It seems almost everyone agrees that the civil service is struggling. Overcentralised, insular and stubborn, it is painted as an outdated mess – a fax machine in a world of computers.
In government, both major parties have proposed policy solutions to fix this – including reducing headcount, creating new schemes to bring in outside innovators, and increasing collaboration with external experts. But to date, very little has been said or proposed about what political changes are needed to make these policy solutions viable.
As Sam Freedman has spoken about recently, there is often a divide between the policy and the politics – the technocratic solutions to fix something versus the reality of political incentives linked often to the media and public opinion. He talks about that in terms of climate change and immigration, but let’s now use the same framework to examine the scope for potential reform of the civil service.
Take the suggestion that civil servants need to more meaningfully consult with the outside world. It is often true that they don’t. But why is it true? Partly it’s because civil servants live in fear of telling someone something, it appearing in the next edition of the Daily Mail, and them being summoned for a spectacular dressing down by the relevant minister. Under the last government, I witnessed a senior civil servant make a fairly innocuous comment at a sector conference which was immediately written up by the press. Did ministers respond by saying “don’t worry about it, we’re really keen on thorough consultation so it’s fine”? Of course not. Whilst ministers remain intensely nervous of any media coverage which even slightly deviates from the agreed position, so civil servants will continue to be very selective in who they discuss things with openly and honestly.
In addition, if this hypothetical new, reformed civil service consults people and they tell them to do something politically unpalatable, what happens then? Accessing greater expertise is all well and good until you have to tell those experts that they’re working in a political environment and a lot of what they’re proposing just simply won’t get through spads and ministers. I’ve seen this happen countless times, from digital experts to data analysts – greater expertise often leads to even greater incredulity and frustration when ministers come back with an inevitable “no.”
Another common demand of the civil service is: surely it would be better if we made policy with 10-year not 10-month time horizons? And, funnily enough, that is actually most civil servants’ dream! But when the minister you’re talking to doesn’t know if they’ll be in government by then, and there is an election in between, it becomes very difficult (frankly, undemocratic) for an individual civil servant to do so. It’s the politics here, not the policy, that’s the blocker.
"Accessing greater expertise is all well and good until you have to tell those experts that they’re working in a political environment and a lot of what they’re proposing just simply won’t get through spads and ministers"
A final demand of the civil service I’ll look at is a current favourite – devolution. Again, of course there is merit to this – but the reality can often be very politically problematic. Under the last government, this is what the Department of Health found very quickly in the wake of the Lansley reforms of the NHS. In this case, the reforms had essentially told the department to butt out of local decision making in the health system. But as the months went on, it became more and more clear that responsibility for hitting NHS targets still sat with the government. It simply wasn’t politically viable to have an arrangement where A&E waiting times weren’t met, the PM was lambasted for it, but the Department of Health said “sorry, not our problem, guv”. The politics and the policy didn’t match up.
Reforming the way the civil service works involves difficult decisions. So yes, let’s implement policy solutions to make things better, but only if there’s an understanding that the politics will need to change too.
Reza Schwitzer is a former DfE civil servant and is currently director of external affairs at examination board AQA.