented as a percentage of the total number of actions, the Department of Health comes at the bottom, having had 53% of actions over-due for a month or more.

The recent Whitehall Monitor #9 – Business plan performance – one year on adds that using the data within the business plans to understand the progress of change on Whitehall is not without difficulties. Report author, Justine Stephen said:

“the principle of getting departments to set out what they are going to do, when they will do it and  whether this has happened is a good one and is to be applauded. At the moment, we can say who has missed the most deadlines or completed the most actions.

However, the Business Plans are not yet delivering real democratic accountability, as it is still difficult to access, understand or compare the information they contain. Until these issues are addressed, the Prime Minister’s goal of a new system of accountability to the people will remain a work-in-progress”.

Rising to the challenge
When the business plans were launched, ministers made clear their desire for “armchair auditors” to use the data being placed in the public domain to hold departments to account. One year later, the Institute is one of few individuals and organisations to analyse the data.

It reveals that it is “difficult to meaningfully compare departments” for some key reasons:
•    Different departments have had very different numbers of structural reform actions to complete this year ranging from just 15 (HMRC) to over 100 (CO and BIS).
•    Individual actions are not directly comparable in terms of how challenging they are to complete

The recent report adds that  the quality and accessibility of the Business Plan information could be improved:
•    As we note in our report See-through Whitehall there are practical steps that government can take to clear up errors in its reporting and make the data more useable
•    The departmental accounts of why deadlines have been missed are hard to access and sometimes do not fully explain why the action was not completed or what remedial action will be taken

Variation

A further complication in the process of comparing departments is that they have very different profiles for when their actions are due,  As the report says “some departments had the bulk of their actions fall very early, whereas others have spikes of activities running to 2015 and beyond. This makes it difficult to compare how well departments are doing in implementing their reform programmes as they are running to different timelines”.

In addition, the accuracy of the information published also varies widely. Looking at the latest information on the No10 website, Institute researchers found that there were over 50 actions that had the wrong status or date against them.

Moving forward

The recent analysis further underlines the assessment presented by the Institute in See Through Whitehall. This makes the case for government  to look again at the business plans, and take steps to make them more consistent and easier to analyse.