The quality of the senior civil service is continuing to "erode", the Senior Salaries Review Body has said, after finding that just 5% of applicants to roles at the three highest grades were meeting minimum standards.
The pay review body set out its ongoing concerns over recruitment, retention and other issues in its 2024 report, which recommends that senior civil servants, like those below the SCS, should get a pay rise of 5% and pay band minimums should rise by £1,000. The Cabinet Office has accepted both of the recommendations.
The SSRB said it has found “a further continuation of the problems we have seen with the SCS over many years, including difficulties attracting sufficient high-quality applicants, high levels of churn and the lack of a simple pay-progression system”.
“Consequently, we remain concerned that the quality of the cadre leading the government’s initiatives and overseeing public services is being eroded,” the pay review body said.
The SSRB found that 95% of applicants in 2022-23 to director, director general and permanent secretary positions did not meet the minimum standards to be appointable.
It also discovered that in 37% of recruitment campaigns across the SCS there was only one appointable candidate, up from 29% the previous year, while 6% of campaigns found no suitable candidates. Subsequently, 13% of SCS posts were not filled.
The body said the percentage of recommended candidates judged to be good or outstanding has steadily fallen, from 68% in 2018-19 to 54% in 2022-23.
It also said the directive to advertise all posts externally apart from a few exceptions, introduced in May 2022, led to no increase in the percentage of appointments that came from outside government. In 2022-23, 82% of appointments at SCS2 and SCS3 were existing civil servants, “a similar figure to the previous year”, the body said.
The SSRB said this “suggests that for external applicants, the civil service is not attractive”.
However, it added that 34% of new SCS entrants recruited through open competitions were external, “suggesting that there is scope for greater external recruitment”.
Senior civil service turnover rising
The SSRB also found an increase in the percentage of senior officials leaving or changing roles. It said 25% of senior civil servants left or changed their roles in 2022-23 “as a conservative estimate”, compared to 23% in 2021-22 and 21% in 2020-21.
It said the resignation rate also increased to a record high of 5.9% in 2022-23, up from 4.9% in 2021-22 and 3.1% in 2020-21.
“This is a high and increasing degree of churn, which will undoubtedly have a negative impact on the effectiveness and productivity of the SCS,” the body said.
More positively, the SSRB found that on average, senior officials were staying in jobs for longer. The median tenure of SCS members in their current role is 2.1 years, the median time they have been in their current pay band is 2.9 years, and the median time they have been in the SCS is four years – compared to 1.9 years, 2.6 years, and 3.6 years in 2022. But the SSRB said it still considered the average time senior officials were still spending in their jobs to be low.
Excessive churn means that “too many posts are occupied by individuals still building their expertise and key networks and the leadership of some departments and agencies lacks stability”, the body said. It added that frequent turnover “makes it difficult to hold leaders accountable”.
It said the high levels of churn “will also inevitably impact on the accountability and productivity of the SCS” and that the standards set at this level “have a knock-on effect across the civil service”.
The SSRB has been highlighting issues with recruitment and retention, as well as the lack of a simple pay progression system, since 2018. It said that “whilst the government, in the main, has agreed with our analysis, we have seen little or no progress in resolving them”.
It said, however, that it has “seen some promising signs” this year that it hopes “will make a material difference”, namely the implementation of measures in the Civil Service People Plan and the publication of the SCS Strategy. The document revealed the strategy is now due in January, having initially been targeted for this year.
The body said many of the measures in the people plan are “on track to be delivered by the end of this year, and if implemented well may start to improve civil service recruitment and management”.
But it added that “SCS reward needs a review in the round”, whether this comes from the new strategy or a separate review.
“We hope the planned SCS strategy will deliver this, and we look forward to engaging with the Cabinet Office on it,” it said. “An alternative would be to conduct an overarching review to a publicly stated timeline. The SSRB would also be very willing to contribute to work of that sort.”