Ministers and Civil Servants Cannot Reform Whitehall On Their Own

Parliament needs to engage with the cultural and constitutional aspects of reform

Reform have recently published another fascinating paper as part of their Reimagining Whitehall work stream.  Its title is Breaking Down the Barriers:  Why Whitehall is so hard to reform. 

The paper summarises interviews with twelve former Cabinet and Permanent Secretaries, six former Cabinet Ministers and nine other 'Great and Good'.   It thus leaves itself open to the criticism that Reform should have also interviewed some less senior officials including those in offices outside London.

To be fair, however, Reform were in effect asking interviewees to admit why they had (individually and collectively) failed to lead change Whitehall.  It is to their credit that they were not over defensive in their responses.

Taken together, they identified ten barriers to change which I have for convenience divided into three:

1.     Ministerial and Permanent Secretary Lack of Interest

2.     Cabinet Government

3.     Incompetent Change Management

1. Ministerial and Permanent Secretary Lack of Interest

Reform's interviewees identified the following problems:

·      Ministerial uninterest

·      A bias for policy and ministerial handling skills over corporate and organisational capabilities in promotion

Here are some quotes[1]:

"Permanent secretaries ask themselves:  Do I take a phone call from the Chief Operating Officer. This reflects a wider civil service pathology that prizes ‘clever’ policy brains above operational expertise. As one former permanent secretary bluntly expressed it: “fast streamers don’t want to be COO John Manzoni, they want to be Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood.”

"One politician used to describe implementation and policy as the blue collar and the white collar."

"Why have previous reform attempts failed?  Answer: because the most powerful people in government - both politicians and civil servants - move their attention to the next most pressing policy issue of the day.  And don't ... focus their attention  on the machine that's delivering it.  They don't lift their head - or perhaps bury their heads - into the machinery."

Comment: Senior Ministers’ strong preference for support from policy experts rather than those with operational skills is mainly driven by Ministers prioritising their own need to perform well in Parliament and the media. This important aspect of Whitehall’s culture (and our constitution) will need to change if there is to be meaningful reform. But any change in this area would need to be accepted by Parliamentarians.

2. Cabinet Government

Reform's interviewees identified the following problems:

·      A poorly defined and weak executive centre

·      Departmental fiefdoms

In other words, a Cabinet (of equals in) Government means that Permanent Secretaries feel primarily responsible to their Secretaries of State, who are seldom much interested in centrally driven initiatives such as Civil Service reform.

Here are some more quotes:

“...it’s a culture that’s manifested in a structure which prioritises departmental autonomy, essentially. That your loyalty, and I used to say this when I was in government, is primarily to your department. Secondly, but quite a long way second, to the government of the day.” 

"The prizing of 'clever' policy brains above operational expertise, combined with Whitehall's siloed structure means that securing the buy-in and action of Permanent Secretaries is almost impossible."

It’s extraordinary how non-compliant permanent secretaries and DGs are. The centre is something you doff you cap [to] when in view, but as soon as they’re out of view, you just manage it…” 

“Some permanent secretaries said we’re not going to roll it out in that department, it’s going to cost too much and we’re not doing it. And in effect could get away with it, because Francis Maude didn’t have authority over their secretaries of state.” 

“It was really striking going from being the Permanent Secretary of an operational department like the Home Office to become Cabinet Secretary. At the Home Office, I'd sometimes find I'd pulled levers and commissioned work, even if I didn't know I had, just by casual remarks … so I had to learn to say 'OK everyone, just thinking out loud. No one's to do anything!' To being Cabinet Secretary, when I could barely find a lever that was connected to anything.” 

Comment: It is likely, therefore, that Cabinet Government itself will need to be reformed as part of any Whitehall reform process. That would again represent a significant change to our constitution.

3. Incompetent Change Management

Reform's interviewees identified the remaining six problems:

·      A lack of clarity about who is responsible for instigating change

·      A leadership cadre with limited external experience and a status quo bias

·      Insufficient investment in change management and poor communication of the tangible value for reform

·      Limited attempts to build enthusiasts for reform throughout the civil service

·      Limited exposure at all levels to alternative organisational models and ways for working

·      The absence of a self-reforming, or stewardship, mentality

Comment: None of the above problems are at all new.  But strong and experienced change managers can overcome them. I was pleased, therefore, to see that at least one of Reform's interviewees had led successful change programmes.  That person argued that ...

