At a three-day, three-city event with more than 150 sessions, it’s easy to spot a pattern – and at Civil Service Live (CSL), one emerged whenever Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude or a top-rank official passed the mic to the audience. It’s hard to find a more polite crowd than a conference of civil servants, but almost all such speakers were challenged – early on, and very directly – on why politicians and special advisers are being allowed to attack and undermine civil servants in the press.
However, having scratched that painful itch – as CSL crowds have been doing ever since 2010, with steadily growing levels of irritation – each audience moved on. And few raised the topics of pay, pensions, terms & conditions, or even the continuing resource budget cuts: officials appeared reluctant to publicly question austerity policies. Instead, they talked about the scarcity of training; the weakness of Whitehall IT systems; the rigidity of grade and departmental career development processes. In short, they complained that they lack many of the tools for the job – tools that the Civil Service Reform Plan promised to provide.
Indeed, the CSL audience proved receptive to some quite challenging messages on civil service capabilities and structures. Public Administration Select Committee chair Bernard Jenkin depicted Whitehall as fundamentally unsuited to the modern world, and found a large minority sympathetic – perhaps because he presented civil servants as the victims of antiquated systems, rather than their defenders. Even Maude, who’s often criticised the civil service to build support for cuts and reforms, won applause by sympathising with officials’ frustration, focusing on improvements rather than weaknesses, and calling for a resurrection of Gus O’Donnell’s ‘four P’s’ – though he could quickly lose this ground if he fails to maintain this constructive tone.
These audiences were right to press leaders on capability issues such as talent management and IT: as cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood acknowledged, progress on improving the workplace has been extremely slow. And if the perm secs and ministers start to deliver on these aspects of civil service reform – plus bigger training budgets and a stronger focus on diversity, which also drew many questions from the floor – their staff will both start to enjoy some benefits from all this change, and see that their employers respect and value them.
Many civil servants have shown that they understand the need for reform. And if they’re given the skills, freedoms and technologies that they need to deliver on the government’s ambitions, the downtrodden atmosphere in government offices could lift quickly. Meanwhile, a better-equipped civil service would find it easier to realise ministers’ ambitions, in turn reducing politicians’ frustrations with their departments.
It is, in short, a potential win-win. And whilst it’s one that would be demanding of both managers’ time and investment cash – in an era when both are in short supply – the alternatives are far worse. Civil service leaders and the Cabinet Office must focus on fulfilling their promises to give civil servants the tools for the job. Then the appetite for reform will grow, the civil service’s ability to deliver will improve – and we may, finally, hold a Civil Service Live at which civil servants are not first interested in why their own bosses keep tearing strips off them in the country’s most public forums. ?
Matt Ross, editor. matt.ross@dods.co.uk
See also: Workplace improvement too slow, leaders confess