Civil service churn is a ‘core part’ of government’s long term problems, says IfG
Think tank director Bronwen Maddox warns a lack of institutional memory could jeopardise the levelling up agenda. Jim Dunton reports
Rapid turnover of officials is one of the biggest issues affecting the government’s ability to deliver policy and plan for the future, Institute for Government director Bronwen Maddox has said.
Delivering the think tank’s annual director’s lecture, Maddox said she shared former prime minister Tony Blair’s recentlyexpressed view that British government was losing the capacity to identify and solve the nation’s big problems. She said expertise of civil servants and ministers was a major factor.
“There are zones of government where ministers and their civil servants have little deep knowledge of their subjects and they have little understanding of the implications of making a bad decision, and may not have immersed themselves in the experiences of people on the receiving end to know what that really means,” Maddox said. “A big part of that is because they change jobs too often.”
The IfG’s latest Whitehall Monitor report acknowledges that churn among civil servants reduced during the pandemic, with around 8.4% of officials either moving jobs or leaving the civil service between March 2020 and March 2021 – down from 10.3% the previous year. However, the report said the figures demonstrated officials continued to move between jobs “too frequently”.
Maddox said the UK’s chaotic Afghan evacuation efforts last year, 2020’s shambolic handling of the use of algorithms to generate A Level results, and Lord Theodore Agnew’s scathing resignation comments about attitudes to fraud in the Treasury highlighted an expertise deficit in government.
She said there was a “state of complacency” among ministers and officials about those failings, and that civil service churn had a “pernicious” impact on departments’ ability to function well.
“The motives, generally, are pay, promotion, wanting to get on,” she said of officials’ desire to secure their next move. “The civil service is really blessed with many dedicated, ambitious people who want to do just that. But the result is that they may stay only a year or two in post and may know comparatively little about their subject – and they may suddenly be dealing with whole new aspects of it.
“It was evident in the Afghan exit last summer, where quite a few of those dealing with petitions for help and evacuation were said to know little about the country. The big block of people who did had long before moved on.”
Maddox said a deficit of institu
tional memory in departments led to a failure to learn lessons about what had not worked in the past and “wasted huge amounts of time” in the process.
She said further education, regional policy and industrial policy were enduring areas that every government sought to address – with the current government’s flagship levelling up agenda being the latest effort.
Maddox said that if it lasted long enough to proceed with levelling up, the government would “have to recognise why so many similar efforts have failed and draw on the ones that have succeeded” if it was to achieve anything at all.
When he quit as efficiency minister last month, Agnew said the Treasury appeared “to have no knowledge or little interest in the consequences of fraud to our economy or society”. Around £10bn is currently estimated to have been lost to fraud in schemes run by HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Maddox said Agnew’s comments about a culture of indifference or ignorance as to the effect of bad decisions had struck a chord.
“It’s hard to put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it,” she said – citing the Ministry of Justice’s Transforming Rehabilitation programme and the Department for Education’s handling of exams algorithms.
“The core culture of the civil service is one of dedicated public service. And many people give their professional lives to that. But you also find an evasion of responsibility and an obsession with promotion that is less attractive. A disdain for politics, a lack of understanding of the pressures on politicians, and sometimes a shortage of people who can find practical answers to the problems that ministers identify.”
Ex-perm secs give their take on churn
Former Department for Exiting the European Union permanent secretary Dame Clare Moriarty and her ex-Department of Health counterpart Dame Una O’Brien were in the audience for Maddox’s lecture. Both recognised the churn phenomenon in a question-andanswer session afterwards, but questioned the forces at work.
Moriarty, who left government in 2020 following DExEU’s demise, said her early career moves were rarely her own choice and had usually been driven by organisational demands.
“My experience was mostly being hoiked out of things that I was stuck into and sent to do something else because that was what the department
“In complex policy areas there is a need for a certain cadre of civil servants to have experience across a range of different roles. Without that, they’re not much use to ministers”
needed,” she said. “I used to describe myself as the Department of Health’s human cannonball. It was a business need.
“I don’t remember myself thinking: ‘I’ve only done this job for a very short amount of time but I want to go on to the next level and put myself forward.’ It was much more that there was a constant supply of things that needed fixing and there was probably an underavailability of people who could be hurled into things.”
Moriarty said churn was intertwined with civil service pay, which ultimately came back to politics.
“The way in which pay in the civil service is constrained is fundamentally to do with the optics of it and what people feel about how much it’s reasonable to pay,” she said. “There’s a lot of criticism of the civil service, but the way the civil service operates is fundamentally to do with being in an adversarial majoritarian political system.”
O’Brien, who was DH perm sec from 2010-2016, said that when she joined the civil service in 1990 she had experienced a distinct lack of churn. She said the result was that officials were too close to the sectors they covered, damaging their ability to provide independent analysis.
“There was a reason why things changed, but arguably it has gone too far,” she said.
However, she also made the point that in complex areas like energy, health, or the environment, “there is a need for a certain cadre of civil servants to get experience across a range of different roles. Because without that they’re really not much use to ministers”. O’Brien said having directors general in DH who had started out in the department then gone on to gain experience working in the NHS and local government before returning was extremely useful.
