Arthur Reynolds is a former civil servant and government speechwriter.
Whitehall waited years for Labour’s return.
When Boris Johnson’s government rode high – before Partygate and Pincher – I sat in a press office that endlessly lamented their bosses.
Statements like “we really need a Labour government” went unchallenged. A head of office repeatedly rearranged his minister’s lunch with a Conservative on the department’s board because he couldn’t bear the thought of joining them. As the administration limped on, ministerial requests were delayed, sidestepped, or ignored.
Wherever I worked in Whitehall, the unspoken mantra was the same: ministers were children to indulge, not leaders to follow. But we were assured things would be different under Labour. At a departmental ‘away day’, a senior civil servant told us she looked forward to working with “ministers who cared about public service” again.
On election day, optimism was in the air. At the Health Department we were warned against clapping “too enthusiastically”. At the Home Office and the Treasury, officials cheered Cooper and Reeves like they were Moore and Charlton in ‘66. But before the champagne went flat, the same gripes bubbled up. Bureaucrats complained about indecisive ministers, an interfering Downing Street, and toothless mission boards. Ministers were lost in incoherent submissions, endless write-rounds, and the perpetual gloom of “expectation management”.
Less than six months later, Keir Starmer launched his fleeting war on Whitehall, declaring that too many civil servants were “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
None of this should have surprised anyone with a passing knowledge of government. The uncomfortable reality is that many civil servants are not invested in the government’s success, they’re after a good pension and an easy life. Performance is sacrificed at the altar of wellbeing. Hordes of staff work “compressed” hours – supposedly putting in an extra hour or two a day in exchange for an extra day off every week or fortnight. Others work mostly at home, leaving them uncontactable and unaccountable at moments of crisis.
Risk-taking – a prerequisite for real reform – is unconscionable. The default response to any hint of challenge becomes “I’ll have to check with my manager”, creating a bottleneck of decisions for a handful of senior officials. The notion that the Civil Service is a well of policy expertise is also painfully outdated. Generalists bounce from post to post, using an interview system that prohibits questions about actual job performance to climb the ranks.
This has allowed what Keir Starmer’s former Head of Political Strategy, Paul Ovenden, dubbed the ‘Stakeholder State’ to take over. Rather than implementing government policy, officials spend hours apologising for them in meetings with lobby groups, and in turn lobbying ministers to ditch their own proposals. It is inefficient in the extreme.
When Whitehall leads on policy, it shows a tremendous lack of political nous. This government’s most toxic policies – from the family farms tax to cutting winter fuel allowance – were the backwash of Whitehall ideas Tory ministers rejected. Officials need to learn to bury bad ideas.
As Lord Hermer recently demonstrated, publicly, ministers have reverted to the line that “the civil service is full of dynamic, committed people driven by a deep sense of public service”. In private they have found the system impossible to grip. One remarked that working with the civil servants responsible had made them “no longer blame their predecessors for the state of NHS dentistry”.
But the reforms they’ve proposed – reducing the number of consultations, gradual 15 per cent efficiency savings and cutting around 2 per cent of a 500,000-strong workforce – come straight from Starmer’s managerialist playbook: too little, too late.
A new tranche of Special Advisers to help junior ministers wade through the treacle will be helpful, but a handful of political staff in each department will still work around the clock to clean up the mess of part-time officials.
Reform’s recent proposal to replace the top two layers of civil servants in every department with political appointees was met with consternation by the unions, but it is in keeping with sane democracies like Germany. Breaking up the role of the Cabinet Secretary makes a great deal of sense – one person cannot lead the civil service, advise the Prime Minister, and manage the Cabinet. But their plan to axe 68,500 civil servants is a far cry from the radicalism Farage once projected.
Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to cut 132,000 jobs and return headcount to 2016 levels is closer to the mark. Although a future Tory administration must remember that quality is just as important as quantity. Redundancy processes often end up with those able to find jobs elsewhere going, whilst those who can’t gum up the system.
The Conservatives can take advantage of Reform’s timidity.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has floated allowing ministers to appoint “a few dozen” politically minded staff. That should be just the start. A handful of dynamic leaders won’t be able to motivate a rank and file that have grown comfortable in a broken system.
In the US, incoming administrations appoint thousands of officials from policy advisors to senior departmental leaders. The results speak for themselves. Since the pandemic, the US economy has grown roughly three times faster than ours. They produce more energy than they consume; we leave millions of tonnes of oil and gas in the ground, sacrificing jobs, tax revenue, and investment. Homes are 40 per cent cheaper per square metre and first time buyers need deposits that are half as big. That’s the reality of life in the UK: paying more to get less.
None of this is a coincidence.
The US system prioritises pace, accountability and delivery. Ours prioritises appeasing lobby groups and protecting the status quo.
Unless we abandon the polite fiction that a foot-dragging bureaucracy can power our nation’s renewal, any future right-wing government will be unable to make the radical change the public demands and deserves.
