Description
Key accountabilities:
- Finalize a set of initial supplier by supplier reviews to ensure we have a good sense of the current quality of contingency planning. Analyse the issues and develop a set of recommendations to improve contingency thinking and planning across Whitehall, ensuring Departmental buy-in and implementation.
- Scope and lead a second wave of reviews that provide Permanent Secretaries with confidence that Government as a whole is ready to respond to a range of scenarios (from supplier failure to a gradual decline in service quality).
- Work closely with policy teams in the Client, HMT and elsewhere to produce policy guidance, linking to other reforms underway across Government (eg to strengthen the role of SROs, and considering whether current approvals processes and our training and development offer can be improved to help embed change)
- Ensure senior colleagues in Cabinet Office and HM Treasury are kept closely informed of progress. Design and introduce mechanisms for keeping key stakeholders across Whitehall engaged in this work and bought into findings as they emerge.
Key Tasks and Deliverable
- Government is committed to ensuring that public service markets are vibrant and diverse, with a wide range of providers competing to drive up quality and improve value for money.
- To deliver this goal the Chancellor chairs a Cabinet sub-committee focused on Markets for Government Services.
- The Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service lead an officials group, supported by a joint team drawn from HMT and CO.
- The team works on a range of reactive and strategic issues.
- Part of the team provides a secretariat function (eg co-ordinating Government's response to major commercial challenges).
- Increasingly the team also focus on a set of strategic projects to tackle Ministerial concerns.
- One of these focuses on contingency with a view to ensuring that Ministers can feel confident that critical service delivery would be safeguarded in the event of supplier failure.
- This is a high profile role requiring considerable engagement with senior colleagues in Departments and Industry.
- This role offers the opportunity to work closely and the Cabinet Secretary, Head of the Home Civil Service and Permanent Secretaries across Whitehall.
- The successful candidate will lead a significant part of the project, managing at least two people and working flexibly with colleagues from HM Treasury.