"Change management is a complex and resource-intensive process, and in general, the level of commitment required to succeed is rarely in place. In addition, the tangible value of that change to those expected to enact it is often poorly communicated, reducing buy-in and hindering success."

The general approach in Whitehall is more like a parody of tough change management.  You look at change programmes in the corporate world, they don't enter them lightly because they know they are difficult things to manage. ... I worked for a private company they did a big change programme.  I said to the CEO:  'How much of your time are you spending on this?'  '50%'.  'For how long?' 'Six months'.  Because you know, this was mission critical to the business ..."

"We had two directors that ... did nothing else but work for me and think about  transformation, how do we get everyone to buy in, how do we communicate it, track progress, that sort of thing.  That I think made a significant difference to implementation.

Analysis - Change Management

Different change management experts use different descriptors but they all talk about the need to identify something like  “the six Cs”:- the key elements of any system, none of which can be permanently altered without simultaneously requiring or causing change in the others.:-

• Capacity:- i.e. resources, and in particular staff numbers

• Capability (or competence):- i.e. staff skills, training, experience and motivation

• Compensation - salaries, bonuses, appreciation

• Communications:- including not only communications whilst the change programme is being implemented, but also new ways of communicating once the changes have been implemented

• Culture:- new relationships, attitudes to innovation etc

• Constitution:- i.e. organisational structure, reporting lines etc.

Put another way, if you try to change one of the 'C's without changing the rest of the system then the system will over time, like this child’s flexible toy, snap back (revert) to its previous state. 

This reversion can be seen throughout the history of civil service reform - witness the failure of so many ‘reform’ initiatives over many decades.  It is particularly worrying that even the ostensibly successful efficiency programmes seem to have failed over the longer term. Professor Christopher Hood examined this subject with Ruth Dixon when they published[2] 'A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? - Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government'. Their conclusion? Over a thirty year period of successive reforms, the UK exhibited a striking increase in running or administrative costs (in real terms) while levels of complaint and legal challenge also soared. (The counterfactual - what would have happened without the efficiency programs - might have been worse, of course, but their findings were hardly cause for celebration.)

Most Whitehall reformers do seem to recognise the interrelationship between the first four Cs, even if Ministers try to ignore them.  You shouldn't, most obviously, try to cut staff numbers unless you improve the average capability of those that remain - and then you probably need to pay them more.

However - to pick up Reform's themes '1' and '2' above - Whitehall reformers have found it hard, verging on impossible, to address cultural and constitutional issues in the absence of engagement with Parliament itself.

Former Permanent Secretaries Jonathan Slater and Philip Rycroft, for instance, argue that Whitehall's culture should in future encourage senior officials to be significantly more accountable for the advice that they give to Ministers. But I have seen little evidence that Ministers would welcome this. And most MPs would much prefer to score political points by focussing on ministerial successes and failures rather than give credit to, or blame, senior officials.

It is also relevant that, although recent Prime Ministers have tried to become more Presidential and less 'first among equals', none of them have got anywhere near acknowledging the consequences for the constitution.  The Whitehall machine has accordingly become increasingly confused and dysfunctional, as described by Reform's interviewees. 

Where Next?

This Reform report, like so many before it, has shown that no Ministerial team and no Civil Service Leadership team is ever, on their own, likely to be able to lead a change programme in which all of the six 'C's are simultaneously changed in a way that creates a new stable configuration.  It is in particular very difficult (and it would surely be wrong) to change Whitehall's culture and the country's (unwritten) constitution without involving Parliamentarians.

So how do we establish a change programme which involves Parliamentarians and yet is sufficiently politics-free to command wide respect?  Maybe it will be impossible until we have recovered from recent political and economic earthquakes?  In time, though, maybe we will need the modern day equivalent of Haldane or Fulton?

Martin Stanley - Editor - Understanding the Civil Service

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[1] The quotes have been lightly edited to improve readability.

[2] In 2015