Civil service is poor, pompous and arrogant, say two former Permanent Secretaries

The title of this Substack post repeats that of the BBC’s Chris Mason’s report of a fascinating conversation at an event organised by the Reform think tank on 19 January 2023.

The conversation was mainly between Reform’s Charlotte Pickles and two former Permanent Secretaries who spoke very candidly about the weaknesses of the current UK civil service. This was part of Reform’s inquiry into Reimagining Whitehall.

It is important that their concerns are shared as widely as possible so, to that end, I have prepared the following lightly edited transcript of the conversation. (A video of the event can be seen here.) Please do draw this post to the attention of anyone else who might be interested.

For me, though, one important message from both speakers is that the problem must be addressed by Parliament. The civil service cannot fix it on its own. I have highlighted a small number of sentences which make that point.

Martin Stanley

Editor - Understanding the Civil Service

The Transcript

Charlotte Pickles

Everyone in this room will be very familiar with the decades of reports, comment pieces, commentary in general had on whether we need reform, modernization, updating, whatever words you want to use of Whitehall and the Civil service and lots of common refrains around the types of people we have in there. Are people too similar?

Do we have cognitive diversity? Are we getting people from different backgrounds and experiences? Why can we not do long term thinking, higher things? So short term, do we have the right skills? And that's everything from the soft skills, but also the kind of hard and technical skills that we often call ourselves.

Coming back to, why is it so siloed, why can't we do cross government working? There's a whole series of things that people will be incredibly familiar with. So I want to start with the question of why is it we haven't solved any of these? Is there a question of appetite for reform? Who should be responsible for driving the changes?

If we feel like we have quite a good idea of what the problems are and we keep talking about them, where does responsibility sit? Is there a sense of collective ownership of the corporate functionality of Whitehall?

You both sat at the most senior levels in Whitehall. What would be your reflection of why we haven't achieved some of those reforms.

Jonathan Slater

So I would say, obviously government is in charge, ministers run things, but typically they don't understand anything about the civil service or whether it's any good or not because how would they? They generally don't know very much about their policy area. Why would they know anything about the civil service? Typically they've never run anything.

So if you just leave it to ministers, you're never going to really get any change or you're very unlikely to, because it's just typically not their area of competence or interest, just the nature of the system.

So that leaves the civil servants. Are they putting ideas, radical changes in front of ministers who are turning them down? No, they're not. Why do the people who run the service, people like Philip and I of course, [let this happen] and I guess this is typically because the majority of people at the top of the civil service not having the faintest idea just how poor it is. So why would they?

And of course, why haven't the people at the top of the civil service got any idea how poor it is? Because they've never done anything else. I mean, it's simple enough

PPE fast stream, you join the UK, Rolls Royce, civil service is the best in the world. These are all quotes from people who Philip and I worked for. So why are you going to radically reform that then?

And then you get to the top of it? Well, it can't be that bad then, can it?

And that's of course come with any profession. When you get to the top of the profession you're not going to think it's very poor at choosing the people to run it, are you?

I would give that as my answer.

Charlotte Pickles

Thank you. I said to someone at the start of this, I wonder how candid they'll be.

Philip Rycroft

Yeah, so let me preface my answer with two comments.

One, and I think this is worth repeating endlessly, because the civil service gets a lot of criticism, some of it absolutely justified, but on a personal basis, often not justified. There are many thousands of hardworking, dedicated public servants who are good, clever, hardworking people who should be respected. I think the system in which they're now operating is not given them the opportunity that I think they should have.

I think the other introductory remark I would make is I think that what we've seen over time, and there'll be others in this room who've studied this more closely than I have, I haven't done as much of the history of the civil service as I would like to have done, but I think what we've witnessed is a steady degradation of the authority of the Civil Service: the authority of the Civil Service in the interactions with ministers it sort of granted us. It's sort of the status within the constitutional framework that's unwritten constitution, clearly. So this is a thing about perception rather than changing statute, the rules. But over time, I think the place that the Civil Service has in the running of the country has diminished.

