Ben Knight is a 26-year-old former civil servant turned Parliamentary Researcher, who embarked on a three-year career in adult social care at the beginning of the pandemic. He has since worked in sales.
The dysfunction of the relationship between Sue Gray, Simon Case, and the Number 10 spads has thrown into stark relief the issue of the machinery of government and its innate resistance to the smack of firm leadership.
With recruitment now active for a new Cabinet Secretary and the Government damaged by the chaos of Sue Gray’s resignation, the time is right for Conservatives to consider how the next Tory administration can, if it is to be a reforming government, reform government itself.
During my brief career in the Civil Service, I was struck by the extremely high calibre of its workforce – and by the inadequacies of the structures in which they were required to operate.
At one time it fell to me to organise a meeting of the cross-Whitehall Board Secretariats Network in the Chancellor’s meeting suite at One Horse Guards Road. Apparent from the contents of this meeting, and others, was how vastly different and inconsistent approaches to corporate governance were across different central government departments.
The professional bureaucracy of the British government was less a well-oiled machine working towards shared goals, and more a loose confederation of tribes working towards disparate goals, and with a shared suspicion of the centre.
Meaningful reform of the Whitehall apparatus has been resisted by politicians for generations, due to a perception of low reward for the huge energies that would be expended on fighting entrenched interests. The reality is that making government function more like the private sector – and more like an innovative, flexible start-up at that – would deliver more efficient, more effective government more readily aligned to the political priorities of a new Prime Minister.
Pay and rations is a major area for reform; paying the vast majority of civil servants more in exchange for eliminating the colossal unfunded liability of defined-benefit public sector pensions would be a compromise most conservatives could live with.
Such reform to civil service remuneration would open the door to more granular initiatives, such as performance-based bonuses and close analysis of delivery metrics, which could be readily borrowed from the private sector.
At the top end, the debate around Gray’s pay packet has laid bare the reality that senior civil servants are not paid competitively for the scale of responsibilities which they take on. Attracting and retaining the best expertise, and filling the ranks of the senior civil service with the very best from the private and third sectors, requires that we take a Singaporean approach to the pay of public officials – and enables an equivalent approach to gifts, donations and corruption.
Enhancing the appeal of public sector service to the very best performers would open up many doors: for instance, a new approach to turning around NHS waiting lists could see private-sector leaders with superb records, or even the successful leaders of healthcare systems overseas, “parachuted in” to transform the most egregious NHS trusts much more easily than at present.
More fundamentally, the balance of powers between departments is in need of adjustment.
The perennial legacy of ‘Treasury-brain’, in which the single most powerful entity on Whitehall prioritises managing the costs of government over pursuing the growth of the economy, is a stark example of the flaws in a system which gives the chancellor an outsized role in the governance of individual ministries. A popular refrain among department leaders is that “if we do not use our budget, we’ll get it cut next year.”
A simple and effective innovation would be to enable departments to retain and “bank” unused resources, driving an incentive to operate efficiently and to cut down on elastic costs.
The Cabinet Office should expand in its role as the single coordinator of policy and practice across the whole of Whitehall, centralising all government procurement and outsourcing under the watchful eye of its chief executive. The Cameron Government made meaningful steps in this direction with the appointment of the effervescent John Manzoni; but the establishment of the Cabinet Office as a counterweight to the Treasury, and as an arbiter and auditor of the whole of Whitehall’s work, would enable coordination towards shared goals to be carried out much more effectively.
The watchful eye of a deputy prime minister with constitutional permanence – the Prime Minister’s “enforcer” – should represent the leadership of 70 Whitehall. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority would take on a new lease of life by providing quality and risk assurance to all significant government policies and projects.
Similarly, the terms and conditions, human resourcing, and pay scales of the entire Civil Service should be centralised under the auspices of the Cabinet Office. The Civil Service needs to feel more like a single organisation within which generalists move quite freely without inhibition, and less like a conglomerate of departmental silos competing for funding from Number 11.
Departmental leadership should separate the administrative and corporate from the policymaking and political, with permanent secretaries advising ministers on the issues and chief executives running departmental boards; it is a poor use of ministerial time to have cabinet members arbitrating HR, corporate finance, or internal security issues.
The Civil Service should be supported to attract and retain the most ambitious and effective staff.
The present recruitment process focuses on alignment with “success profiles” and a skills, knowledge and behaviour framework. This should be replaced with an assessment of pure capability and tangible achievement – academic and/or practical – and the old-style entrance examinations should be restored.
The role of public administrators as servants of the national interest should be made clear, and celebrated by offering staff as much support as is practicable to develop their own skills: an approach to support for the pursuit of further qualifications and training from third-party sources could be drawn from the Armed Forces, which perform excellently in supporting servicemen and women to pursue degrees and other accolades.
The Cabinet as the key decision-making body should be made smaller: it is too large to act nimbly, issue judgements quickly, and pull together in times of political difficulty. The payroll vote is important to governments in Parliament, and the overall number of ministers need not change – but Cabinet-attending secretaries of state should be culled, perhaps to a core of no more than eight.
(There is a reason that, in times of conflict where effective leadership is more pivotal than ever, prime ministers have routinely assembled scaled-back “war cabinets.”)
Finally, wholesale reform of local government should see the development of larger, more powerful local authorities along a unitary model, confluent with the boundaries of the historic counties to enable both considerable efficiencies of scale and a genuine sense of local identity.
Councillors should be better-paid with the positions reflecting much more of a full-time job, and the boundaries of most relevant local services – police forces, integrated care boards, ambulance services – should be aligned.
Councils should have a direct supervisory role over them all, with council leaders or mayors having oversight of the entire spectrum of local service provision to develop clearer lines of accountability and to eliminate overlaps in service provision and duplication of resource allocation.
The key mistake of the most recent Conservative government was to bemoan the ever-present “Blob” without taking robust steps to challenge it. The next Conservative government, with its inevitable mission to make Britain work better, must first look to make government work better for Britons.