“There is a subtlety to the churn argument that I think it is important to embrace, although I do agree there is a fundamental issue about the pay and conditions that needs to be addressed,” she said.
Maddox acknowledged earlier in the session that departments’ ability to offer attractive pay rises to candidates for internal promotion was a central issue for churn.
“It’s a trap that a large bureaucracy has constructed over the years, and is finding ways at the margin to get better at, but it is really very hard,” she said.
The government has published its levelling up white paper for England, more than two years after announcing the flagship policy in its 2019 election manifesto. The white paper set out 12 missions to reduce the gap between the richer and poorer parts of the UK by 2030.
They cover pay and productivity, public transport improvements, and offer devolution deals to every part of England.
Michael Gove, secretary of state at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, said: “For too many decades, too many communities have been overlooked and undervalued.” He said the levelling-up agenda was about ending “historic injustice” and “calling time on the postcode lottery”.
But reaction has been mixed, with praise for the document’s ambition and criticism for the lack of funding, originality and focus.
Think tank the Institute for Government said the white paper was a “genuine attempt” by government to turn a slogan into a plan of action that could be measured and judged. It said further devolution of powers “could be genuinely radical” but warned government risked “falling well short of its targets” due to the absence of a “clear sense of priorities about which issues are most important, and where intervention can be most effective”.
The IfG also questioned the lack of new major policies and additional funding – just £11bn over the next five years – to achieve the priorities set out.
Weighing in at more than 300 pages, the government’s flagship policy document is not short of words. Tevye Markson reports on reaction to the longawaited substance
Think tank the Centre for Cities noted that Germany spent 2 trillion euros between 1990 and 2014 on levelling up measures following reunification.
Policy director Paul Swinney said the lack of long-term funding for the measures outlined in the white paper was troubling. “The huge concern is that this signals that Treasury is not behind the agenda. And history tells us that is the death knell to any policy plans,” he said.
Former No.10 chief of staff Lord Gavin Barwell agreed the funding announced so far was insufficient, but said the white paper was a “big step in the right direction”, building on former PM Theresa May’s Industrial Strategy and ex-chancellor George Osborne’s plans for powerful elected mayors across England.
Others criticised the similarities between the goals and plans announced by previous governments, including
May’s Industrial Strategy.
Darren Jones, who chairs parliament’s
Business, Energy and Industrial
Strategy Committee, said the white paper was “essentially the recentlyscrapped Industrial
Strategy rebranded as levelling up”.
The Industrial Strategy was shelved in March last year, but elements were absorbed into the government’s
Plan for Growth.
“Government was failing at delivering the Industrial Strategy missions so how will government now deliver this?” Jones asked.
Shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy described the white paper as full of “recycled, watered-down ambitions”, adding that one of the better announcements in the publication was made by Gordon Brown in 2008.
But the IfG said it was good that the government was not pretending to be the first to have identified or tried to tackle problems at the heart of the agenda. “Instead, it sets out why – in its view – previous attempts failed and why the contents of its new white paper mean this time will be different,” the think tank said.
Colin Talbot, professor emeritus of government at the University of Manchester, said some levelling up initiatives predated even the New Labour government.
He told CSW: “The 1992 John Major government used things like Single Regeneration Budgets and European Structural Funds to target what we now call ‘left behind’ areas under the direction of Michael Heseltine.”
The chief area of concern for Talbot, however, is that the organisation and management of the levelling up agenda “does not look fit for purpose”, with “constant changes” to the scope and size of DLUHC; secrecy over the new
cabinet committee for levelling up; and a lack of engagement with devolved administrations. This last issue has caused plenty of frustration in Scotland and Wales.
The white paper makes it clear that, as well as working with the devolved administrations, the UK government will be engaging directly with local government across the UK. Talbot says this is “almost certain to irritate the devolved administrations” – and so it has.
Angus Robertson, the Scottish Government’s constitution secretary, told CSW: “It was regrettable that devolved governments did not receive any specific information about the content and timing of the levelling up white paper, and, despite the clear interest of devolved governments, there was little meaningful engagement before it was published.
“This approach is of course completely at odds with the principles set out in the recently published Intergovernmental Relations Review – of mutual respect for the responsibilities of governments, and for building and maintaining trust based on effective communication.”
Also speaking to CSW, Mick Antoniw, counsel general and minister for the constitution in the Welsh Government, said: “When we responded to the Intergovernmental Relations Review, we said the test would be whether the UK government followed the spirit of the review, based on respect and a new approach that serves all governments equally and fairly.
“The early signs have not been good. We continue to receive extremely limited information on very significant initiatives, when engagement with devolved governments would be essential in bringing forward meaningful reform.
“Westminster seems content to drive a coach and horses through the concept of mutual consent, on which the devolution settlement was designed to operate.”
While English local government sources say their involvement has been more positive, they said this was due to the amount of detail about devolution within England in the white paper that needed local government engagement and knowledge.
“The huge concern is that the Treasury is not behind the agenda. History tells us that is the death knell to any policy plans”