Return to Government, 2010–2016
Maude was appointed Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, with the right to attend Cabinet, on 12 May 2010, following the formation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition. As Cabinet Office Minister, Maude was responsible for: public service efficiency and reform groups, Civil Service issues, industrial relations strategy in the public sector, transparency, civil contingencies, civil society and cyber-security.
In 2010, Maude set up the Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG) in the Cabinet Office to work with HM Treasury, with the aim of making government departments more efficient. This work included stopping wasteful spending; improving the way government buys goods and services; reducing losses from fraud, error and debt; raising money by selling empty buildings and underused properties; and reviewing and reshaping large scale projects. Collectively these reforms introduced the 'functional model' within Government, by creating new cross-cutting functions such for legal, IT and digital, property, major projects, finance and HR.
Savings are difficult to measure, but the work of the ERG claimed to have contributed to £3.75 billion of savings in 2010–11, £5.5 billion in 2011–12 and an "unprecedented" £10 billion in 2012–13. The ERG claimed to achieve savings of at least £20 billion in the financial year 2014 to 2015. Cumulatively, by 2015, Maude had delivered more than £50 billion of audited savings during the Cameron–Clegg coalition government.
These savings included include £3.4 billion by reducing the size of the Civil Service and reforming Civil Service pensions; £3.8 billion by linking together departments to buy goods and services and enforcing controls on recruitment and use of consultants; and £0.6 billion by exiting 500,000 square metres of property. In December 2014, Francis Maude set out plans to make a further £10 billion of efficiency savings between 2017 and 2018 and an additional £15 to £20 billion for 2019 to 2020.
In June 2012, Maude laid out his plans for reforming the Civil Service. The Reform programme was endorsed by leadership of the Civil Service, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. The document laid out a series of practical actions including steps to improve the skills, abilities and performance of civil servants; introduce a sharper performance management system; create a modern employment offer for staff; improve IT and flexible working across departments; and tighten the delivery of major projects. A year after the publication of the initial plan, Maude updated Parliament with a One Year On document, setting out successes and failures. This document included various further steps: establishing the principle of Extended Ministerial Offices, and introducing Functional Leadership across Whitehall. However, in November 2013, former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler of Brockwell told the BBC that "Mr Maude and some of his colleagues don't understand leadership." Butler said the relationship between ministers and the Civil Service worked best when there was loyalty on both side and public criticism showed something was wrong. A spokesman for Maude said good leadership required issues to be addressed, not swept under the carpet.
Maude oversaw the Government's groundbreaking transparency policy. This work includes making sure that departments include specific open data commitments in their business plans, regularly publishing open data sets on all central and local government spending over £25,000, senior staff salary details and how the government is performing against objectives. Data.gov.uk contains over 9,000 datasets including local crime statistics, sentencing rates, hospital infection rates and GP performance.
Maude also led the UK Government's work with the Open Government Partnership. This work helped make the British government the most open in the world at the time, and led directly to the creation of services such as the Citymapper app and challenger banks like Monzo.
Following Maude's reforms, the United Nations rated the UK government as the most open in world.
Maude was responsible for the creation of the Government Digital Service, with the aim to consolidate internal IT and replace government 1,700 various websites with a single web hub, gov.uk. The new consolidated website won Design of the Year 2013 at the Design Museum awards, beating The Shard and the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics cauldron. Its revolutionary single source model inspired government websites around the world, including in the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
The Government Digital Strategy also committed Departments to redesigning all existing government services that serve more than 100,000 users each year. Maude's office estimated that moving services from offline to digital channels could save approximately £1.8 billion a year; at the time digital transactions cost 20 pence each compared to £3 for a phone call and £7 for a physical letter.
In June 2014, Maude warned that elderly people would have to apply for key benefits, including Carer's Allowance online. His remarks were criticized by organizations who work with the elderly partly on the grounds that poorer people may not be able to afford computer facilities, and partly because even computer literate people may lose their skills in old age. Whilst critics estimated that over five million pensioners have never used the internet, Maude said that 'refuseniks' could be offered a one-off lesson.
Maude did not seek re-election as an MP at the 2015 general election. In May 2015, Maude was elevated to the House of Lords and he was created, by letters patent, Baron Maude of Horsham, of Shipley in the County of West Sussex on 26 May 2015. This allowed him to be appointed as Minister of State for Trade and Investment jointly at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, replacing Lord Livingston of Parkhead. Nine months later, Maude announced his resignation from this post on 10 February 2016, to be replaced by Mark Price.
In 2021, Maude completed a pro-bono review of the state of the cross-cutting 'functional model' and spend controls system he had set up as Minsiter for the Cabinet Office in 2010 to 2015. In 2022 he was appointed to conduct an independent review of governance and accountability in the Civil Service. This review was published in 2023 with 57 recommendations for improving the operation of the Civil Service.
