The referendum result and the impending negotiations on Britain’s future relationship with the European Union represent a “huge opportunity” for the civil service, according to former joint head of the government economic service Vicky Pryce.
Speaking to CSW, Pryce, who has also served as the chief economist at the Department for Trade industry, declared: “This is the time for civil servants to show what they can do. They can prove how useful they are.”
During the referendum campaign prominent Leave supporters such as Iain Duncan Smith and Boris Johnson accused the civil service of “bias” and “propaganda”, but Pryce said the creation of a Brexit unit, to be led by Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin and made up of civil servants from the Cabinet Office, Treasury and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, will prove invaluable to a new government.
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“All the experience of decades dealing with the EU can now be put properly together, and the various options can be properly analysed,” she argued.
“You can do a proper cost-benefit, really do it a way that takes in to account business views, civil servants working with the Bank of England to work out what the various implications will be. So at least whoever is doing the negotiations afterwards, and hopefully they won’t be ignored, is going to be able to fight for the right things.”
And the timing of the result, said Pryce, may also be to the civil service’s advantage, with the relative quiet of the summer months allowing for time to produce a detailed report. “It’s rather good this can be done now during an interim government, and during the summer – [because] it is always a problem, and I remember this, in terms of what you are trying to finish by when.”
Pryce also believes the collective knowledge of the civil service will also be heavily relied upon.
“A lot of our civil servants and our ambassadors and people we have in the EU in the Commission have dealt with these issues many times before," she said. "So there is a lot of very useful stuff. Any government that comes in in the future will rely on civil servants to a considerable extent.”
However, when asked about the possible creation of a Ministry for Brexit, an innovation promised by Conservative leadership candidate Theresa May, Pryce said: “Who knows whether there will be Brexit along the lines people are talking about? Anything can happen.”