And I think if we don't fix this, that process will continue. It's not like dramatic, it's not going to fall off the edge of a cliff next week, but it will mean that the Civil Service is less capable, less competent, less able to influence the function in the country than it has been in the past. I think this is quite serious.

Having said all that, I absolutely agree with Jonathan's perception. I think the sort of self referential nature of the system, I think, has been a big inhibitor on reform. It's not as though there haven't been attempts at reform, and you quote in your paper, Jonathan,  Gus O'Donnels four P's, Jeremy Heywood, digital, data and diversity and so on.

But that reform is never, it seems to me, dropped deep enough into the system and I think to me this is exacerbated by the things that are deemed most important, which is essentially chasing after ministers and solving the political problems. And someone like Jeremy Heywood was brilliant at that. Absolutely. There's no question that his capacity, and I worked in Nick Clegg's office through the coalition years and so was right at the heart of the machine when political problems would emerge, and the way that the system then functioned around to get those sorted out was brilliant in many ways, but that meant that we were chasing, constantly chasing our tail. So there was the moment of reflection, of stepping back, of saying, no, no, we need a deep, serious reform change programme here, which is going to occupy new Cabinet Secretary, 50% of your time for the next three years, and new Permanent Secretaries, it's going to be 50% of your time and you're just going to have to work through that. Never got close to that. So that the reforms that have had, the change that's happened has not got deep beneath the surface, and hence what John very adequately described as the problems the system has.

Charlotte Pickles

And is that then in part because Permanent Secretaries don't see their primary role as, kind of, the corporate functioning of their department? Is it because of the types of people on the whole who are moving through? So a lot of Permanent Secretary are from the policy profession, similar backgrounds.  How do you shake that up?

Philip Rycroft

Let me tell you a little anecdote. So I came down to Whitehall in 2009, sort of a bit starry eyed from the chilly north, and I joined a department called the Department for Innovation University and Skills anyone remember that?  And that's been quite a big deal for me because I still left the family in the north, announcing myself, coming down to London, and within four weeks of joining this Department, it was abolished and it was going to be more than abolished, it was going to be merged with what was at the time BERR. And I remember sitting in this room with all of these DGS and the Permanent Secretary having a conversation about this, and the talks, very serious, earnest talk about whether this is a merger or a takeover.  And I was thinking, Hang a minute.  I thought you all work for the same organisation. And I just couldn't get my head around this, the sense that this was a really competitive space and the DIUS people were very worried about being taken over by BERR, which is effectively what did happen.

What it illustrates to me is that Whitehall does function as a series of sort of pyramids of power which are departments and the primary loyalty of a permanent secretary and the department tends to be first Secretary of State second ... and then a very long distance third the country.

Now, let me again just illustrate that why I say that because I was dealing, of course, through a lot of my Whitehall time with the whole integrity of the UK Union and whether the UK would survive as an entity. And it was a very difficult challenge to get departments to pay attention to this, which again, I found quite extraordinary because the integrity of your territory, you'd have thought would be absolutely on top of the list of things you'd be worrying about as a centralized Civil Servant. And so, sorry, long answer, but the way in which Whitehall functions, as Jonathan described, when you've shinned your way up the greasy pole to get to the top, that tends to be the focus, not the corporate functioning.

Jonathan Slater

Just to reinforce that point.

Philip is obviously right. How he started; the Civil Service is packed full of really clever, really committed, hardworking people. That always has been. And it's tremendously impressive, the calibre of people in the Civil Service. And it's equally extraordinary how we waste them and how you turn people really quickly.

You ask any civil servant. I would attend every induction meeting of any new starters in my department. You turn people really quickly from people who say they join the Civil Service because they want to make a difference. And we ask in a year's time, how's that going then? And how does what you thought you were joining the Civil Service to do compare with what you're doing? And they're doing a lot of writing.

I'm oversimplifying. But we turn really good people into people who are just who are frustrated. And the answer I gave in that publication I produced last year was that this system would only change, will only change, if you open it up, if the civil servants in this room spends most of their time in closed secret meetings with ministers. That is the current system. That's the system for the last 100 years.  That is the system. You spend most of your time in secret meetings with ministers writing stuff that nobody is going to see for 20 years. What would you expect that system to generate?

