Speaking in an interview with CSW as she leaves her Department of Health job to stand in May’s mayoral contest, Benita said that “this year’s going to be so difficult, just in terms of getting the job done, so there’s a danger that a lot of the corporate issues, a lot of the agendas like diversity will get overlooked.”
Only a diverse civil service will be able to meet the huge challenges facing Britain, she argued, “because the more representative you are in terms of your policy advice, the better chance you have of getting the right solutions.” So “it isn’t the moment to take your foot off the pedal – but there’s a risk that might happen.”
Benita praised the commitment of new head of the civil service Sir Bob Kerslake to the issue, but raised concerns that the splitting of his job from that of the cabinet secretary will weaken his ability to pursue the diversity agenda. And she suggested that one of departing cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell’s three successors should have been a woman, saying: “When Gus goes, they split his role and three people succeed him – not one of them a woman. I think that’s quite disappointing”.
Benita also argued that when the coalition took power, the civil service was “so nervous of being seen to be stuck in the past that we almost bent over backwards to say: ‘We can deliver anything.’ And in doing that maybe we didn’t put forward, in the way we ordinarily would, the objective, risk-based evidence on some policies. I think we and the government paid for that quite quickly – in that the policies went a certain way and then we had to pull back.”
The civil service knew that as a new administration took power “you have to show that you’re there to serve the government of the day; that you’re not wedded to anything in the past”, said Benita – but “we were slightly nervous, and a bit scared of saying: ‘We don’t think you should do that’.” The result was that the government ended up trying to implement flawed policies, she said.
Similar mistakes were made across Whitehall, Benita said, but she had the clearest view of events at the Department of Health, where “we ended up with a listening exercise unprecedented in terms of stopping policy at the legislative stage. Could we have done more at the beginning? Was there a point at which officials should have said: ‘We really need to slow down a bit, even if we agree with this and think it’s going to work’? Maybe we should have done that.”
Read the full interview with Siobhan Benita
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