Getting a Grip on Whitehall
There is one useful proposal in Pat McFadden’s announcement, trailed in the papers this morning, about his plans for the civil service.
He plans to introduce "mutually agreed exits" that will incentivise poorly performing civil servants to leave their jobs. Such pay outs are commonplace in the private sector but they have been (almost) prohibited within the civil service as ministers have been unwilling to accept that employment law-compliant processes (for the design of which they are responsible) are too cumbersome.
Performance management has been a particular problem within the Senior Civil Service for two reasons.
First, it is very hard to prove lack of competence when there might be other reasons for failure to make good progress on ministers’ priorities:
The individual might be being overworked and/or under-staffed (see Infected Blood and Grenfell - part 3.2 of this analysis) and/or having to wait for responses from colleagues - and even ministers (see part 3.3 of this Grenfell analysis)
The area might be under-resourced. Criminal justice, social care, defence … ?
Ministerial decisions might have been faulty. (I have pointed out before that you can’t sensibly blame the civil service for politicians ….
who, in government after government, have failed to reform the funding of social care,
who agreed to support the US invasion of Iraq without sensible plans for what to do next,
who told the financial regulators to prioritise growth and apply a ‘light touch’, so contributing to the 2008 financial crisis,
etc. etc.)
Second, many senior officials are incapable of accepting that they are less than perfect. They will very often have been star pupils at school and university and will have been rapidly promoted since then, often without gaining much if any management experience along the way. They don’t recognise that they have weaknesses as well as strengths. Their ‘stellar’ reputation thus makes it very difficult verging on impossible for their line managers (who will themselves often be weak managers) to tell them that they need to improve even one aspect of their performance. A couple of our most recent Cabinet Secretaries have been perfect examples of this species.
So any new process that allows mutually agreed exits, with compensation, will most likely be an improvement on the status quo.
Jill Rutter correctly adds that the civil service has done big negotiated pay-offs - but usually only for Permanent Secretaries … and the best negotiators have received peerages as well!
The rest of the government’s plans (headcount reductions, payment by results, development plans etc.) do not represent new thinking and are therefore rather disappointing. As David Higham has pointed out on Bluesky “We had performance related pay and “rank and yank” in the SCS over a decade ago”.
It is particularly disappointing that ministers are yet again focussing on the civil service rather than the wider system. I and others have written endlessly and consistently about what needs to be done to improve Whitehall’s performance but this government, like its predecessors, appear to take no notice.
Reform, for instance, covered this subject very well a couple of years ago. My summary is here. The Institute for Government has produced endless relevant and sensible reports. And Policy Exchange published a rather punchy Getting a Grip on the System last July around the time of the 2024 election. This paper was in theory perfectly timed in that it examined the resistance to change that faces any energetic new minister. But in practice it appears to have attracted very little attention mainly because of other post-election excitements. Those interested in this area might therefore find the following introduction to that report to be helpful:-
Former Labour minister Jim Murphy set the scene with these two quotations in his foreword:
In his diary, the Duke of Wellington described the culture shock of switching from issuing orders to his officers, to chairing Cabinet as Prime Minister: ‘An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’
… and …
When I first became a Minister Tony Blair told a much younger me that the good news was that the British civil service had the engine of a Rolls Royce but the bad news was that it also the brakes of a Rolls Royce. He added with his trademark smile that if you don’t drive it, it may find a lay-by to park itself in.
The report itself set the scene in this way:
So many former Ministers, from the lowliest parliamentary-undersecretary of state, to the “first amongst equals”, often say the same thing: their time in office was frustrating, the system was sclerotic and glacial, the connection between the will of the people and the willingness of the machinery of government to enact it was at times tenuous.
On the left, they complain about the ‘establishment’; on the right, ‘the blob’. The point is identical: democratically-elected Governments, with clear majorities and mandates, and willing, energetic Ministers, meet mighty but subtle forces of resistance.
This resistance stems not from bodies of armed men, nor powerful financiers, nor shadowy cabals in St James’s clubs. We can leave that to the writers of political fiction and satirists. It stems from systems, cultures, attitudes, assumptions, groupthink, and at times inertia: the desire not only to assess risk, but ideally to avoid it altogether; to do what has always been done.
The report went on to make 36 recommendations of which some are more controversial than others. Those of particular interest to the civil service were that pay should be improved and the National School for Government reestablished. And ministers should should be consulted on senior civil servant performance assessments.
Recommendations with wider implications include:
Consult on changes to the Civil Service Code to make it clear officials are bound to comply with UK law, meaning it is entirely for Ministers to agree the Government’s risk appetite on international law. [This is a response to the ECHR/Rwanda issue which dogged the previous governbment.]
Reform the process of assessing legal risk, giving commissioning officials a stronger input into assessing the likelihood of legal challenge, not leaving this entirely to Government Legal Service.
All Ministers should be given the right to establish personal advisory panels to act as a sounding board for policy proposals being developed in the departments. These should be paid, directly appointed positions capable of seeing departmental papers.
Pass a Bill to enhance and make consistent Arms Length Bodies’ accountability to Ministers. A single Bill should ensure that all statutory Bodies are subject to Ministerial strategic direction, and that the Chair, executives and board are expected to follow these and potentially can be removed if they do not. [This rather ignores the benefits associated with independent regulation. See also my recent newsletter about public bodies.]
Reform the Public Appointment Regulations to make it clear that diversity does not override the merit principle; to strengthen the role of Independent Assessors and to enable Ministers to accelerate preferred candidates direct to interview, the remaining process continuing according to merit.
The full report is here.
Martin Stanley - Author - How to Succeed in the Senior Civil Service