4.2 Under the current model, the departmental machinery for top-level decision-making and direction is based around the Defence Secretary (who periodically convenes groups of senior officials to advise him); the Defence Board, the senior non-Ministerial executive body, chaired by PUS; and the Chiefs of Staff (COS) Committee, through which CDS obtains the collective military advice of the Service Chiefs, including on the conduct of military operations.
4.3 Leaving aside operational decision-making, and the establishment last year of the National Security Council, we believe that there is considerable scope for improving the effectiveness of this departmental machinery. Although identified as a weakness in previous reviews of Defence organisation, Ministers are still involved in the decision-making process at too late a stage, and in an ad hoc way. This is not a faw unique to Defence; the Cabinet Office's recent instructions to all Departments on establishing main boards under the chairmanship of a lead Minister are in part designed to address the same basic issue. Below Ministerial level, the Defence Board is widely regarded as ill-constituted to take tough, timely decisions in the Defence interest. More generally our analysis suggests that the Department does too much business by committee in a way that confuses accountability, results in slow and lowest common denominator decisions, and generates unnecessary work.
4.4 To address these issues, we recommend a strengthened model for top-level decision-making and direction centred on a new Defence Board, based around the Defence Secretary, who would chair and remain individually accountable for decisions, and the PUS and CDS. To ensure the Board is as effective a body for governing Defence as possible, we advise that the Board should be slimmed down, but still able to cover the range of Defence activity and the key challenges the Department is facing. We recommend a membership of:
• Defence Secretary (Chair);
• An additional Minister;
• Permanent Secretary;
• Chief of the Defence Staff;
• Director General Finance - reflecting his role as the principal financial adviser;
• Chief of Defence Materiel - reflecting his responsibility for a major part of the Department's business, and the immediate priority of ensuring that the equipment and support programme is affordable and deliverable; and,
• Three Non-Executive Directors (NED), one of whom would act as the lead NED (as defined in Cabinet Office guidance), one of whom would chair the departmental Audit Committee under the Board and a third who would chair the Appointments Committee.
4.5 To genuinely govern Defence, the new Board would need to meet frequently (ten times a year), and cover the departmental strategy and business plan; financial management, including the allocation of resources, financial controls and risk; the approval of major investment proposals, and periodic performance monitoring. The new Board would not cover policy or operations, and although it could call senior leaders to account this would not obviate the need for PUS as Accounting Officer to hold TLB holders to account. In effect, the Board would subsume the functions currently performed by ad hoc Ministerial groups and much of that covered by the existing non-Ministerial Defence Board.
4.6 Looking more broadly, corporate decision-making should also be strengthened in three further ways. First, through greater clarity over the responsibilities and accountabilities of the senior leaders in Defence - we will return to this in parts 5 and 7. Second, the Department should move away from its current culture of consensual, committee-based decision-making and should instead move to a system under which senior individuals are empowered to take personal responsibility for achieving their objectives and are held rigorously to account for their performance. It should create committees only where absolutely necessary to support effective decision-making. Third, the Department should make increased use of evidence in decision-making, with improved analysis and management information clarifying the choices available to decision makers and setting out the costs and benefits of each option.