Would you expect it to generate people who are sort of interested in the long term in the practical consequences of their action? Would you generate people who are really good at working out what they think their minister wants and giving to them? Which of those things are you going to get? And there's no way that system is going to change fundamentally while it operates like that.

And it doesn't have to operate like that, it really doesn't. Local government doesn't operate that way. It's a parliamentary democracy. Parliament could have something different if it wanted it. They operate differently in other parliamentary democracies.

Charlotte Pickles

Can I pick up on that point, then, about which you both have made in slightly different ways, but which is the design of the system itself is the problem here. And Philip he said there's lots of, thousands of great people, but the system, whether you say smothers it them, or kind of the opportunities or constrains in some way. So I don't think you just talk there very well about your brilliant people are forced into this very narrow kind of serving of ministers. How do we change that, though? So what are the mechanisms?

Is it about kind of what you promote reward, is it, Jonathan, you didn't mention the word accountability, but that's sort of at the heart of some of the arguments you've been making.  Accountability to who? Or is it about transparency? Is it about, I know in New Zealand kind of you have the Minister sitting in one building and you have, on the whole, most of the civil servants sitting somewhere else. There's a real sense that they have a separate identity and responsibility for stewarding both the government and the country. What are the mechanisms we have?

Philip Rycroft

So I think there are two other things we should come on to. One is the diversity of either that and that we all talk about, I have no doubt. The other is I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Whitehall does too much, tries to do too much, and that, I think, is a big part of the issue.

But let's do the accountability thing. I absolutely agree with you. And I think another example of that, my personal experience, I spent a couple of years working in a cabinet in the European Commission, and the relationship between, if you like, the political functioning and the services was more transactional and the sort of the holding to account the services by the cabinet was, I think, something that's something quite interesting in the way that works. My own view on this is that we do need to turn it into more transactional relationship and get away from this notion that Permanent Secretaries are somehow the key advisor to the Secretary of State in a quite close knit sort of way with that relationship never being exposed to the glare of public analysis. I think that a system where the Civil Servants are held publicly to account for the quality of the advice that they give would be a dramatic transformational change.

And, as Jonathan said, this ultimately has to come from Parliament. Now, if you do that, that does, of course, change the nature of the functioning of how advice they give up the system is adopted or not by the politicians. They would therefore need more support to function in terms of their offices. But I could envisage a situation where you have, as in the Berlaymont in Brussels, you have all the ministers essentially in the same building with their cabinets, and you have this more transactional, bit more distant relationship with the Civil Service. But those civil servants being held publicly to account for the quality of the advice they give, pretty much in real time, and I think that would (it sounds a bit scary) but I think ultimately that would allow the public to see what the Civil Service is up to. It would allow, I think, way more challenge on the issues that Jonathan has been so eloquent about, which is the relationship between that advice and what's actually going on in the world. And I think that would ultimately be healthy for our democracy. But it's a very big change.

Jonathan Slater

The meeting that Permanent Secretaries tend to hate more than any other is the Public Accounts Committee, because it's uncomfortable. Obviously it's uncomfortable being held to account, being asked difficult questions in a public forum, particularly if they're things that you're responsible for. That is hard. Obviously, I'm oversimplifying, exaggerating, but to try and make the key point. But it changes their behaviour. It changes our behaviour. It really does. Really does.

Okay, I've got to put this advice to this Minister and what I think they want is poor value for money. Now, if ... if I say that, they might not want to hear it, but if I don't say it, what on earth am I going to say to Margaret Hodge? It really does change the behaviour. If you've got to say it in public, it changes what you say. It's sort of obvious, isn't it? And you can see, therefore, that's another reason why, typically, the Civil Service isn't going to vote for this, because it's uncomfortable. Unless, of course, you spend a lot of your career doing it, in which case it's normal.

