The head of the civil service told attendees at the Lancaster House gathering last night that the awards - run in collaboration with PoliticsHome’s parent company Dods - had gone from “strength to strength” since their launch in 2006. But he said officials were still overly modest about their own achievements.
“The civil service is really good at some things,” he said. “We’ve saved shed loads of money for the government. I think we’ve managed to achieve 93% - at the last count - of the coalition’s commitments from the last parliament. We’re brilliant at handling crises, we do summits, breakfasts, we plan the general election very well even if we don’t predict the outcomes correctly. We do scenario planning.
“We do everything brilliantly, except one thing: we’re terrible at blowing our own trumpet. We are terrible at recognising the success of our colleagues, our own successes. We’re terrible at boasting about it. It’s what I like about the civil service actually. But I think once a year it is the right thing to do to celebrate our success.
“And what has been so great about the Civil Service Awards which my predecessor Gus O’Donnell kicked off in 2005 is it does give us that annual excuse to let our hair down and actually just talk a little bit about the brilliant work that’s going on in the civil service and recognising some of our colleagues that have made the service perform so well in the year behind us.”
The Cabinet secretary was joined by Matt Hancock, the newly-appointed minister for the Cabinet Office, who heaped praise on the civil service and said that the example shown by past award winners demonstrated the value of trusting civil servants to get on with delivery.
He said: “My experience of being in government is that we have the finest civil service in the world and I’m an enormous supporter and enthusiast for the work that the civil service - properly led by legitimately accountable ministers - does.
“It is full of brilliant people who are striving to make their country a better place. Now we need to make it even better. The civil service needs to be open to all, it needs to truly reflect the nation that it exists to serve. It needs to be a byword for social mobility. It needs to attract the best. It then needs to challenge them and support them to become even better. And also, I think, it needs to trust more.
“[We should] trust at every level civil servants to work out the best solution to a problem - from a job centre in Macclesfield through to the echelons of Jeremy’s private office - it needs the support and the challenge and trust through the line to be able to deliver as well as possible.
“So for me these awards aren’t only about individual achievement. Of course they’re about individual achievement. But they’re also about finding exemplars that others can learn from, so that from across the large organisation we can make sure that we’re constantly striving to improve and to be the best, all in the service of our great nation. That is what being a first-rate and award-winning civil servant is all about.”
This year’s Civil Service Awards will take place at Buckingham Palace, with categories set to include project and programme management; diversity and inclusion; analysis and use of evidence; and supporting growth and productivity.
Sir Jeremy told the audience that civil servants had “better get our skates on” to nominate colleagues before the August 7 deadline, and said 2014’s awards had seen an “amazing” 699 nominations from across the civil service.
“Behind each and every one of those is a unique story, some unique quality a team or an individual brought,” he said. “But I think there were lots of general things [that stood out] as well. The professionalism of the civil service, the humility of the winners always touches me. The teamwork, the dedication, the passion. And the inspiration and creativity that comes behind a lot of the award winners. We have some truly fantastic civil service colleagues.”
The Cabinet Secretary also gave a “big thank you” to the event’s partners EY, who have supported the awards from their beginning.
EY government and public sector leader Björn Conway - who will be on the judging panel - told the audience that the awards had “become better and better” in the past decade.
He said: “I’m absolutely passionate about these civil service awards and the reason I’m passionate about them is because for our people they really resonate.
“In our business the things that are important are around delivering social impact, inspiring people on lifetime careers in driving innovation, and this is the best example I can think of in the public sector in bringing those things together and recognising them. So it’s not only, I hope, inspiring for civil servants. I hope it’s also inspiring for the people who work in our organisation.”
Conway said that while changing governments meant the themes of the awards had “inevitably changed” over the past ten years, the “quality and the impact” shown by the civil service had been consistent.
“And actually, the quality of submissions has improved every single year. So it makes the job of the judges very very challenging and very, very hard.”