The Civil Service Commission is “largely satisfied” with departmental processes to make appointments by exception, according to the findings of a rapid review published today that showed that the number of these appointments made in July and August was “considerably lower” than in previous years.
The commission – an independent body that regulates appointments to the civil service – launched two reviews of appointments by exception in August, in response to concerns about high-profile appointments of officials with links to the Labour Party shortly after the general election.
The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 requires recruitment to the civil service to be conducted on the basis of "fair and open competition". However, "exceptional" appointments are also permitted, provided they meet certain criteria and are temporary.
In 2023-24 there were 6,977 appointments made under these exceptions – around 7%of total appointments made to the civil service.
Under the rules, the commission must approve such appointments if the role in question is at the highest levels of the civil service: SCS Pay Band 2. Below this level, departments have a “delegated authority” to make exceptional appointments for a maximum of two years.
In August, first civil service commissioner Gisela Stuart launched a review of departmental processes for approving these delegated appointments by exception and of all such appointments made in July and August. Alongside this, the commision’s audit committee reviewed the process for approving appointments by exception at the top levels and whether these had been properly followed over the same period.
In a letter to the cabinet secretary outlining the findings of these reviews, Stuart said the audit committee is “content that the commission’s processes are appropriate and have been followed”.
She added that the CSC will now publish details of these top-level appointments monthly – rather than annually – “to demonstrate the commission’s commitment to transparency and maintaining high levels of public trust”.
The wider review, carried out by the commission’s policy team and overseen by its board of fourteen independent commissioners – was “largely satisfied with processes in place within departments to apply, consider and approve exception requests”.
It found that departments made 550 delegated appointments by exception in July and August 2024, a number it described as “considerably lower than might have been expected based on data from previous years”.
Most of these were made under Exception 1 of the recruitment principles – which allows temporary appointments and “[does] not require the appointee to have a unique or specialised skill set – instead the emphasis is on the urgency or short-term nature of the role”.
The review did not re-decide any individual decisions, but did find two “technical” breaches of recruitment principles had occurred in this period. This is the least serious category of breach, described by the commission as an incident which has “no or minimal impact on the legal requirement that recruitment into the civil service is fair, open and based on merit”. Both of these related to record keeping in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
The comission makes several recommendations to “support greater consistency and improvements in practice” and says it will now “work with departments to ensure compliance with these recommendations and will monitor implementation on an ongoing basis through its audit”.
Among the recommendations is that departments develop “comprehensive exception approval forms” based on the CSC's own forms for cases requiring its approval. These forms should include a succession plan for the role and show that departments have given “sufficiently thorough conflict of interest consideration”.
The commission also says departments should make sure that “robust challenge processes are in place to ensure the terms of temporary appointments by exception are strictly applied” and “have appropriate tracking mechanisms in place to manage exception use and support succession planning”.
The review also identified a range of good practice, such as the use in one department of a “skills-match hub” to evaluate whether existing staff can be re-deployed rther than making an appointment by exception; and the creation of “clearance committees” comprising HR, finance and strategy teams “to ensure decisions to appoint via exception are appropriate”.