Déjà vu all over again

From time to time, ministers decide there is too much government, and too many civil servants and costing too much. Civil servants are not allowed to publicise their opinions but, if they did, they would suggest, respectfully of course, that government does indeed need improving but the problem lies with the ministers who are wholly untrained for their roles and do not stay in post long enough to learn them. They do not really know what they want, what is achievable or how to get it. Most could not run a bath, never mind the country.

This quote from the Civil Service Commission may ring a bell: “About 380,000 people work for the UK’s Civil Service. However, this number is expected to drop in the near future as a result of the Government’s effort to reduce public spending. But besides reduction of the expenses through smaller size, the Civil Service reform also foresees far reaching changes of its structure and organisation in order to make it more efficient yet remain one of the nation’s best employers.” The date? 2012. The number of civil servants eight years later? 456,410 and it has grown since. The last government announced a cull to pre-Brexit levels, namely by 20%, or even 40% in some departments, by 2025. The total reduction would number 91,000. The civil service unions took a dim view of that and muttered about cuts to public services and strike action. A Times readership poll of 10th June found 55% of its readers in favour of the cuts and 45% against.

Whilst there are indeed an excessive number of civil servants, the lack of ministerial competence, or perhaps training, is just as big an issue. Future chiefs of the armed forces attend Staff College, or the equivalent, to prepare them. A new minister, by contrast, arrives at his desk with no training whatever. There is no college for future ministers but there should be. Their senior colleagues may give them a few tips but they have never been trained either. How many can explain the difference between an executive agency and a non-departmental public body (NDPB)? Or know that NDPB employees are not civil servants at all? Realism should be top of the syllabus for this ministerial college. According to its 2021/22 annual plan, HM Treasury’s three priority outcomes were:

“1. Place the public finances on a sustainable footing by controlling public spending and designing sustainable taxes;

2. Level up the economy, ensuring strong employment and increase productivity across the regions and nations of the UK; and

3. Ensure the stability of the macroeconomic environment and financial system.” [5]

They are ludicrous because they are unquantified, too broad and beyond the remit of the Treasury. How, exactly, are their desk-bound 2,042 staff (2021/22 annual report Figure 1B) going to increase productivity UK-wide?

Each government department’s annual plan should have realistic, achievable and quantified targets and be discussed with the relevant select committee before the year begins. Before the summer break the following year, the department’s annual report should be reviewed at a meeting of the relevant ministers and select committee. Performance should be compared with plan and prior year.

Second on the syllabus should be arithmetic. It is astonishing that the Cabinet Office does not know how many it employs: recent estimates vary from roughly 2,000 to just under 13,000.[6] And the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, when Business Secretary, had plans for energy that, concerningly, did not add up.

Third on the list should be staff alignment with objectives. Executive agencies exist to deliver policies, leaving policy-making and legislative matters to the departmental central core. NDPBs have the ambiguous status of being independent and not independent at the same time. They should be converted to executive agencies if their objectives are essential and closed if not. The importance of assigning the relevant teams to executive agencies, whatever the contrary advice of civil servants, is that it greatly enhances of delivering the objectives.

In short, reducing the size of the civil service whilst improving the quality should be accompanied by formal training for would-be ministers in how government works now and how it should work in the future.