I mean, obviously there are many special things about Philip and me which we keep us uniquely insightful.  No, I mean, there isn't!  We just joined the civil service after other careers. We worked in other places for politicians who happened to do it differently. I've spoken to a number of ex Cabinet Secretaries, who when I was doing my research, said, Blimey, if we'd have known then what we know now because the jobs they've done since.

Here's another example. A Director General who worked for me went over to New Zealand leading on the policy for his department. He came back and he said, I have one meeting with my minister a week because this policy that I'm leading on, you know what? doesn't change from week to week. And I thought about all those meetings I used to do with ministers, several a day, which I thought was the only possible way it could be done. And I thought, what was I doing in those meetings? And the answer was, it wasn't policy, it was handling. I mean, the number of times I got asked by my Secretary of State, 'could I sort out the Chancellor'. What!!  They're cabinet colleagues and in New Zealand the cabinet colleagues spend all their time together and the civil service job isn't to sort that out.

Charlotte Pickles

Can I pick up on that point? There is a common argument that you hear quite a lot, which is, well, if we just got more private sector people into civil service, everything would be fine. You know, because we need more of a commercial approach to this. You know, we need people with that private sector experience.  And certainly several people (we're doing a big report at the moment looking at the barriers) and several people, said to us that the problem is ... the public sector is a lot more complicated on the whole than the private sector.

Lots of you in the room here may disagree with me and please do ask questions, but for example, you can't just say well "That's an awkward group those people on benefits. We're just going to stop serving them."  Or actually, we're not going to deal with this crisis because a bit costly, so we're going to go somewhere else. So it's a lot more complicated.

But you've both pointed out the fact that you need something to look at and go, oh, it can be done differently, this isn't the only way. And you said local government is a good example of that.

Scotland is an example of different government, but doing things differently. But how do we get that broader set of experience, the comparator point, to say, but hold on a minute, this isn't the only way of doing something. And maybe there are lessons we could learn and adapt to. How do we change the makeup? How do we create that broader capacity or experience within the system?

Jonathan Slater

Well, again, by admitting that the system is currently failing. I mean, this is a point that's true of any reform of anything at any time. It's not going to happen unless the people in it or the people in charge of it admit that it's broken. Name a single transformation of anything anywhere in the world in which the people at the beginning didn't say it was broken, it doesn't happen otherwise. So you have to admit it's broken and it's not broken because the people in it aren't very clever.

That's not the problem, it really isn't that,  There isn't any person I've ever spoken to who joined the civil service was struck by how clever the people in it were and how hard they are committed. There certainly is something about the notion of not being in the club which can be a bit irritating for somebody who joins mid career from the private sector anywhere else. So I mean, there is that but typically private sector people would say to me, oh my goodness, why does the system work like this? This is so poor, rather than the individual people in it. How many reform plans that you and I see in Philip which commits senior civil service to going on secondment for a bit?

There are six months at Camden Council or KPMG or nine months if you're lucky and then you come back in. I think on the day that Michael Gove's reform plan was published, a very senior civil servant said to me, and that was the latest commitment to everyone going on secondment, that he'd just been in a meeting with a Permanent Secretary asking for approval to go off on secondment. And this Permanent Secretary said to him, oh, you don't want to do that, that would be bad for your career because we'll forget about you. So if that is the view at the top, it doesn't really matter what you put in the plan, you need to chase people at the top.

Philip Rycroft

So again, a little anecdote but I, as a reward for good behaviour back around just after Devolution 2000, I was sent off on secondment by a more enlightened bit of the system as a Civil Servant but working then for what was the Scottish Executive at the time, to work for Scottish & Newcastle. The late lamented was at that time the second biggest brewer in Europe, headquartered in Edinburgh. ... Anyway, I pitched up at this brewer, you know, as a, you know, keen young lad and, you know, all full of the joys of being a civil servant. Very clever, and all the rest of it. And I sat down with these folk and they were completely uninterested in what I'd done. I mean, completely. It was a cursory conversation, about two minutes. And I had to learn. I had to learn about the value that they added to their business. I had to learn about their skills. I had to learn. I had to learn to respect what they did. ...