Arthur Reynolds is a former civil servant and government speechwriter.
Whitehall waited years for Labour’s return.
When Boris Johnson’s government rode high – before Partygate and Pincher – I sat in a press office that endlessly lamented their bosses.
Statements like “we really need a Labour government” went unchallenged. A head of office repeatedly rearranged his minister’s lunch with a Conservative on the department’s board because he couldn’t bear the thought of joining them. As the administration limped on, ministerial requests were delayed, sidestepped, or ignored.
Wherever I worked in Whitehall, the unspoken mantra was the same: ministers were children to indulge, not leaders to follow. But we were assured things would be different under Labour. At a departmental ‘away day’, a senior civil servant told us she looked forward to working with “ministers who cared about public service” again.
On election day, optimism was in the air. At the Health Department we were warned against clapping “too enthusiastically”. At the Home Office and the Treasury, officials cheered Cooper and Reeves like they were Moore and Charlton in ‘66. But before the champagne went flat, the same gripes bubbled up. Bureaucrats complained about indecisive ministers, an interfering Downing Street, and toothless mission boards. Ministers were lost in incoherent submissions, endless write-rounds, and the perpetual gloom of “expectation management”.
Less than six months later, Keir Starmer launched his fleeting war on Whitehall, declaring that too many civil servants were “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
None of this should have surprised anyone with a passing knowledge of government. The uncomfortable reality is that many civil servants are not invested in the government’s success, they’re after a good pension and an easy life. Performance is sacrificed at the altar of wellbeing. Hordes of staff work “compressed” hours – supposedly putting in an extra hour or two a day in exchange for an extra day off every week or fortnight. Others work mostly at home, leaving them uncontactable and unaccountable at moments of crisis.
Risk-taking – a prerequisite for real reform – is unconscionable. The default response to any hint of challenge becomes “I’ll have to check with my manager”, creating a bottleneck of decisions for a handful of senior officials. The notion that the Civil Service is a well of policy expertise is also painfully outdated. Generalists bounce from post to post, using an interview system that prohibits questions about actual job performance to climb the ranks.
This has allowed what Keir Starmer’s former Head of Political Strategy, Paul Ovenden, dubbed the ‘Stakeholder State’ to take over. Rather than implementing government policy, officials spend hours apologising for them in meetings with lobby groups, and in turn lobbying ministers to ditch their own proposals. It is inefficient in the extreme.
When Whitehall leads on policy, it shows a tremendous lack of political nous. This government’s most toxic policies – from the family farms tax to cutting winter fuel allowance – were the backwash of Whitehall ideas Tory ministers rejected. Officials need to learn to bury bad ideas.
As Lord Hermer recently demonstrated, publicly, ministers have reverted to the line that “the civil service is full of dynamic, committed people driven by a deep sense of public service”. In private they have found the system impossible to grip. One remarked that working with the civil servants responsible had made them “no longer blame their predecessors for the state of NHS dentistry”.
But the reforms they’ve proposed – reducing the number of consultations, gradual 15 per cent efficiency savings and cutting around 2 per cent of a 500,000-strong workforce – come straight from Starmer’s managerialist playbook: too little, too late.
A new tranche of Special Advisers to help junior ministers wade through the treacle will be helpful, but a handful of political staff in each department will still work around the clock to clean up the mess of part-time officials.
Reform’s recent proposal to replace the top two layers of civil servants in every department with political appointees was met with consternation by the unions, but it is in keeping with sane democracies like Germany. Breaking up the role of the Cabinet Secretary makes a great deal of sense – one person cannot lead the civil service, advise the Prime Minister, and manage the Cabinet. But their plan to axe 68,500 civil servants is a far cry from the radicalism Farage once projected.
Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to cut 132,000 jobs and return headcount to 2016 levels is closer to the mark. Although a future Tory administration must remember that quality is just as important as quantity. Redundancy processes often end up with those able to find jobs elsewhere going, whilst those who can’t gum up the system.
The Conservatives can take advantage of Reform’s timidity.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has floated allowing ministers to appoint “a few dozen” politically minded staff. That should be just the start. A handful of dynamic leaders won’t be able to motivate a rank and file that have grown comfortable in a broken system.
In the US, incoming administrations appoint thousands of officials from policy advisors to senior departmental leaders. The results speak for themselves. Since the pandemic, the US economy has grown roughly three times faster than ours. They produce more energy than they consume; we leave millions of tonnes of oil and gas in the ground, sacrificing jobs, tax revenue, and investment. Homes are 40 per cent cheaper per square metre and first time buyers need deposits that are half as big. That’s the reality of life in the UK: paying more to get less.
None of this is a coincidence.
The US system prioritises pace, accountability and delivery. Ours prioritises appeasing lobby groups and protecting the status quo.
Unless we abandon the polite fiction that a foot-dragging bureaucracy can power our nation’s renewal, any future right-wing government will be unable to make the radical change the public demands and deserves.