Keir Starmer & The Tepid Bath of Managed Decline

Civil servants were the subject of a number of pre-Christmas communications, including from Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden:

Too many civil servants are “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” and “caught in bad systems”. They need to “feel emboldened [to] upset the apple cart … Too often, needless bureaucratic impediments, silos, processes about processes, all impede your ability … to deliver for the people we are here to serve. And from the conversations that I have had with many of you over the past five months, I know these barriers frustrate you every bit as much as they frustrate me.”

“From my time as director of public prosecutions, I know first-hand just how fortunate this country is to have a Civil Service that is admired across the world. … I know how hard you work … [I recognise your] dedication, professionalism and strong sense of public service. … You want to change the country and make Britain a better place”.

“Instead of writing more complicated policy papers and long strategy documents, the government will set … teams a challenge and empower them to experiment, innovate and try new things.”

Newly appointed Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald added that the Prime Minister “has been clear that he wants a re-wiring of the way the government works … this will require all of us to do things differently – from working much more effectively across departments to taking advantage of the major opportunities technology provides”.

I recognise that these comments were principally aimed at ‘the blob’ - the mandarins who (deliberately or otherwise) delay or oppose ministers’ attempts to introduce exciting and important new policies. But most civil servants are employed in agencies or local offices, collecting taxes, paying benefits, examining novice drivers, forecasting tomorrow’s weather. They are no more ‘frustrated’, nor ‘dedicated’, nor opposed to change, than are their friends and relations in the private sector. It would surely help if senior ministers avoided over-generalising and put a little effort into defining more clearly what they want to change.

More importantly, I don’t know if it was deliberate, but the targeting of the Civil Service looked like an attempt to blame officials, in advance, for future government failures. We all recognise that just about every part of our political system has failed in recent years. I and others have written extensively about weaknesses in the civil service. Ian Dunt and many others have written extensive criticisms of ‘Westminster’ and beyond. But 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 voted to block a military response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people

• who consistently failed to raise fuel duty and so discourage the use of public transport and rail freight at a current cost of £3 billion pa,

• who told the financial regulators to prioritise growth and apply a ‘light touch’, so contributing to the 2008 financial crisis,

• who will not go on the record to say which immigrants offer a net benefit to the UK. Students, tech, care, NHS workers, farm workers?

• who failed to consult their own Ministry of Agriculture (let alone anyone else) about the best way to restrict agricultural inheritance tax relief. (Tim Leunig has some great ideas.)

• who are so in thrall to the gambling industry that they allowed the number of addiction cases to double last year,

• who sold 55,000 military homes to the private sector for £1.7 billion whilst retaining all responsibility for upkeep and repairs. They are now being sold back for £6.0 billion. (Officials had to scrabble to justify the first decision and eventually found that it could only stand scrutiny if they made the unlikely assumption that property prices would rise by only 1%pa before inflation.)

• who have even failed, year after year, to agree how and when to refurbish their own crumbling Palace of Westminster.

It troubles me, too, that the Prime Minister and others think it worth spending time and political capital on civil service issues when they (and we) have so much else to worry about, including …

• a Russian-led war that is beginning to look truly global

• the expiry, in 2026, of the final remaining nuclear arms control treaty

• the urgent need to facilitate economic growth

• climate change whose consequences are clearly already affecting many communities in the UK, let alone abroad, and

• the need to decentralise decision-making and empower ‘the front line’.

Here are some other’s comments on what ministers said. Robert Shrimsley in the FT:

Reform is not delivered by declamation. It is slow, detailed and difficult. It is dangerous to invest too heavily in the idea of government as a startup. Agile work processes are effective for new and discrete projects, but organisations whose decisions affect millions of lives cannot "move fast and break things".

Amy Gandon :

Framing the failings of Whitehall as a matter of personal complacency … misses the point. Civil servants are not slow, risk-averse or inexpert because they choose to be. They are slowed down by 5 layers of people signing off their work. They are risk-averse because mistakes mean headlines and ministers don’t always back them to innovate.

They may end up inexpert because the only route to better pay or more responsibility and satisfaction is to slip around departments every 18 months. Now is that a matter of personal responsibility or system failure, you tell me?

David Higham quoted Norman Lamont, many years ago:

I am astonished how, when things go wrong, often it is the civil servants who are blamed when it is we politicians who make the decisions and it is we politicians who should carry the blame.

And here is a current civil servant, writing anonymously in the Guardian:

Is it excessively uncharitable to suggest that the ideological vanguard of the new cabinet may be panicking, and is falling back on well-worn tropes about the recalcitrance of the civil service “blob” in an effort to distract attention from the fact that they are tying themselves in knots about exactly what to fix first? After all, five months in and – despite the Plan for Change relaunch-not-relaunch in early December – is it that much clearer what this new government really wants to do, including to the government? …

I don’t have a problem with targets; no good civil servant does. [But] demoralising his workforce isn’t going to do the PM, or the public, any favours. As union boss Dave Penman has pointed out, civil servants support reform and are up for the challenge of improving public services. Couldn’t the prime minister try to bring us with him?

Let me finish by recognising that it is early days for this administration. They are not responsible for the politicians’ failures listed in the middle of this blog, and it is still too soon to expect them to have finalised their plans for local government and defence spending, social care, the NHS etc. etc. We await their (and not their officials’) decisions with interest.

I also recognise that the senior ranks of the civil service could have done better in recent years when they failed sufficiently to challenge Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The Civil Service is no longer a Rolls Royce, if ever it was.

But the Civil Service in general, and Whitehall in particular, is still full of genuinely talented, hard working and committed public servants. They are amongst the least of the problems facing Sir Keir and his colleagues.

Martin Stanley