Standing departments and a civil service

List the public functions — registers, treasury and accounts, public works, water, health, schools, court administration, inspection — and give each one department. Its mandate, published in the code, states:

• What it does, and what it may not do.
• Its powers — and that it has no power that is not written.
• Who it answers to, and how and when it reports.
• The date the mandate lapses unless renewed — five years is a workable term.

Two departments never share one task. Where functions touch, the mandate names which department leads.

Heads of department, chosen by the assembly or the elected executive, decide aims and priorities and answer for them in public. Officials carry them out, advise honestly, and keep their posts when the head changes.

Officials serve any lawful head equally: they do not campaign or act for any faction. In return, no head may instruct an official to break the law, falsify a record or hire a favourite; an official given such an instruction records it and refuses. The UK's civil service code names four values: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality.

Advertise every permanent post publicly with its duties and the standard required, for at least two weeks. Candidates take the same written test and structured interview, scored against the published standard by a panel of three, at least one from outside the department. Mark written tests without names: candidates write a number. Imperial China went further and had papers recopied by clerks before marking, so no examiner could know the handwriting.

Nobody sits on a panel for a relative, business partner or member of their household, and nobody supervises a relative. Publish each appointment with the number of applicants.

A probation year for each new official, ending in a written assessment. After it, promotion by competition among those qualified, on recorded performance and a test for the new duties.

Dismissal only for stated misconduct, incapacity, or the post being abolished, after a hearing with the right to answer and to appeal outside the department. Security of tenure is what lets an official give an unwelcome answer. Dismissal for proved misconduct must actually happen, or tenure becomes immunity.

Every matter gets a numbered file: the request, every document, and every decision with its reason and the name of the official who made it. Register files in a central index, so any can be found by number, subject or name.

Write every post's procedures down in a desk manual, so a newcomer can do the job from the manual and the files. Hand over in writing: an official leaving a post lists every open matter and where it stands.

No one person orders, approves and pays. Requisition, approval, receipt of goods and payment carry four different signatures — the control the ledger makes checkable. Write down a spending limit for each grade; anything above it goes up.

Rotate staff every three to five years in posts that issue permits, inspect, collect money or buy — long enough to learn the work, short enough that no private arrangement settles in. Declare every gift above a token value in a register.

Red tape is a cost paid by the public that appears in no budget. For each form, licence and procedure, record minutes to complete × number completed a year × the value of an hour — the Standard Cost Model the Netherlands adopted in 2003 to measure the burden of its rules. Publish the total for each department.

Then apply three rules: ask only for information that will be used; never ask for what the government already holds; and set a deadline for every decision, after which a low-risk application is treated as granted — as the EU Services Directive (2006) provides for business permits. The counter that applies these is citizen services.

At each mandate renewal, an outside reviewer — the audit office once there is one — reports: is the function still needed; is it done well; does another department do it too; what does each unit of service cost? The assembly then renews, merges, shrinks or closes the department.

Set staff numbers by the workload in the mandate, not by last year's budget. Officials of a closed department move into vacancies by competition; nobody is kept in a post with no function.