FROM THE EDITOR
It has been a long few months for civil servants. Faced with the biggest peacetime task of any government in responding to the coronavirus pandemic, officials across departments have worked with unprecedented speed and ingenuity to develop new public health systems, craft communications messages, develop economic support packages and move whole services online – all while working from the spare bedroom.
CSW has been covering this herculean work all summer on our – new and improved – website, and in this digital edition of the magazine we give you a flavour of how government has responded to Covid. We speak to HMRC’s two permanent secretaries about how the department launched the government’s biggest-ever intervention in the economy – the furlough scheme – in a month, and how even this unforeseeable project leant on the best of civil service policymaking practice. Ian Diamond, the national statistician who has become a regular feature on the nation’s TV screens, tells us how the Office for National Statistics developed new ways to count the impact of Covid. And Nick Smallwood, the head of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, discusses how it helped build Nightingale hospitals and kept construction going safely as part of the prime minister’s pledge to build back better.
Remarkable as it might seem, though, this summer was not solely dominated by the pandemic. In the months – or perhaps it was only weeks – when ministers deemed the virus to be under control, there was a flood of policy initiatives. Ministers committed the UK to ending the EU transition period at the end of December, meaning that officials needs to prepare for a possible no-deal exit at the same time as planning for – and indeed now dealing with – a second Covid spike.
Related to this was government’s internal market bill, which, a minister confidently asserted, would break international law by revoking elements of the initial Brexit deal, albeit “in a very specific and limited way”. What may have only been intended as a Brexit power play nonetheless led to the resignation of the government’s top lawyer, Sir Jonathan Jones. And Jones’s was not the only departure of a top official since you last had a digital copy of CSW in May. Department for Education permanent secretary Jonathan Slater left his post in the midst of an A-Levels policy row – when a decision to adjust teacher-predicted grades with an algorithm after the exams were cancelled led to an outcry, then to a Uturn. Slater speaks exclusively to CSW about what happened behind the scenes and how he learnt that, in a phrase he says he had not heard before, the PM decided the department needed “new official leadership”.
As well as sharing what happened in those late August days before he left, Slater paints a vivid picture of a perm sec doing what is familiar to most officials now – undertaking the vital work of government at home while balancing the competing needs of the job with childcare pressures and the stress of living through a pandemic. “I needed them not to feel guilty about time with their children or parents,” he says of DfE staff in lockdown. “Everyone’s got to look after their own wellbeing.”
This is a time when the value of the work of civil servants to the county will always be remembered, both within the service and beyond. But it should also be remembered that, when the chips were down, the prime minister chose to get rid of a dedicated public servant who thought this way.