But I had to lose a lot of my assumptions about how clever I was, because I was working with a whole bunch of folk, very different domain, who were far better at what they did than I would ever be in terms of the production, selling of beer and all. The it was an absolutely salutary experience. I was meant to go for three months and ended up staying over two years, very tempted to stay on with them. And I had a nice offer.

And there I was, you know, on Wednesday afternoons, looking out of the window, at Victoria Quay down in Leith in the years subsequent to that one, and I thought, Why didn't I go with it? But I wanted to come back into public service. I did that.   But a lot of people said to me at that time, why are you doing this? Because you will lose something. I thought, well, no, this is and it was for me, as an individual, I think, transformational. There were very different attitudes, the work that we did.

But ... is the answer just to get a load of folks in from the private sector?  No!  Some? Yes.  But running government is actually a professional job. And you wouldn't say, my Scottish Newcastle experience, they weren't going to let me run the logistics network or sales. What can you do? Well, I can do public affairs because I know the other side of that fence and government is a skilled professional job.

So my part of my answer to this is one is you need more flow in from the private sector.

And I think you need to put more gates in their for promotion. I would not promote anybody into the senior civil service who has not done at least three years in local government, health service, industry, devolved somewhere outside of Whitehall, an absolute bar, so that you have to have that experience.

And the other thing, which is I think people don't talk about too much, but I think it's hugely important. I would change the gates by which people come into the civil service. And as on more of a continental civil service, I would expect people to have degrees that are relevant law, economy, public administration. The level of understanding that I encountered around the constitution of the country and the civil service was lamentable, which is extraordinary if you think who's meant to be thinking about the supremacy stuff?

And that was not fixed by the sort of sheep dip training that you get as a civil servant. So I would make it particularly on the policy side, very much more professional. And you do that by making you demonstrate you've got the attitude, the skills, the knowledge, in one way or another before you take on the job.

Charlotte Pickles

Just picking up on you mentioned the policy side there, and we've had both of you reflecting on how clever the civil service is. Do we put two great a  premium on cleverness? Is that part of the problem that actually we have a lot of very bright, often initially, young things coming through and those bright young things get to the bright senior things without that experience. Why is policy is partly policy the kind of obsession? Because that's the thing we prize because, again, coming back to the cleverness and yet we always have the conversations about delivery and operations and that's the kind of ugly cousin type thing, if I can put it that way, to the policy side. Should we have less clever people?

Jonathan Slater

Ironically, the policy function is for the people with very good degrees from very well respected universities, but they don't really know very much about the constitution or Parliament, according to Philip. So you really need to clearly want people who understand their subject well and can learn. But that isn't to be just found from people who have got a particular set of degrees, from a particular set of universities. I mean, when I became the permanent sector of the Department of Education, I withdrew the requirement for us to recruit people with degrees. For me, that's generally not the question whether you've got a degree, let alone when you've got a degree from a particular university.

Charlotte Pickles

And yet most do have a degree from a very narrow set of universities.

Jonathan Slater

Yes, absolutely. Well, that's because ... that goes back, in my view. So I'm getting a bit boring here to what too many senior people think is good. Obviously it is quite hard, isn't it (your point about the private sector) to define success for a civil servant? It's very hard to define success for government. It just is a lot harder [than] shareholder value or whatever you might do in the private sector. And so you get left with choosing other things instead of what's actually achieved on the ground, and then it takes you back to culture.

There's nothing better on this subject, in my book, than [Sam Friedman's report[1]] on the lack of social mobility and the civil service.  He absolutely nails it. Studied neutrality, the way that a very restrictive group of people like talking to each other, the particular sort of jokes with a particular sort of classical allusions. Oh, my goodness. Absolutely. Yes! And if you don't understand the classical allusion (and I almost never did, right) you sort of wonder if there's a sort of separate room where people are doing the work.

Again, I lost count of the number of times when a fellow Permanent Secretary would send someone to me who wanted to get a promotion in.  And, you know, mine was a department they get promoted into because they're interested in education. And these were people and when you explore with them for ten minutes, you know, what was there? What might they bring to the job? They got a particular sort of degree from particular sort of university and they'd like a promotion and they were pretty good at classical allusions. And this is not ministers sending these people to me. This is not ministers.

