The UK has been badly governed for many years. Our public services are overstretched and poorly performing. GDP/head is flat-lining. There have been numerous scandals and too many failures to get on top of major policy questions such as immigration and the best way to fund social care and higher education. (These three are of course interrelated.) Politicians are ultimately responsible, of course, but the Civil Service must share the blame. This web page explores this issue and suggests further reading for those who want more detailed analysis.
Politicians
Whatever your political views, it is important to acknowledge that politicians, not civil servants, have taken (or failed to take) some of the most far reaching decisions in recent years. You can’t sensibly blame the Civil Service alone for politicians' repeated failure to reform the funding of social care, or their inability to decide whether to implement a hard or soft Brexit, or their failure to raise fuel duty, or their decision to tell the financial regulators to apply a ‘light touch’, so contributing to the 2008 financial crisis.
Most Senior Officials Kept Their Heads Down
But where were the senior civil servants? Their key skill is supposed to be speaking truth to power in a way that can be heard. It's pretty clear that ministers are nowadays less inclined to listen to civil service advice. So what happened?
Strong officials were sidelined or sacked, for a start. Ivan Rogers (sacked by Theresa May) and Tom Scholar (sacked by Liz Truss) were obvious examples but there were lots of others. Tim Shipman records that "Treasury officials were reluctant to criticise [Truss/Kwartang's] plans or warn that they would tank the markets. 'They'd just seen their boss [Scholar] beheaded in front of their eyes' a special adviser realised ... 'The only official prepared to fight was Clare Lombardelli, the chief economist at the Treasury ... [She] would sit there silently and Liz would go, "What do you think, Clare?" And she would tell her exactly what she thought. As a result, Liz didn't like Clare Lombardelli'."
It is arguable that this can't excuse the behaviour of the most senior official - Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood - whose biography revealed that he did not seriously challenge David Cameron’s decision to veto any pre-referendum planning. Nor did he drive home the seriousness of ‘the Irish border question', even though he well understood its danger. Perhaps most crucially, he and his senior colleagues (and the Cabinet itself) failed to ensure Cabinet discussion either before or after Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2016. Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond told UK in a Changing Europe that: “I did see some text on the economy the day before, but I had no idea that she was going to describe Brexit in the hardest possible terms. … I was completely and utterly horrified by what I felt was almost a coup: a definition of Brexit without any proper Cabinet consultation at all. … she dug a 20-foot-deep hole … in making that speech and, from that moment onwards, cupful by cupful of earth at a time, was trying to fill it in a bit so that she wasn’t in such a deep mess." But neither he nor the Cabinet Secretary did anything about it.
There was one brave resignation: that of Jonathan Jones, the head of the Government Legal Service. But he recognises that most officials had little choice but to keep their heads down: "I think the Civil Service ... survived this remarkably well. We took everything that was thrown at us, and we did what the politicians asked, whatever our personal views. ... Brexit was done, in the end, to the timetable, according to the wishes of the politicians. The big problem, I'm afraid, is on the political side, whether the politicians really did accept and understand what they were doing."
You certainly couldn't discern the poor state of many public services from the tone of senior officials' public statements, annual reports or presentations to their staff. We all recognise that ministers expect all public documents to begin positively. It would nevertheless have been good to hear some Permanent Secretaries and Agency Chief Executives recognise the seriousness of the challenges that they faced and the difficulty of addressing them in current circumstances. But I can't remember seeing any good examples of such accountability and they would argue that this is because they are primarily accountable to ministers and not to the public.
Keir Starmer has therefore inherited a bunch of senior officials whose characters are essentially passive and whose key skills are keeping the show on the road and keeping their heads down, rather than understanding how to effectively and energetically help ministers drive forward exciting new policies. He and Chris Wormald, his new Cabinet Secretary, probably need to fast track the promotion of some of the livelier current Directors and Directors General - or bring back some of those who were forced out?
What About All the Scandals?
Infected blood, Windrush, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Grenfell Tower, ineffective pandemic preparation, Partygate ... These scandals were all the result of unforgivable failings by individual civil servants and/or their management chains. Officials' only defence can be that they were being asked to do too much with inadequate austerity-driven resources. But what would it have cost to staff the relevant teams and provide them with adequate resources? Peanuts, surely, when compared with their departmental budgets. And negligible compared with the damage that was done as a result of those staffing and resourcing decisions.
It is particularly worrying that many officials seem incapable of learning from experience. Public Inquiries and NAO reports are to be survived and confined to history as soon as decently possible. So the same mistakes are repeated time after time.
Speaking on the Today Programme, former Met Police counter-terrorism chief Neil Basu was surely correct when he forecast the result of the inquiry into the tragic killings in Southport: "I can give you the last line of the inquiry conclusion now because it will be the same one I've seen in every major public inquiry in the last 30 years. It will be the agencies didn't communicate or share intelligence, they were underfunded, they were staffed by inexperienced untrained individuals who were simply overwhelmed by demand."
