Former health secretary Matt Hancock has spoken in defence of civil servants, saying it has never been his experience that officials were responsible for blocking policy objectives he was pursuing.
Recent years have seen a dramatic shift in political appetite for blaming the civil service for government policy objectives failing to materialise, with preparations for the UK’s departure from the European Union a particular flashpoint.
However, in a just-published interview for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect series, Hancock – who also served as culture secretary and paymaster general during his near-decade-long ministerial career – said officials were often scapegoated.
Hancock said he had never experienced civil servants blocking plans for something that was physically achievable.
“I observed in coalition in particular – because it was brought out into the light by the nature of coalition – that usually when a junior minister can’t achieve something, it’s because the secretary of state doesn’t want it to happen, but doesn’t want to tell them directly,” he said. “So it just goes into the grinder.”
The former minister added: “If, as a secretary of state, you can’t achieve something, it’s either because it’s not possible, or because it’s not legal and you don’t have the time, bandwidth or wherewithal to change the law, or because the prime minister doesn’t want it and he or she doesn’t want to tell you that they don’t want it. And then the civil service get the blame.
“To any new minister, I would say the civil service are not your blockers, but sometimes they are the messengers either of real-world impossibility – and you can push at that because sometimes they’re too cautious and that’s fine, but if you’ve pushed three times and you’re still getting a no, there is a real-world blocker.”
Hancock said ministers would undoubtedly find policy areas civil servants are “unkeen” on. However, he said those situations required further investigation of officials’ motives.
“They might have seen it before and think that it’s a disaster or they might think it’s unwise and therefore make it harder for you,” he said. “But my rule of thumb was if you push something three times and it won’t move, you’ve got to work out what the real-world blocker is.”
Hancock said discovering the PM to be the “real-world blocker” should result in a plan being dropped. But he said tracing the opposition to a special adviser in No.10 did not need to be terminal.
“Then it’s you versus that adviser to persuade the prime minister, and the prime minister of the day will choose: it will go one way or the other,” Hancock said. “There’s a whole art to getting that piece of paper into the prime minister’s box and sometimes you could be quite Machiavellian about that. Knowing how to unblock that blockage is an art form but those who blame the civil service are not leading in an effective way – that’s my strong view.”
Hancock quit as health secretary in June 2021, when leaked CCTV footage revealed him breaking social-distancing rules on government property with colleague and lover Gina Coladangelo.
Elsewhere in his Ministers Reflect interview, Hancock talked about his experiences at the helm of the Department of Health and Social Care when Covid-19 hit the UK in 2020, and of wrangles with Dominic Cummings.
Cummings was ‘agent of chaos'
Hancock said Cummings, who was chief adviser to then-PM Boris Johnson from July 2019 to November 2020, had brought chaos to the heart of government in the early weeks of the pandemic.
“His view was that he did not have to represent the view of his boss, and in those senior No.10 aide jobs that is unconstitutional and obviously wrong,” Hancock said. “it’s wrong for a reason: it’s because it’s totally impractical.”
Hancock added: “Cummings took the view that his view was more important than the prime minister’s and we now know that he also thought the prime minister was an idiot, although he didn’t make that clear at time. He held meetings that clashed with mine, whether intentionally or not, and caused chaos in accountability.”
The former health secretary said that once cabinet secretary at the time Sir Mark Sedwill had introduced new structures for decision-making in the pandemic response – leaving Cummings focused on testing – things sorted themselves out.
“Testing was a total nightmare for exactly the reasons of poor accountability, but at least it was constrained largely to that area,” Hancock said. “One of the reasons the vaccine project was such a success is because we kept it out of No.10 and the Cabinet Office.”
Hancock said the vaccine programme was “undoubtedly” the thing he was most proud of from his time in government.
“It was one of the most effective and largest programmes of government in civilian times," he said. “We went from the advice that it would take, in normal times, five to 10 years to develop a vaccine to delivering one before anybody else in the world, in 11 months.”
Introducing Covid rules was ‘out of body experience’
Hancock said he clearly recalled the huge implications of an early-2020 conversation with government chief scientific adviser Prof Chris Whitty at which they agreed that social restrictions needed to be introduced to put the brakes on the pandemic’s spread.
“I remember the out of body experience I had sitting in the cabinet room – I remember exactly which seat I was sitting in – when Chris Whitty and I had decided going into the meeting that we had to tell Boris that we had to stop all unnecessary social contact and ask everybody to do that," he said.
“I remember sitting there saying: ‘Prime minister, we are going to have to tell everybody to stop all unnecessary social contact'. And that felt deeply strange and completely unprecedented. I almost had a physical reaction to saying it.”
The full transcript of Hancock’s interview can be found here.