Charlotte Pickles

Philip, on the policy versus operational delivery. How do you think about that?

Philip Rycroft

I hear what Jonathan said about the diversity of degrees. I agree with that. But I think my point about coming into civil service, even if it's not a degree or whatever, but that you get trained. 

How many professions you come at, you want to be a lawyer, you look at the medical profession, accountancy, whatever. You go through a process of professional learning on the job or off the job, whatever. And we just don't do that to the necessary extent.

And I think as part of that and again, the point about the admixture of skills, backgrounds and so on, so you would aim to do that? Why not? We're bringing folk in from local governments who've got and that is actually that is sort of like the turbo charges their career in the civil service because they understand stuff that most of the folk in the civil service don't necessarily understand.

I don't like the distinction between policy and operational. I think it's sort of ,and I don't know the answer to that. It's sort of a little bit too hard wired. I'm policy and you're operation.  Hang on a minute. How do you separate these things?

I ran schools directorate in the Scottish government for four years. Probably the best job I ever had, because we had the whole system there and you couldn't say our policy had to relate to what was going on in the classroom because, if we wanted the advantage of doing it in the Scottish context, we could get everybody in the room to talk this stuff through. So I think that it is ultimately about government, good government.  But I think that diversity of experience, more learning to understand actually what you get into.

But I think also this cognitive diversity; I think it's fascinating, this.  And I sat round what is classically called 'the Wednesday Morning Colleagues meeting'. This is the main functioning meeting of Permanent Secretaries once a week. 'The Wednesday morning colleagues meeting". Even the title says quite a lot. But the way around that table, I have to say that my background is absolutely straight down the middle, classic civil servant, private school, Oxbridge and the rest of it. So I am not, from that point of view, a great example of diversity. My bit of diversity is I carried on living in Scotland, so I actually knew another part of the country.

But the way in which that whole experience, whatever people's backgrounds, was a homogenising experience.  There's something about living in this big city that people live, relatively speaking, in the same part of the city; kids from the same school. And the way that encouraged the homogeneity of thought, I thought was very striking. And I don't want to go deep into this, because I will go on to very, very thin ice, but there is something that this reflects the wider way which this country functions. It's not just a feature of civil service, I think it's a feature of our politics and much else besides.  Clever people in this room could do the analysis to understand the drivers of that and why it has given us suboptimal government; a combination of the civil service, ministers and all the rest of it over the last ... forever. I think it's a fascinating question.

Just one other little hobby horse of mine. I think you can feel as you walk down those corridors in 70 Whitehall and so on - you can feel oozing out of the stones of the history of the place and that prioritising, of the external, of our punching above our weight in the world and being a big player in a tilt of pacific.  And all of that stuff is still too dominant.

I don't know whether you agree with this Jonathan, but I remember sitting around that Wednesday colleagues table. I'd bang on about Scotland [to be met], broadly speaking, by disinterest around the table. And then our ambassador to Beijing would come in, everybody would sit up, absolutely fascinated that. And I thought, this is the priorities, the sort of the mental maps are just tilted in the wrong way.

Jonathan Slater

A couple of thoughts to add to Phillip's.  There's a fun book which I recommend. It's very short, something if you haven't really called Bluffocracy[2], by a couple of guys who say the problem with the country, the reason there is a problem in our country, its productivity is significantly lower than our OECD competitors - it was before Brexit - the problem with our countries, it's run by people like us, they say.

And it's not just the civil service, absolutely. Government, journalism and so on. So this is a broader point about the way that England (and it's England, not Scotland, isn't it?) defines clever. It's a particular sort of clever, a particular sort of academic excellence, which, again, speaking as an ex Permanent Secretary of Education, I do think is quite significant and related to the lack of productivity of our country.

So that's one point I'd make and the other way in which I saw, and we all saw.  That's why I went to speak to so many ex cabinet secretaries to say this is this new? No. What you see at Wednesday morning colleagues, typically, is not a grappling of the challenges that we're facing and what are we going to do about it?  It really isn't. It hasn't been for 20 years anyway. And I don't think it ever think it ever was, right?

