Ministers should slash the size of the senior civil service by 40% and seek to restore pay to 2010 levels, a think tank has said.
“A considerably smaller but much better paid senior civil service would provide a better service for ministers and the public,” the conservative Policy Exchange think tank said in its latest report, Getting a grip on the system: restoring ministerial authority over the machine, which features support and a foreword from former Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove.
Today’s report argues that in recent years, power has “leached away from ministers to arm’s length bodies, unaccountable advisory groups and experts, the civil service and the courts”.
Reducing the size of the civil service, along with increasing the number of special advisers in government, giving ministers greater powers over senior civil service appointments and tackling ministerial churn, is a critical step to reverse this power shift and enable the government to meet its policy priorities, according to Policy Exchange.
The report notes that there have been many “unflattering comparisons” between the UK civil service and that of Singapore – widely considered to be a bastion of efficiency.
“The public will not get a Singapore-like civil service with relentlessly falling wages. Nor, however, can the public continue to afford the expansion and grade drift which this paper describes in the higher echelons of the civil service even at current pay rates, let alone on more generous terms,” it says.
It calls for a 40% cut to the size of the senior civil service – which has expanded by 67% since 2012 – and a similar cut to the government policy profession.
It should use the savings from this move to fund pay restoration to 2010 levels, the think tank said. The report calls on ministers to ask the Senior Salaries Review Body, which makes recommendations on SCS pay, for advice on how to do this and says it should consider a 30% increase in wages.
It notes that the SSRB has repeatedly drawn attention to falls in civil service pay, especially at senior levels, since 2010 – as well as the growing gap between pay in the civil service and comparable private sector roles and other parts of the public sector like local government and the NHS.
Government policies on pay and progression “have led logically to the phenomenon of grade drift and churn”, the report says.
“Different parties may have different views on the required size of the civil service, depending on the fiscal position and the new government’s policy priorities,” the report said.
“Whatever the new government’s views on this might be, there is a strong case for scaling back the size of certain parts of the central civil service, in particular the senior civil service and the policy core and reviewing the overall pay package.”
This process of “reducing and reshaping” the civil service must be accompanied by training “to ensure that the civil service is of the highest calibre”, says the report, which calls the abolition of the National School for Government by the coalition government in 2012 a “mistake”.
It echoes calls from commentators including former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill to set up a similar institution to provide both generalist and specialist training at all levels of the civil service.
More special advisers
While the civil service shrinks, the number of special advisers in government should increase, Policy Exchange said. The report says ministers and spads have become “ever more outnumbered” in departments as the SCS and policy profession have grown.
“The hollowed out nature of political parties means ministers have less dedicated policy resource supporting them, making them dependent on an official machine which prizes conformity and consensus in its policy thinking, and extreme risk aversion with regard to the law,” the report says.
It says “artificial” constraints on the number of spads and their role should be abolished, “with ministers resisting the temptation to win short-term plaudits by tightening the numbers further as recommended, for example, by the recent Commission on Governance”. A February report from the commission called for a "rigorous limit" on the number of spads in government.
The Policy Exchange report suggests lifting either lifting the cap on spads entirely or setting the cap at between 200 and 300 – much higher than the existing number.
It also recommends creating two categories of spads: those attached to individual ministers, and a new category of subject matter experts based in revived Extended Ministerial Offices within departments, employed on fixed term contracts to support successive ministers from that administration. The last EMOs were dismantled in 2013.
“The number of spads is tiny compared to the overall civil service paybill," the report says. "Their role in supporting ministers on their priorities, communications and media is well understood. Our interviews also stressed how important they were also in helping ministers formulate and deliver their priorities."
It also says the role of spads should be “significantly enhanced” in areas such as public appointments, driving the delivery of key ministerial priorities and advising ministers on the management of their departments.
The central spad team in No.10 working on public appointments should also be enhanced, taking on responsibility for creating a template for job specifications and advertisements “from which departments will need to justify any divergences”, the report says. Any prospective recruitment campaigns would need to be agreed with the team.
Greater ministerial power over public appointments
Ministers should also have greater powers to influence public and senior civil service appointments and set direction for arm’s-length bodies, the report says.
“The role of the civil service in assuring that successful candidates are ‘appointable’ is an important check against nepotism, cronyism and corruption. It is absurd, however, that prominent public figures are initially sifted on the basis of an application form and required to subject themselves to a time-consuming, month-long bureaucratic process even to get to interview – rather than being assessed against their public record and capabilities,” it says.
“Ministers should be allowed to advance candidates straight to interview, and the whole recruitment process needs to be shaken up, as it currently entrenches a bias towards candidates with public sector or similar backgrounds.”
Ministers should also have the right to ask for officials to be moved into or out of roles “critical to their strategic priorities”, the report says.
While moves out “should not necessarily be seen as a performance issue for the individual concerned”, the report also says ministers should be more involved in day-to-day performance management – an area where it says ministerial input is seen as “faintly improper, despite the fact it is explicitly envisaged in the official senior civil service performance guidance”.
It says ministers should “reaffirm” that they will be consulted in the SCS performance regime, providing comments that can feed into individuals’ year-on-year performance reviews and the talent grid, which monitors civil servants’ long-term promotability. It says line managers are “obliged to take on board ministers’ views – but any such divergence is an appropriate matter for discussion between permanent secretaries and ministers”.
Civil service code update
The report also recommends two recommendations to the civil service code, in a bid to address issues around what it calls “officials’ conservatism about legal risk”.
It points to recent disputes about the Rwanda scheme, which the new government has scrapped. Home Office officials had been told that were a European Court of Human Rights judge to issue an injunction against a flight deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda under the scheme, they should ignore it if told to do so by ministers. The FDA union sought a judicial review – which was ultimately unsuccessful – on the matter, saying that ministers should amend either the legislation on the scheme or the civil service code to clarify their obligations.
To avoid similar situations in future, the Policy Exchange report calls for a “simple but powerful amendment” to the section of the civil service code that sets out officials’ duty to “comply with the law and uphold the administration of justice”. This section should instead read that officials must “comply with UK law and uphold the administration of justice”, it says.
It also says the obligation set out in the code not to “frustrate the implementation of decisions once taken” should be strengthened with an additional duty covering the policy development process.
Writing in the foreword, former Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said the report's recommendations are "well worth examining closely".
"In my experience change can be delivered – but the process can be painful and slow, and I recognise many of the issues the report identifies," he said.
He said the report "pushes back hard on the pretensions of those who believe whole areas of public life and decision-making impacting the population should be fenced off and left in the hands of technocrats beyond any political accountability."
"I have noticed a certain fellow feeling between politicians of all parties about the challenges they have faced delivering their political priorities once in office. It is interesting to see this insight reflected in the findings of a report co-written by a former civil servant and two former special advisers of both parties. I recommend it to all," he said.