The prime minister has set an unenviable challenge for the newly appointed cabinet secretary, Sir Chris Wormald: the complete rewiring of the British state.
After his appointment was announced, many were questioning whether a senior official, so long part of the institutional furniture, could effectively shake up and disrupt the Whitehall machine. Having only worked around the civil service for three years, I speak from experience when I say it takes time to learn the ecosystem, the culture, and the levers of power. A new government – with a shelf life – does not have the luxury of time to learn these crucial aspects of delivering on the job from scratch.
Almost everyone agrees that the civil service urgently needs radical reform. With a government that appears to be up for the task, we have a window of opportunity. Many of the challenges faced are not new, and are commonly understood at all levels of the civil service, but past governments have lacked the conditions and willingness to tackle them. Many issues are either caused, or contributed to, by the broken system for reward.
Pay has been suppressed, neglected and restrained over many years; it fails to compete with jobs elsewhere and provides little progression. Departments have little autonomy or flexibility to address workforce needs. There is still no central reward strategy, and civil servants are not incentivised to develop their skills and capability.
On civil service reward, there are three things the FDA is asking the government to prioritise. None of them would be difficult to deliver, nor would they be high cost, but they would all help to make significant shifts on morale, motivation, recruitment and retention:
1. How pay is decided
Decades of decisions driven by political ideology have left the civil service trailing behind the rest of the public sector. Our years of working with the Senior Salaries Review Body have shown us that their pay recommendations are evidence-led, with consideration for recruitment and retention, skills and capability, and morale. A properly independent pay review body, with strengthened bargaining rights for unions in the decision process, would deliver better outcomes for civil servants.
2. How pay is progressed
The civil service is sorely lacking any system for pay progression. Aside from a few outliers in departments, few civil servants see their pay increase in any meaningful way. This leads to low morale, disincentivises development of skills and contributes to churn, as people move jobs in attempts to increase pay. Since the abandonment of capability-based pay we’ve seen no alternative proposals to address this – a pay progression strategy is vital if the civil service leadership is serious about its ambitions.
3. Increase employer flexibility
The civil service is made up of more than 120 employers. The centre can’t be best placed to make decisions for each employer’s needs and nuances. The current delegated pay remit process – which has essentially amounted to cost control – has left employers hamstrung, and without any flexibility to innovate, or creatively target anomalies. In order for employers to be competitive with their respective markets, the system needs to allow employers to own and drive their own reward strategies, utilising their own funds. A new pay review body process could remove the cost control mechanisms and cumbersome business case processes currently in use, helping to provide employers with flexibility where needed, recognising the differences across the civil service.
To deliver change at pace across the public sector, we need a motivated, talented, skilled and valued civil service. The state’s lack of modernisation and reform over decades has led to a creaking public sector and problems that have been left to fester are being felt more acutely by the year. With a new government, a new cabinet secretary and public services at breaking point, the time for reform is now.
Lauren Crowley is assistant general secretary of the FDA. She leads for the union on pay, equality, the SCS and legal.