John Manzoni, business executive-turned Civil Service CEO, talks to Peter McDonald about his time in government and change from the inside
In 2014, the Civil Service appointed its first Chief Executive, John Manzoni, a joint billing with the then Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Heywood. For the first time, the service had someone at its head who was both an outsider and focused on the inner workings rather than the Ministerial machine.
John was well-accustomed to business leadership, having previously spent 30 years in the oil and gas sector before joining government. His tenure as CEO of the Civil Service lasted until 2020, when he returned to industry. Five years after leaving the public sector, he reflects on his personal missions at the time, what he learnt about delivery in government and where he believes we can improve the system.
Horizontal functions
When John entered government, he recognised two longstanding issues. The first was the cultural bias of policy formulation over delivery. He keenly felt that the career structures, rewards and incentives of the Civil Service were all geared towards advising on policy rather than making that same policy happen in the real world. The second was Whitehall’s classic vertical architecture, marked by departments operating as self-contained units with relatively little cross-government scaffolding.
His response to these structural concerns was the creation of ‘functions’ – cross-government professions to define, own and improve specialist capabilities across departments. As he puts it, the idea was that they would have their own leaders of suitable seniority, charged with “bringing the right skills to the right places at the right time.” Borrowing from corporate models, the professions went beyond traditional services – HR, finance and legal – and extended to the full span of delivery disciplines, including commercial, property, procurement and digital.
Overall, John’s mission was to rebalance the operating model of government, strengthening the structure of delivery to complement the traditional structure of policy advice. Departments would remain vertically accountable for decisions and outcomes, but the functions would provide horizontal heft.
“It was obviously needed,” John reflects. But it took a crisis to prove the merits of what was an unfamiliar model (to Whitehall, at least). This came in the form of Carillion, a major supplier of services across the likes of health, education, transport and justice. In 2017, when alarm bells were sounding on the company’s finances, the nascent central commercial function was tasked with corralling information from across government to assess taxpayer exposure – and the options for addressing potential business failure. “Carillion was the first time we could really see across government,” he recalls. This mattered, “because the company didn’t know – and nor did any single department.”
The situation deteriorated rapidly. “We were in with the lawyers and it came down to the wire on a Sunday afternoon,” he remembers. The question was whether to let the failing company go into insolvency or inject more public funds. Because there was a cross-Whitehall view, contingency plans were already in place, “so we were able to say ‘no’ to a bailout.”
Responding to an emergency was a start, but there were bigger cultural challenges to overcome. “Getting the functions going was one thing,” John says, “but having them make an impact at the top table was another.” He explains how in the corporate world large businesses would usually have ‘line’ leaders and core functions sitting around the boardroom table together. But he found this proved tricky to replicate in a government context.
In such a setting, departmental permanent secretaries were the established line leaders. There was no defensiveness about the presence of new functional players, just uncertainty on how it could be made meaningful. “The agendas for the meetings were really hard to get right,” he recalls – by which he means finding purposeful ways to bring the vertical and horizontal leadership group together around collective issues. For John, the challenge simply reinforced the need to persist: “I said to Jeremy [Heywood] that we had to keep trying. And so we did.”
Counting the whole cost
One purpose of establishing cross-departmental functions was to understand what it would really take to deliver the government’s priorities. John’s ambition was that a genuine ‘whole of government’ costing for delivering a particular policy could be best developed if function leads supported departments. This reflected the complex reality of government, with costs and levers spread over multiple departments.
This ran counter to the traditional approach of each department being responsible for its own elements – and assigned budgets accordingly. However, he argues that a bilateral allocation process between the Treasury and individual departments does not adequately reflect the cross-cutting nature of modern government – “we still fund things in silos instead of asking what it really takes to deliver.”
To be fair, multi-year Spending Reviews are intended to address these very considerations. Moreover, the Treasury must carefully control aggregate spending across departments within the system of Parliamentary accountability. This role is more important now than ever.
