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4 days ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton |Sienna Rodgers |Sophie Church
It has been derided as the Frankenstein’s monster of Whitehall: an ungainly collection of limbs, animated in madness, its fleeting autonomy as tragic as it is doomed. That its current political head is also reportedly being readied for the chop by the rival that pipped her to the top job has made the narrative irresistible.
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4 days ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton
Ministers have given their backing to all 62 recommendations in the just-published Strategic Defence Review 2025 – including a commitment to reduce the Ministry of Defence’s civil service costs by “at least 10%” by 2030.
The latest SDR also includes calls to ramp up the UK’s capacity for uncrewed and autonomous defence systems – such as drones – and for a “comprehensive approach” to improving industrial productivity that supports the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
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4 days ago | 
publictechnology.net | Jim Dunton
The Strategic Defence Review will see more than £1bn invested in cutting-edge battlefield technology that will allow UK forces to disable threats with drones or cyber operations – as well as more traditional methods – the Ministry of Defence has said. Ahead of the publication of the SDR next week, the MoD said the 10-year strategy will see the creation of a “Digital Targeting Web” that will apply lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.
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5 days ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Beckie Smith |Jim Dunton
The Ministry of Justice is setting up a new probation and reoffending directorate to bring policy work on the two areas closer together and respond to growing demand for the two services.
The directorate will provide “significant policy input” to deliver justice secretary Shabana Mahmood’s priority of using technology solutions to manage offenders in the community, according to a job advert for a director to lead the team.
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1 week ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has nominated Office for Budget Responsibility chair Richard Hughes for another five-year term at the helm of the public-finance watchdog.
Hughes, who is a former director of fiscal policy at the Treasury – and who also previously served as acting chief economist at the department – has held his current job at the OBR since 2020.
The OBR’s role of providing independent scrutiny of the government’s tax and spending plans is often not without controversy.
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1 week ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton |Beckie Smith
The Cabinet Office’s Places for Growth programme exceeded its original target of moving 22,000 civil service jobs out of London by the second quarter of 2024, just-published transparency data has revealed.
Launched in 2020 under the Johnson government, the initial deadline for relocations was the end of the decade – but the Sunak administration brought the target forward by three years in 2023.
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1 week ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton |Tevye Markson
The Northern Ireland Civil Service would not be able to handle a mandate for staff to work at least four days a week in their offices because there is not enough space, a Stormont committee has been told.
Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Committee for Finance heard this week that a programme to cut the number of offices NICS staff operate from by 28 over the next three years is on track to deliver – and that a back-to-the-office drive wouldn’t work.
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1 week ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton |Beckie Smith
The Strategic Defence Review will see more than £1bn invested in cutting-edge battlefield technology that will allow UK forces to disable threats with drones or cyber operations – as well as more traditional methods – the Ministry of Defence has said.
Ahead of the publication of the SDR next week, the MoD said the 10-year strategy will see the creation of a “Digital Targeting Web” that will apply lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.
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1 week ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton
Michael Padfield has been appointed as director and deputy head of the Attorney General’s Office.
AGO director general Douglas Wilson said Padfield had been promoted following an open and fair recruitment process across the civil service.
Padfield joined the AGO, which is a ministerial department responsible for providing advice and support to the law officers who give legal advice to government, in 2020.
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1 week ago | 
civilserviceworld.com | Jim Dunton |Sam Trendall
Four weeks ago, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, now based in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, brought 150 tech experts and town planning gurus from across the country together for a “hackathon”.
The two-day event, held at Leeds University’s Nexus innovation hub, was designed to create digital solutions to specific problems facing the planning system that MHCLG had identified.
