## Notes from 16 January 2026 [[2026-01-15|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2026-01-17|Next note →]] John Manzoni served as the UK’s first **Chief Executive of the Civil Service** from 2014 to 2020, working alongside Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood. The role was created as an institutional innovation. Previously, the Cabinet Secretary — the UK’s most senior civil servant — combined responsibility for advising the Prime Minister with leadership of the civil service as an organization. [[Public Sector Reform in the UK|The new role separated these functions]], establishing a senior post focused on managing the civil service system, including people, functions, and operational capability across government. Manzoni joined government after a 30-year career in the oil and gas sector and returned to industry after leaving office. [This interview](https://heywoodquarterly.com/reflections-of-a-top-delivery-man/) with Peter McDonald for [[Heywood Foundation|Heywood Quarterly]], published in January 2025, comes five years after his departure. Read at some distance, it works less as a retrospective and more as a diagnosis of why large governments struggle to deliver. In the interview, Manzoni identifies two structural problems he encountered on arrival. First, the civil service systematically rewarded policy formulation over delivery. Second, departments operated as largely self-contained vertical silos, with weak cross-government coordination. His response was the creation of cross-government “functions”: professional groupings designed to define, strengthen, and professionalize specialist capabilities across departments. These functions went beyond traditional corporate services such as HR, finance, and legal, covering delivery-critical disciplines like commercial, property, procurement, and digital. Manzoni presents the reform not as a bureaucratic reshuffle, but as a way of making delivery expertise visible, senior, and system-wide. The model borrowed explicitly from large corporate organizations, where both line leaders and functional heads sit at the same board table. In the UK context, this meant permanent secretaries (department heads) working alongside functional leaders of equivalent seniority. Departments remained vertically accountable for decisions and outcomes, while functions provided horizontal capability, standards, and challenge. A recurring theme in the interview is that government often lacks a clear understanding of what it actually takes to deliver its priorities. Manzoni pushed for whole-of-government costing, reflecting how costs, capabilities, and levers are spread across departments, rather than treating policies as a collection of isolated budget lines. He is critical of the bilateral budget allocation process between the Treasury and individual departments, which he argues fails to capture this cross-cutting reality. His example is a political commitment to recruit 20,000 additional police officers. Once delivery specialists were involved, it became clear that this also required additional court capacity and at least three new prisons. Manzoni’s preferred model would allocate funding for such priorities to a single place, with one clearly accountable leader responsible for delivery across government. ## Prioritization and the limits of central control Manzoni repeatedly returns to what he sees as government’s core delivery problem: an overcrowded agenda. Reflecting on the current government’s five missions, he says they have “_the potential to be hugely valuable_” if they represent real choices, but warns that “_they cannot be broadened to be everything for everybody._” He also observes that delegation often flows upward rather than downward. Throughout the interview, he distinguishes between policy decisions that rightly belong with ministers and delivery decisions that should sit with officials. When delivery choices are routinely escalated, progress slows and accountability weakens. On arm’s-length bodies created under the UK’s _Next Steps_ reforms, Manzoni notes that “_it was a great idea… but then control crept back_.” He warns of a reinforcing cycle in which weaker leadership leads to tighter central control, further undermining effectiveness. His emphasis is on strong boards, clear multi-year mandates, and sponsor departments that provide strategic direction and trust rather than day-to-day control. ## Careers, incentives, and delivery experience Another thread running through the interview concerns career incentives inside the civil service. Manzoni argues that many officials have built careers primarily through policy roles, shaping what is valued and rewarded. Success remains closely associated with proximity to ministers, even though effective delegation often requires time away from the center. One logic behind the functional reforms was to create alternative career paths: professionals whose progression depended less on ministerial exposure and more on demonstrated competence. Manzoni draws a clear distinction between policy work, which relies heavily on intellectual capability, and delivery, which depends far more on accumulated experience. ## Interchange with the private sector Manzoni acknowledges that government is “_an order of magnitude more complex than running a company_”, particularly given the need to combine social and economic objectives under political constraint. Even so, he sees the private sector as an important source of delivery expertise — while admitting that “_we never cracked interchange_”. He is skeptical of bringing in outsiders for symbolic reasons rather than operational impact: “_you need people from the outside doing real jobs, not just being symbolic ambassadors._” That means giving them ownership of major delivery responsibilities, not roles defined by proximity to Downing Street. More broadly, he argues for greater permeability in both directions. This includes senior civil servants spending meaningful time outside central government — in the private sector or in local government — environments where execution is unavoidable and operational skills are continuously tested.