I was startled this morning when I read a Civil Service World report that there are now 7,385 Senior Civil Servants. The last figure that impinged on my consciousness was around 4,000, so I thought that CSW might have made a mistake. But … No! There were 3,770 SCS in 2000 and there were 7,385 last March. This chart summarises the figures:
It would be interesting to dig deeper into this startling increase. Grade inflation may partly be a product of competition for skills, internal and external. I wonder if it may also in part be connected to the tendency of Ministers to be more skeptical of the expertise and qualifications of their officials and critical of the advice they receive? A growth in demand for professional specialists might be involved too, as well as increases in frontline operational teams pushing up through the layers?
And the SCS were originally Ministers' (Assistant-, Under-, etc.) Secretaries who knew Ministers' minds and were trusted to take decisions on their behalf. Can this trust be maintained if there are now nearly 8,000 of them?
Good questions indeed. There must be a lot going on to cause this increase.
My concern is that it must have made the management of larger departments much more difficult. Where once there were maybe 150-200 SCS, almost all of whom will have known each other, there will now be 3-400. It is very hard, verging on impossible, to create a strong corporate spirit across such a large cohort.
Just caught up with this. On your last point, absolutely, and speaks also to questions about the structure of Depts - with larger bodies of SCS, federated models with (eg) operations in semi-autonomous Agencies may work better in terms of connection and leadership?
It would be interesting to dig deeper into this startling increase. Grade inflation may partly be a product of competition for skills, internal and external. I wonder if it may also in part be connected to the tendency of Ministers to be more skeptical of the expertise and qualifications of their officials and critical of the advice they receive? A growth in demand for professional specialists might be involved too, as well as increases in frontline operational teams pushing up through the layers?
And the SCS were originally Ministers' (Assistant-, Under-, etc.) Secretaries who knew Ministers' minds and were trusted to take decisions on their behalf. Can this trust be maintained if there are now nearly 8,000 of them?
Good questions indeed. There must be a lot going on to cause this increase.
My concern is that it must have made the management of larger departments much more difficult. Where once there were maybe 150-200 SCS, almost all of whom will have known each other, there will now be 3-400. It is very hard, verging on impossible, to create a strong corporate spirit across such a large cohort.
Just caught up with this. On your last point, absolutely, and speaks also to questions about the structure of Depts - with larger bodies of SCS, federated models with (eg) operations in semi-autonomous Agencies may work better in terms of connection and leadership?
I agree.