John Healey celebrated nine months as housing minister over the weekend. Not long you might think but in the Communities and Local Government (CLG) department that almost qualifies him for a gold watch - or at least a cake.
As is well known, he took up his new post on 5 June last year to become the fourth housing minister since the CLG department was created in May 2006. There have also been three secretaries of state and three local government ministers (one of them Healey himself, making him a 21-month CLG ministerial veteran).
What’s less well known is that ministers have actually lasted longer in post than their civil servants. A new report from the Communities and Local Government select committee on the department’s performance reveals that the average length of time a CLG official can expect to stay in one post is just nine months.
In part that’s understandable given the amount of new work taken on by the CLG in the wake of the recession and the government’s response to the housing market crash. As CLG permanent secretary Peter Housden told the committee ‘particularly in the housing area where we have taken on completely new areas of work…..that has required us to shift the balance of staff and to move from low priority to higher priority work’.
The committee commends the department for ‘the action which it has taken to meet ministers’ priorities in this very difficult period’ but it backs concern expressed by the Chartered Institute of Housing about the effect of the revolving door approach to staffing on the CLG’s other work - especially the delay to the green paper on private rented sector reform.
The committee goes on: ‘The Department can help itself in the task of improving its capability by improving its workforce planning. Leaving staff in post for an average of just 9 months before moving them on to something new is not a sensible way to run an organisation.’
More worrying for the future perhaps is that, as committee chair Phyllis Starkey puts it: ‘The Department has yet to become the kind of “big hitter” it needs to be within Whitehall and we have yet to see consistent and sustained evidence that the Department possesses the full range of skills required for the effective formulation and delivery of the policies for which it is responsible.’
If the CLG is not a big hitter now, can it avoid become a big loser when the public spending axe falls after the election?
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