Beyond the governance code and the behaviour of ministers, many of the issues with the public appointments process are primarily administrative. Delays are a major problem, as the Cabinet Office acknowledges internally, and not a new one – a key aim of the last set of reforms to the public appointments process, the Grimstone review of 2016, was to improve timeliness. ⁵³ A Review of the Public Appointments Process, Gov.uk, March 2016, www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-public-appointments-review-of-the-public-appointments-process, pp. 22–3.  Delays matter because they put off good candidates and can lead to a lack of continuity in senior roles, with gaps having to be filled on a temporary basis. The causes of delays have a political element – interventions from ministers and special advisers often slow down the appointments process – but they also result from failures to administer the appointments system efficiently, gather the right data on what is going wrong and address problems at a departmental and cross-departmental level. Improving these processes was a major focus of our report last year.

The Cabinet Office has significantly improved the public appointments website, ⁵⁴ //apply-for-public-appointment.service.gov.uk/roles  making it more standardised and accessible. All campaigns should now appear on it, although the information published on when decisions are made and who panellists are remains patchy. It also now hosts a ‘future opportunities pool’, which should help departments share information on promising candidates, and the data collected is being used to generate a forward view of upcoming appointments (which was previously a resource-intensive manual process). Adoption by departments will be key and the Cabinet Office is working to help departments use the website to improve their forward planning and to run recruitment campaigns more efficiently.

The Cabinet Office is also starting to analyse aggregate data on appointments; for instance, to find out the causes of delays. There are aspirations to publish richer aggregate data on timeliness in appointments, when the data has been fully developed and tested – although this will depend on data quality, resourcing and ministerial approval. This would be welcome and should be prioritised: it was a key recommendation of our report last year, and something the Scottish government, for example, has been doing for some time.  ⁵⁵ Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland, Annual Report on Public Appointments 2021/22, 31 October 2022, www.ethicalstandards.org.uk/publication/public-appointments-annual-report-202122, pp. 19–21.

This data should be as granular as possible in order to identify the underlying causes of delays. At present, there is still debate within the system as to the main causes, and the only information available publicly is a list of exceptional appointments, usually made to fill gaps left by delayed appointments, ⁵⁶ //publicappointmentscommissioner.independent.gov.uk/regulating-appointments/exceptional-appointments  which is often updated with a considerable time lag on the commissioner’s website. Government needs better internal data and the public deserves more clarity on how the system is being administered, and how significant delays really are. 

Alongside establishing the causes of delays and addressing them, it remains important for central teams to co-ordinate public appointments processes in departments, with input from sponsor teams as appropriate. We also recommended training for special advisers on how the appointments process is intended to work, streamlining the involvement of the Cabinet Office and No.10 (where we understand some progress has been made), and redefining the three-month ‘aspiration’ for the time between applications closing and an appointee being announced so that it concludes when an appointment is offered – this would then be sufficiently realistic to be treated as an enforceable target. 

Our report also proposed that a government chief talent officer could strengthen cross-government talent development and outreach, support the commissioning of headhunters where necessary, and share best practice across departments. The Cabinet Office public appointments team is doing important work in these areas but a senior leader would be better able to achieve the required change. We also made a range of specific recommendations on how to attract the best people – including on remuneration, term length, personal liability and remote working – which still stand.