“Because of the way we run the system, we waste less public money than we would otherwise waste,” he acknowledges. “But because of the way we run the system, we don’t deliver change as fast as we could.” So John encourages us to push the boundaries.
In his view, better cross-government assessment and expertise is vital. “We got close to the place where, if you knew how to listen to the functional structure, you could properly ‘cost’ a policy outcome.” He illustrates this with the example of bringing property and commercial experience to the then Prime Minister’s commitment for 20,000 additional police officers – “we were able to show it was also going to need three new prisons.”
Overall, John’s challenge to the Civil Service is to make financial decisions grounded in a full assessment of what it takes to do something. To deliver on a specific cross-government outcome, his ideal model would be to provide a ‘whole government’ allocation to one single place and then make a single person accountable for delivery.
Sir John Manzoni
To govern is to choose
Assessing the cost is one thing, but deciding what to prioritise is another. Of course, this is ultimately a political judgement and so rightly rests with ministers.
All the same, John wanted the functional structure to better equip the Civil Service to support such prioritisation. However, the turbulence of Brexit, Covid and political transitions made this hard for him to pursue. “One thing I worry about,” he says, “was that we were not really able to connect a stronger civil service to the politics of prioritisation.”
This mattered because, in John’s analysis, the greatest reason why government struggles is its overcrowded agenda. This is a broader point than doing more – or better – Spending Reviews; it is about coming to terms with the real constraints on the capacity of government. In this context, he finds it interesting to reflect on the current government’s original five missions. “If these are to be the hard choices, the idea of truly focusing on the missions has the potential to be hugely valuable,” he remarks. “But they cannot be broadened to be everything for everybody,” he cautions.
One way into this is for the Civil Service to plan better and with greater coherence. This was his rationale for introducing so-called ‘Single Departmental Plans’, an attempt to replace an array of strategy documents with one statement of each department’s objectives that linked directly to allocated resources (people and money, in particular). This was not, of course, the first time departments had compiled plans. But it was an attempt to establish a single version of the truth for each organisation, with a transparent mapping of inputs to outputs – something the functions could then support.
Although defined in terms of the same vertical structure he sought to soften, it still proved a significant challenge in itself – “they were really hard to do because we hadn’t done them before.” The first versions, he concedes, were more of an aggregated list – and a long one at that – rather than real prioritisation. Mapping these intended outputs to financial inputs was the hardest part, even though, “by definition, funding was the other side of the same coin.” Nevertheless, the plans laid the foundations for what has since been built upon.
Delegating the right way
Once costs are understood and priorities set, it is a case of empowering the right people to execute. In business, John was used to accountability flowing clearly down the chain of command. But he was surprised by what he found in government, where he often saw it effectively reversed. “Delegation was going upward – completely the wrong way round.”
He draws a clear distinction here between policy and delivery, noting it is entirely appropriate for civil servants to elevate policy decisions to democratically-elected politicians. But when delivery decisions are escalated to ministers, it slows things down and blurs the accountability of officials – “it’s the antithesis of how you get stuff done.”
Of course, ministers are ultimately accountable to Parliament; all actions are in their name and they are the ‘public face’ of performance. So is the UK’s constitutional model a constraint? John argues there is no inherent barrier; it is more a case of culture – among both officials and ministers. True delegation, he suggests, relies on two-way assurance: ministers confident enough to empower and civil servants confident enough to take ownership.
With delegation in mind, John reflects on working with arm’s length bodies (ALBs) established to deliver specific parts of government away from the central machine. Many such bodies emerged from the ‘Next Steps’ reforms of the Thatcher and Major eras, intended to hive off major operational parts of the state and improve their management.
“In many senses, it was a great idea… but then control crept back,” he reflects. In other words, the arms of government tended to retract over time. He describes the risk of a reinforcing cycle between weaker ALB leadership and greater central government control – “you can get the worst of all worlds.”