During COVID, we're meeting daily.  A lot of people are dying every day, more in the UK at the beginning than in many other countries. You would not have got a sense, watching that room, of a group of people grappling with that situation and really challenging themselves and what are we going to do? And is that the right answer? You would not get that sense from that room, ever.

Charlotte Pickles

That sounds like a good moment to open up to questions we haven't touched on, introducing a chief executive in the form of John Manzoni from the private sector and kind of this sort of focus on the function.

Q1   

Thank you for that. Very amusing, but actually slightly depressing. And I guess the question that I am left with is, if people of your seniority in the Civil Service had this level of insight into its failings while you were serving, what are the barriers that stopped you as Permanent Secretaries from being able to do anything about it? Because if not you who?

Jonathan Slater

Why didn't I sort this out? Well, I did try and make the Department I ran work better and I didn't recruit any of those people with the classic illusions. And I could take away the degree component. And .. here's an example of an apprenticeship policy team and an apprenticeship delivery team.  And I said, I'll tell you what, well, let's have an apprenticeship team. And there are two people who could run it. The delivery one who knows about apprenticeships, and the policy one who knows about ministers. And we chose the first and we recognised that he needed to understand ministers, too.

And Damien Hinds was the Secretary of State. He wanted to go see how they did apprenticeships in Germany. So I said to the delivery guy, Why don't you go with Damien, then? By the time they came back from the trip, he understood how Damien worked.

It's not that hard, actually, to learn politics, it's a lot harder to learn delivery. So you do what you can and do things do get better. Quite often people said to me, I see what you're trying to do here, Jonathan, but, you know, what is this going to do for my career more generally?

And again, it's not you know when I said earlier that that you we wouldn't wrestle publicly with this in those Covid meetings, I got a text one night about 1130. I was just about to turn my mobile phone off from somebody else who'd been at that meeting that day, expressing her frustration about something that we hadn't discussed at the meeting.

So we could be getting towards almost a sort of tipping point. Quite a number of people - there's some tremendous people running government departments as Permanent Secretaries - who do want to change it. Maybe my suggestion is that Parliament is a bit more demanding. Then maybe we could get there.

Philip Rycroft

[Why didn't I sort this out?]   I was responsible for some things, particularly the team that led on innovation and so on, which was trying to change attitudes, the way we thought about policy, policymaking and so on. But the hard truth is we were just submerged in dealing with ... I never got time to look up and get my nose above the waves and so frustrated and seeing that, just desperate to try and turn this machine around what was a big preoccupation moment through the Scottish referendum and beyond in terms I think this country could break up at any minute, but never having the space to be able to step out of that and never have an influence enough to get the machine as a whole to stop and think.

One of the things that astonished me in a way, and I'll put this in the public domain, but one of the questions I had, why didn't we see the Brexit vote coming? I cannot recall a moment in my career as either a DG or a Perm Sec when the collective of Permanent Secretaries stopped and thought about politics beyond the next election.  Where is the politics of this country going? Where are people out? What's going on out there in the system? I just don't recall ever doing that. And I think that's extraordinary if you think about it. We did some long term thinking about our nuclear establishments around them, pension systems and so on, but actually the world in which we lived and breathed, we didn't really understand it very well and.

Q2.

 I just want to come back to what Jonathan said at the very beginning, which was about politicians in general not understanding civil service, not really caring about it for all sorts of reasons, and then people talk to civil service, not having enough delivery experience. ... For five years, we had a politician [in Francis Maude] who really did care, actually, for better or for worse about civil service reform. And then John Manzoni, he was very senior in his delivery role in the private sector of BP, came in as CEO of the civil service, and he wanted the civil service to take charge of its own destiny, you know, after the Maude era. So I was just wondering, I mean, do you guys you're sort of speaking as if those two figures, did they just get did their reform just get squashed by forms of inertia? Was it COVID or Brexit? What derails that? Because those things that you were speaking did actually happen. But what's happened now?

