Civil Service Reform

I see Reform is planning, if it wins the next election, to sack most of Whitehall’s senior civil servants and replace them with political appointees and outside experts. The theory seems to be that the civil service is bloated and obstructive, so the obvious solution is to remove the people who actually know how the departments function.

It has a certain pub logic to it. If the engine is not running well, clearly the mechanics must be the problem, so remove them and the machine will presumably spring into life.

The American comparison gets mentioned quite a lot in this discussion. In the United States thousands of senior officials change when a new president arrives because cabinet secretaries, agency heads and their deputies are political appointments that come and go with the administration.

What tends to get skipped over is that underneath those political appointments sits a large permanent civil service that actually keeps the machinery running. Britain simply built the system the other way round, with ministers changing while the senior civil service stays in place and keeps the administrative system functioning.

Permanent secretaries are not just bureaucrats pushing paper around. They are the people who know how departments actually work, how the legislation fits together, where the budget pressures are and which procurement contract is about to explode at an inconvenient moment.

Some of them are running organisations with tens of thousands of staff and budgets that would make most private companies blink. Remove them all at once and you have not merely cleared out a few obstructive mandarins, you have removed the institutional memory of the state, which tends to become noticeable fairly quickly when the new arrivals start asking how things actually work.

There is also the slightly awkward matter of money. Permanent secretaries earn roughly £160k to £200k, which sounds generous until you remember they are effectively running organisations the size of large corporations.

Anyone capable of doing that in the private sector would normally command several times that. So if you replace them with “industry experts”, you either pay market rates or recruit people willing to take a substantial pay cut for ideological reasons, neither of which usually results in smaller government.

The Trump comparison that keeps being made is also a little selective. Even in the United States the controversial part of Trump’s agenda has been the attempt to remove career civil servants by reclassifying them as political staff so they can be dismissed more easily.

That proposal has caused quite a row in America because it undermines the long standing idea of a politically neutral administrative state. So when people here talk about copying the American model, they are not copying the routine part of it, they are copying the bit Americans themselves are arguing about.

There is also the small matter of unintended consequences. Once one government decides it can purge the senior civil service and replace it with loyalists, the next government inherits exactly the same power, which means the precedent applies in both directions whether anyone likes it or not.

Before long the senior layers of the state get rebuilt after every election. The Americans actually tried something rather like that in the nineteenth century, when public jobs were handed out as political rewards under what became known as the spoils system.

It produced chaos, corruption and some fairly spectacular incompetence. The Americans then spent the next century dismantling it and building a professional civil service instead, which is a lesson Britain quietly absorbed along the way.

None of this means the civil service is perfect. Anyone who has dealt with Whitehall will know it can be slow, cautious and occasionally baffling, although dismantling the entire senior layer because you suspect they might disagree with you is not really reform.

It is more like smashing the dashboard because the car will not start, which might feel satisfying for a moment but rarely fixes the underlying problem.

Still, if a future government does decide to sack half of Whitehall on day one, the consultancy firms will be quietly delighted. Someone will need to explain to the new arrivals how the departments actually work, and judging by the size of some of them that could keep a few consultants busy for quite a while.