But John sees a significant opportunity if the bodies have people with the right experience in strong positions. “The boards of arm’s length bodies are absolutely crucial,” he says. They also need strong sponsors – not in terms of control, but in terms of strategic empowerment and trust once the right people are in place. Give them a remit – ideally over several years – and let them get on with it, he advises.
Valuing experience
A clear thread running through these reflections is the need to think differently about policy and delivery. This applies especially to culture and skills. “You can’t do policy without intellect,” says John, “but neither can you do delivery without experience.”
“There is a whole generation of civil servants whose careers depend on progressing in the policy environment,” he argues. That, in turn, shapes how they lead and what they value in others. His view is that success is still too closely associated with proximity to ministers, even though real delegation involves time away from the centre – “not every career needs to rest on what’s happening at the very top.”
“The underlying logic of the functional structure,” he adds, “was that people could have a career which depended less on ministers.” Their professional pathway, particularly early on, could be driven by competence in a specialism rather than anything else. He argues it should be an enticing prospect as civil servants can gain more experience in government than almost anywhere – “government just does more of everything.”
In John’s case, the principle was applied at the highest level, reflecting how the Civil Service’s leadership was shared between him and Jeremy Heywood. This required both a personal connection – “we just got on very well” – and a mutual respect for each other’s skills and experience. “He knew what he didn’t know – and so did I,” John recalls. While he observed Jeremy continually in and out of Number 10 attending to the live issues of the day, John deliberately focused his time on structural reform inside the Civil Service.
In the end, he wanted to nurture a cadre of people who could perform the delivery equivalent of ‘truth to power’, a familiar concept but usually applied in a policy context. “It is ultimately a cultural construct,” he remarks. As with effective delegation, there is no institutional reason it cannot happen. But it sometimes requires people who have done hard things to tell the hard truths – “the only way to be heard is to have the backing of experience.” John himself felt more able to do this because his reputation was anchored in the outside world, a place to which he intended to return.
Bouncing in and out
While John drew on his business experience, he is firmly aware that the private and public sectors are different animals. “Government is an order of magnitude more complex than running a company,” he says. In particular, the blending of social and economic concerns is harder than anything most companies face – “the objective functions are more complex and less clear.”
Even so, the private sector remains a vital source of delivery expertise for government. “But we never cracked interchange,” he admits, noting that outsiders are sometimes co-opted for optics rather than genuine operational impact. “You need people from the outside doing real jobs, not limited to being symbolic ambassadors,” he says. That means owning major delivery responsibilities, not necessarily correlated with time spent in Downing Street.
In his experience, incomers had to get to grips with a larger, complex system and lead accordingly. This was different from how they might have led in the private sector: “government requires proper systems leadership which you rarely get close to, even in the largest companies.” For understandable reasons, it was often hard for them to adapt to working with fewer levers in a bigger system. Equally, the ‘system’ itself did not always embrace them. He saw many people ‘bounce in’ but then ‘bounce out’.
Nevertheless, he would like to have done more to enable a more permeable public sector. His desire went in both directions, including for central government officials to spend parts of their career elsewhere. This could be either in the private sector or indeed in local government; both are places geared toward getting things done. “If you go out and have a different experience,” he says, “I promise you’ll be better for it.”
Frustrating and fascinating
John’s focus on the fundamentals of delivery echoes a longstanding analysis of the Civil Service. A case in point is the 1968 Fulton Report, which argued for moving away from policy generalists, encouraging more specialists into government and bringing a greater delivery focus to policy.
It is telling to hear these themes more than 50 years later, from someone who was within the system and sought to change it from the inside. John’s reflections demonstrate his particular perspective and desire to challenge habits that can seem embedded. While much Civil Service reform has historically arisen from external sources, he reminds us that meaningful change can also be driven from within the system itself. As he puts it, “government can be frustrating, but it is fascinating in equal measure.”
Peter McDonald is the Director of Transport and Digital Connectivity in the Welsh Government and a member of the Editorial Board of the Heywood Quarterly.
