The National Armaments Director Group has appointed Jim Carter as its permanent Director General for Commercial and Industry after an external competition, the organisation stated.
Carter has been serving in the role on an interim basis. According to the release, he previously led commercial activity at the Submarine Delivery Agency from 2020 and held senior positions at the Cabinet Office, Network Rail and Cable and Wireless.
His appointment comes as the NAD Group moves ahead with the Strategic Defence Review and Defence Reform, which it describes as the most significant changes to defence in more than fifty years.
In the post, Carter will lead the Defence Industrial Strategy and oversee the transformation of the group’s commercial and industry work. The organisation says this includes strengthening collaboration with industry, reducing contracting timelines and improving the pace of development. He will oversee a team of more than 2,500 personnel. The release highlights his role as Champion for Small and Medium Enterprises, which is intended to widen access for smaller suppliers across the defence sector.
National Armaments Director Rupert Pearce said “Jim’s appointment is excellent news. His deep commercial expertise and proven leadership will be invaluable as we implement the Defence Industrial Strategy and drive the transformation needed to for our Armed Forces to have the capabilities they need.”
Carter said “it’s an exciting time to be leading our commercial experts as we forge strategic partnerships with industry” and added that he looks forward to establishing what he described as a new relationship with suppliers.
The NAD Group brings together roughly 27,000 personnel across capability design, development and delivery.
Another insider. Not a real industry captain who could come in and sort out the mess of procurement. These people go from one civil service job to the next. Nothing will change.
Cable & Wireless were a private company. depends when he worked there
Headhunters were desperately looking for atone to put foward for this job.
My suspicion is that he got the job due to an absence of better candidates.
“I’ve worked with many civil servants and ministers, past and present, who are desperate for change. Let’s bring the world of policy making blinking into the light, putting the needs of the public front and centre”.
Jonathan Slater, Permanent Secretary for the Department for Education 2016-2020.
‘…ministers run things, but typically they don’t understand anything about the civil service…..They generally don’t know very much about their policy area……..Typically they’ve never run anything.
So if you just leave it to ministers, you’re never going to really get any change……it’s just typically not their area of competence or interest, just the nature of the system.
So that leaves the civil servants. Are they putting ideas, radical changes in front of ministers who are turning them down? No, they’re not……the majority of people at the top of the civil service not having the faintest idea just how poor it is. So why would they?
And of course, why haven’t the people at the top of the civil service got any idea how poor it is? Because they’ve never done anything else. I mean, it’s simple enough…..PPE fast stream, you join the UK, Rolls Royce, civil service is the best in the world. These are all quotes from people who Philip and I worked for. So why are you going to radically reform that then? And then you get to the top of it? Well, it can’t be that bad then, can it?
And that’s of course come with any profession. When you get to the top of the profession you’re not going to think it’s very poor at choosing the people to run it, are you?’
‘Published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, where Slater is a visiting professor, the paper argues the link between the civil service policymakers and the wider public doesn’t seem to have improved since 1968, when a report by Lord Fulton identified a lack of contact between the service and the wider community as a serious problem. Slater says the inability of government – including his own former department – to “put ourselves in the public’s shoes” is likely to loom large in the forthcoming public inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.’
Prescient
‘Fixing Whitehall’s broken policy machine’ Jonathan Slater 2022
‘He makes the following recommendations:
Civil service leadership which challenges head-on the pervading culture of remoteness, “studied neutrality” and “emotional detachment”.
Rewarding officials for what they achieve on the ground, rather than just for helping ministers with short-term fixes.
Managing people’s careers, so that policymakers genuinely learn the reality of frontline delivery early on their careers, and cannot get promoted without it.
Transparency and accountability for policymakers, making civil servants account to parliamentary select committees for the options appraisals they prepare for their ministers.’
To do that, a reforming government will require outside experts to lead a light on its feet and swiftly reporting commission.
Read ‘Seven key duties for civil servants in central government’ produced by the Danish Agency for the Modernisation of Public Administration…then appoint Danish retired civil servants, a dozen of them, to a reforming commission and let them get cracking.