Jonathan Slater

Yeah, they are both reformers and they achieved a lot. But neither touched the policy profession.  That was seen as too big, beyond their scope. So the civil service is much better at project management than it was ten years ago. It's much better than digital data than ten years ago. It's much better procurement than it was ten years ago. The system can change if the people in charge wanted to.

Everything's changed about the civil Service except for policy, right. The red boxes for submissions, it's all identical, so it's never been taken on. What would it look like? It would be open. When I worked in local government, there were too many schools to go around in Islington where I worked. You had to close one. That's not an uncontroversial thing. You have to decide which prisons to close or something which courts to close. We had that debate in public. I went a lot. It was my job to advise, well, which school should close there? And I just presented that an open meeting. And I went along and talked to the pupils and the parents of the school that I was recommending closing, explaining why that's just the way the system works.

And I make sure that advice is pretty good because I got there, explained to the kids, I'm not just working out what the minister wants, it's just open. It's just open. Or I'm just held to account by Parliament. You were to be held to account by Parliament as to whether your plans make it. What have you considered, what options to be considered. We can't run the exam system this year because of COVID Okay, there are four or five options. Education Select Committee will ask me to come along or the relevant official. What are the options? What are the pros and cons of each of them? That's objective, right? Have you done that work or not? Can you explain it? And my view is you get a better decision at the end of it. This minister would be much better advised.

Philip Rycroft

I agree. But there's one thing:- Permanent Secretaries are probably the most non-compliant people in the country, but they're very clever at the way they're non-compliant. So John [Manzoni] struggled with a lot of these reforms in a way they shouldn't have done. It more difficult to deal with, but actually a lot of the stuff he did was right, so I can give them that credit.

Q3. 

There are lots of meetings at the top of the civil service and we talked about Wednesday morning colleagues. So there's a citizen board. There are some others, but they're rarely decision making and they're all internal. Do you think there is a place for something external to the civil service to hold it to account that isn't ministers standing off or briefing the papers when some cards are back is actually a function that holds a citizen carefully runs?

Philip Rycroft

Yeah, very briefly. Again, I think transparency is where you go. You can put advice to the ministers that say, these are your options and you go down the spectrum.  [You offer intelligent policy advice] that is exposed to public scrutiny. Ministers then make a decision on that. I think that gives people permission to do the work well. What is the evidence for that? What are the people who really matter, the teachers, nurses, the social workers, what are they saying about this is a brilliant idea? They say it's a rubbish idea, it's not likely to work. So I think that's the way you give people permission to do a good job

I know, [Alex Thomas, IfG] that you're advocating a sort of more statutory sort of protection, if you like. I think that's absolutely right. What you are you doing is increasing external scrutiny, ultimately from Parliament. I don't think the non executive model has worked particularly well at the moment.  That sort of gets absorbed into the department as well. But I think the ultimately it has to be Parliament that is exercising that scrutiny as to how well the system is functioning and all that.

Quite a lot of all of this, again, another big theme, I am sure, is about the assertion of the legislature versus the executive. The executive is way too dominant. And this is one of those demands where I think that is in the interest of the country for the legislature to take more interest and have more say over how the bits of the executive are functioning. Very quick on both.

Jonathan Slater

Leadership matters, obviously. Probably doesn't matter as much as leaders like Philip and I think it does. But when Gus [O'Donnell] was running a civil service he had some things he wanted to achieve and he achieved them. So watch who replaces Simon Case when that happens and what the agenda of that person is. If they want to do some stuff in this space, they can. 

And, like Philip, I think in order to pursue this agenda, if they were interested in doing so, it would need to be codified in statute. Parliament would need to take responsibility for it, they would need an NAO type resource to support them. But these models exist, so that's how I would do it.

END

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[1] See https://www.civilservant.org.uk/information-diversity.html for a longer discussion of diversity in the civil service, including a link to Sam Friedman's report for the Social Mobility Commission.

[2] See https://www.civilservant.org.uk/information-diversity.html for a longer discussion of diversity in the civil service, including a reference to James Ball and Andrew Greenway's Bluffocracy.