The Fast Stream, Digital Currencies, Amazon, Kerb Crawling ...

This is a more of a newsletter than a blog: a collection of items that you might find interesting or helpful. In no particular order …

I have been meaning for some time to say how impressed I am by many of the current generation of civil servants. Digital Technologies DG Emran Mian, for instance, and soon-to-be Civil Service COO Catherine Little both spoke at the Bennett Institute conference last month and struck me as pretty well switched on, and good communicators to boot. I and many others have expressed concern about the way that senior officials have recently failed to Speak Truth to Power but maybe things will improve after the election.

Sam Freedman certainly hopes so:

I think Starmer/Reeves/Gray, and the wider party, are much more instinctively supportive of institutions than the Conservatives, and are also more used to working within them. Their own views and politics will be a closer match with those of people working in the institutions they oversee, as they tend to skew liberal, being, mostly, younger graduates. The worry is that this could translate into being overly accepting of the weaknesses of institutions rather than taking a more constructive approach to improving them.

The civil service is a good example. Conservatives have expressed regularly hostility towards the civil service, which has inevitably backfired, but have done nothing to actually improve it and quite a lot to weaken it (endless cycles of redundancy programmes and recruitment binges). If Labour are just more congenial but do nothing to diagnose those weaknesses or improve performance they will struggle to achieve their agenda. (This is a big theme of Sam’s forthcoming book.)

On the same theme, it is important to remember that significant but unheralded parts of the civil service continue to perform well, here and abroad, especially given the resource and other obstacles that have been put in their way. The Financial Times, for instance, noted that Isis K had planned several attacks in Europe in recent months but they were foiled.

And I have been lucky enough to meet many brilliant junior officials over recent months including Apprentices, Business Managers, Fast Streamers and PAs. They have all been hugely impressive, and much more capable and confident than I remember being at their age or grade. The problem is not the quality of civil service recruits. It is the way we deploy them. I can do no better than repeat here what Jonathan Slater said last year:

The Civil Service is packed full of really clever, really committed, hardworking people. [But] 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.

[They] spend most of [their] 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.

Against this background, I was very sorry to read that Fast Stream applications have fallen dramatically in recent years. The worst example was applications to the science and engineering pathway which fell by 78% between 2020 and 2023. But departing COO Alex Chisholm told MPs that he was not worried about this development. He then announced that the Cabinet Office will no longer offer line management support to the Fast Stream, even though it would continue to be their employer. Maybe Catherine Little (see above) will show more empathy - and sense?

Better still, wouldn’t it be great if Fast Streamers were given a proper home in a department earmarked for their future career? It would surely encourage departments to take a greater interest in their likely future senior managers.

Better pay might help too, which might in turn reverse recent grade inflation. This has, inter alia, led to a near doubling of the numbers in the SCS. One inevitable result will have been that work has drifted upwards. I read recently that a Permanent Secretary had been the official who had written to the Chair of the Post Office about their Horizon legal costs. There may have been a good reason for this but I know from my own experience that such letters would once normally have been sent by Directors (then called Under Secretaries) who were a real power in the land. DGs were kept in reserve and Perm Sec intervention in a Director’s area was very rare indeed, and definitely to be avoided!

Changing the subject:

I recently wrote about civil service briefcases and civil service hostels. Linda S (@VATskills) brought the two together in this brilliant recollection:

I had CS accommodation in a female hostel near Queensway where there was a kerb crawling problem. Holding up briefcase, badge outwards, at offender’s car window was a quite effective deterrent.

Here are two articles that I have recently found interesting:

Frances Coppola’s Substack discussed the ‘shiny new technology’ of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Technologies). TL:DR: Current proposals for CBDCs are going in the wrong direction.

And Eliot Wilson has been very critical of the way in which Scottish Ministers have sought to explain and defend the legislation. To be clear, Eliot was not attacking or defending the legislation itself. Instead: “What is deeply worrying … is the way some of those who defend the act have sought to reassure critics”.

And, finally, I understand that there have been problems with Amazon orders for my recent book Civil Servants, Ministers and Parliament. Amazon are selling the book for immediate delivery. But there is also a rogue entry offering delivery in October. I am trying to get this offer deleted but, if you have accidentally clicked on that offer, please cancel your order and start again. They won’t have taken any money yet.

Martin Stanley