Isn't It All The Treasury's Fault?
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the support of Treasury officials, is by far the most powerful government minister and sometimes seems more powerful than the Prime Minister. The Chancellor often seems to have taken total control of domestic policy-making, as evidenced by their making major announcements about industrial, transport etc. policies.
It is nevertheless often argued that there is some form of Treasury orthodoxy over which successive Chancellors have little control. Journalists therefore often report that 'the Treasury have decided' something - or 'the Treasury have refused' to support some policy. Shouldn't they instead be crediting or blaming the Chancellor?
The IfG published a very good report on Treasury Orthodoxy in early 2024. Here is an extract:
The charge that the Treasury adopts an overly simple analysis of departments’ proposals is belied somewhat by The Green Book, the 2022 edition of which runs to just shy of 150 pages and provides high-level guidance on different types of costs and benefits that should be reflected in business cases. However, for some reason – maybe the Treasury staff’s limited resources and their need to meet financial and, ultimately, political priorities – outside observers do detect a gap between its theory and practice. This can be compounded by the perception that the Treasury is overly sceptical of departments’ proposals. Scepticism is a vital characteristic of any finance ministry but can lead to good policies being rejected, especially when combined with the Treasury’s power, the lack of counterbalance from other parts of government, and the inexperience of its spending officials.
The Treasury’s freedom of manoeuvre and sensitivity to the chancellor’s interests also result in its orthodoxy being enacted with perverse outcomes. It can contribute to an unhelpful flow of policy tinkering – too many rabbits being pulled out of too many hats – and to inefficient micromanagement of departments’ spending. On the other hand, there is a lack of reciprocal scrutiny of the Treasury, particularly on tax, exacerbated by an occasionally secretive approach to external engagement.
Underlying many of these criticisms is the question of the Treasury’s power relative to and over the rest of government. In some ways, the Treasury needs to be more powerful than other departments: it is responsible for public finance and so needs the power to ‘say no’. But in other ways the Treasury demonstrates a worrying imbalance of power in government that leads to bad outcomes in policy and spending. This includes it ‘bouncing’ departments into decisions, secrecy on tax, a lack of competence or authority in the rest of government to challenge Treasury decisions, and poor relations between the Treasury and the business department, in particular.
Cabinet or Presidential Government?
The final para, above, hints at the other major problem in Whitehall. We are supposed to have a Cabinet of Equals with the Prime Minister being First among Equals. In practice, however, most recent Prime Ministers have sought to centralise decision-making - though they have then found that this is inconsistent with the way in which departments relate to each other and to the Cabinet Office. The Prime Minister (or their Chief of Staff or their Policy Unit on their behalf) pull levers which have little or no effect. The IfG, in that same Treasury Orthodoxy report, conclude that ...
there is an imbalance of power at the centre of government over the ‘ownership’ of whole-of-government strategy. A lopsided centre means the prime minister lacks the firepower, intellectual support or control of the levers to set and drive strategy, leaving the Treasury to fill the resulting vacuum. And it is this that can amplify the views and practice of its orthodoxy in problematic ways.
Our view is that rather than decrying the orthodoxy (or equivalent phrase) of its own finance ministry, a government eager to address the problems we outline here should first fix short-termism – primarily through changes to the fiscal framework and strong political direction. Part of this will involve reforming the spending review process to better align funding decisions with government priorities. Beyond this, it should also make a genuine effort to strengthen the whole centre of government, which is notoriously underpowered despite the UK being one of the most centralised states among comparable economies – to this end, the Institute for Government’s Commission on the Centre of Government [reported] in February 2024.
My own view is that it would be better to decentralise both our state and central government - i.e. strengthen Cabinet government. But these two key questions certainly need to be examined.
What About Civil Service Reform?
I hope that it is clear from the above that civil service reform would address too tiny a target. Senior officials should certainly be more bold - and better managers. But there are many deeper issues. Power and decision-making is far too centralised in London whilst power and decision-making is either insufficiently centralised or insufficiently delegated with Whitehall. And there are fundamental weaknesses in officials' relationship with ministers, and in officials' lack of accountability. Parliamentarians, however, are greatly attached to their ability to hold their political opponents to account, and have little interest in the performance of local government or of officials. Significant change will therefore need the support of Parliament. In short ...
We need Whitehall/Westminster reform, not civil service reform.
Further Reading
Much of the above analysis has been informed by Ian Dunt's How Westminster Works ... and Why It Doesn't and Sam Freedman's Failed State.
My four publications will help you learn more about how Whitehall works on a day-to-day basis and the role of the Civil Service within our constitution.
More detailed commentary about and history of civil service reform may be found here.