The pilot edition of the Civil Service Quarterly appeared last week on gov.uk. It is a compilation of blogs on issues covering range of government activity – from disaster management, to the new policy tests in the Department for Education, an interview by former FT editor and CBI head Sir Richard Lambert with Treasury Chief Economic Adviser Dave Ramsden and the almost inevitable article by the Behavioural Insight Team. The “quarterly” (a name designed to make it sound like an academic journal?) seeks to address a number of areas in which the Civil Service in general and the policy profession in particular has been weak in the past: knowledge of what is going on beyond your silo (team, division, group, department); lack of mechanisms to share and a lack of capacity (time/inclination) to reflect before moving on to the next priority. If the journal can become a vehicle for doing this, it will serve a useful purpose. But this sort of initiative often starts with a fanfare and then fizzles out. It has made a good start – but the real test will be the second and third editions – or, better still, a steady stream of interesting material. Some […]

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