Recommendation 20

The Cabinet Office’s approach to dealing with staff underperformance, and raising performance levels more generally, is based on improving the confidence and capability of line managers in departments. The Cabinet Office told us that as part of work to implement the Civil Service People Plan, it is setting standards that line managers will need to work towards and is providing training to support line managers.45 However, it is hard to see how performance management in the civil service can be evaluated and improved without good data on the numbers of employees moving into and out of underperformance. If underperformance numbers and outcomes are not measured, it is not clear how 37 C&AG’s Report, para 21 38 Q101 39 Qq107–109 40 Q83 41 Q79 42 C&AG’s Report, paras 4.13, 4.15 43 Q83 44 C&AG’s Report, Figure 15 45 Q81 14 Civil service workforce: Recruitment, pay and performance management departments will be able to tell if their line managers are managing underperforming staff effectively, or more broadly, whether some departments have particular issues with levels of staff underperformance. The Cabinet Office recognised that there was scope to improve reporting in this area, and said it would work with departments to understand how best to do that.46 46 Qq84, 90–93 Civil service workforce: Recruitment, pay and performance management 15