Recommendation 18

Performance management for civil service staff below SCS level is another responsibility delegated to individual departments. This has resulted in differences among departments in how they manage staff performance and support employees’ development. In particular, there is no common civil service-wide approach for identifying and dealing with staff underperformance in grades below the SCS.40 This has resulted in some departments not routinely collecting data on the number of underperforming staff in their organisations. HMRC, for example, told us it decentralised its performance management system to line managers when it introduced a new system in 2018, which means that it no longer collates central data on the number of underperforming staff.41