The Civil Service Benevolent Fund has been helping civil servants for more than 120 years. But its chief executive tells Matt Ross that as demand for its services increases, the organisation is facing a painful resource squeeze.
The civil service recruitment freeze announced by the government last week is designed to save £120m. The fact that this sum represents well under 0.1 per cent of our budget deficit gives an indication of how much tougher things are going to get: the civil service is likely to shrink significantly, and those who remain will find themselves under much greater pressure.
For Merrick Willis, the chief executive of the Civil Service Benevolent Fund, this prospect presents a huge challenge. Established in 1886, the CSBF is an independent charity dedicated to helping, advising and supporting current and former civil servants who’ve fallen on hard times – and the coming squeeze on the civil service is bound to drive up rates of debt, stress, mental health issues, long-term sickness, unemployment and a range of other problems.
Meanwhile, the CSBF has problems of its own. Much of its income comes in the form of regular donations from working civil servants, but changes in civil service culture have eroded its traditional funding base. The decline in formal induction sessions and the rise in external recruits at senior levels have eaten away at awareness levels, says Willis – and there are bigger issues. “The civil service used to be a much more cohesive community – organisationally, culturally, and from the point of view of career structure,” he explains. “Now jobs for life have gone, so people don’t tend to buy into institutions as they used to. But paradoxically, that means the throughput through the civil service is greater, so the number of people who are eligible for our help increases.”
Most civil servants, says Willis, used to feel a sense of ownership of the CSBF; but that has faded. “I’d like to see a general understanding and acceptance of the fact that the civil service has only got one major in-house charity,” he says. “To a lot of civil servants and some senior civil servants, that’s a self-evident truth; but there isn’t the feeling of general acceptance that, as an outsider coming into the civil service, I would have expected to find. The CSBF should be an accepted part of the community – but somehow it doesn’t feel like that.”
There is little doubt that the fund once enjoyed that privileged position. Before the rise of the welfare state the CSBF was in essence an insurance scheme, providing services such as residential care to those who’d paid in whilst the going was good. With the rise of state benefits and departments’ development of welfare units, the fund took a step back and became what Willis calls “a pure occupational charity”. But the in-house system of welfare units is now long gone, with employee support outsourced to private contractors that, Willis argues, are “one step removed; impersonal; don’t understand the system”.
That puts the CSBF back in the front line on employee welfare issues. “We’re an integral part of a net which has become increasingly wide-mesh as the traditional support mechanisms have been eroded,” says Willis, emphasising the fund’s expert advice work and its ability to provide financial support to those most in need: the CSBF disburses about £5m annually in grants.
Perhaps surprisingly, much of this support goes to serving rather than former civil servants. “The number of current civil servants that we help went up from 66 per cent in 2008 to 73 per cent in 2009,” Willis explains. “In general, it is lower grades who are going to become indebted or whatever, but that’s by no means exclusive. We recently had the very embarrassing situation of one of our volunteer visitors having to visit a former boss who had got into difficulties.”
The fund’s work with serving civil servants highlights what is, for Willis, a convincing reason why departments should give the fund more support. “The senior civil service has a health and wellbeing agenda, and part of that is around managing sickness absence – for example, helping the 40 per cent of people on long-term sick leave who are suffering from mental health problems,” he says. “Overwhelmingly, the evidence we have is that through enabling people to get through a period of particular difficulty, we can often enable them to return to work.
So supporting the fund’s work, Willis argues, produces real rewards in terms of lower rates of sickness absence and a happier workforce. However, he’s been disappointed at the levels of engagement among some senior civil servants and departments. “I think there’s a lack of commitment on the part of some SCS to the whole idea of their in-house charity; to the idea that there should be some form of help for people in these circumstances,” he says. “The proportion of donations from lower-grade civil servants tends to be higher than those from the higher grades. You would think that those in the senior grades might see it as part of their leadership role to show their visible support.”
Some SCS, Willis stresses, are extremely supportive – among them cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell – “but it’s not uniform, and it’s disappointing that we continually have to be making a case”. At his first meeting with the Cabinet Office, he remembers, “people there were referring to ‘your fund’, and my immediate riposte was: ‘It’s your fund, not mine. I’m just hired to run it for you’.”
Unless the CSBF regains that sense of ownership among civil servants at all levels, Willis fears, it will lose out in competition with mainstream and local charities. “We can’t go out and shake tins like Help for Heroes,” he comments. “We don’t want to compete on those terms. We want to be the in-house charity; the thing that people support because it’s supporting ourselves.”
So Willis fears that, as the civil service’s cohesiveness and stability weakens, levels of commitment to its dedicated employee support charity are declining. What’s more, he says, the numbers needing help from the fund are set to spiral. “The sort of reorganisation that’s going to take place in the wake of the election – allied to the downward pressure on numbers – is going to mean that [departments] can’t provide as much [employee] support as they might wish,” he says. “The commitment of the civil service to its benevolent fund – and indeed donor levels, which depend on the numbers of serving civil servants – are under pressure in turn. So we’re facing a double squeeze, with more calls on our resources at a time when there may be less coming through into our system.”
All this looks rather like a perfect storm for the CSBF; and for Willis, the only clear way out is via greater buy-in from key departments and senior officials. “We’re trying to work with the Cabinet Office to persuade them to give us better access. We need opportunities to get the message across – particularly to more senior people – that this is worth supporting,” he says. “We need senior civil servants to make their staff aware of us, and to say to them: ‘This is part of our civil service community’.”
“If we get that embedded better, then I think the fund can go on helping people in the way we’d like it to,” he concludes. “And if we can’t – well, then we face a longer-term problem.” At a time when levels of unemployment, debt and depression are likely to increase rapidly among today’s crop of civil servants, the civil service’s employee problem-solver faces problems of its own – and that could, for the civil service as a whole, prove really quite problematic.