The latest dispatch from the civil service reform frontline
Dominic Cummings' call for maximal open recruitment in the civil service is something it should embrace
This week, my colleague Jack Aldane at GGF reported on the latest in what seems like to be current peak in reports about civil service reform. The latest example was from the Policy Exchange think tank, which has a good claim to having started the current trend with its Whitehall Reimagined report in December 2019, called for an overhaul in how civil service appointments are made – specifically by making sure that all senior appointments are eternally advertised, and ensuring greater external oversight of departments’ hiring practices.
The report said that allowing departments to regulate their own appointments was no longer fit for purpose, and that too many internal civil service appointments were being made - exempt from the obligation to select on merit following an open competition. As a result, many of the top jobs in Whitehall remain were being filled without being advertised – including, ironically according to the report, the director in the Cabinet Office responsible for Civil Service Modernisation and Reform.
The report’s core conclusion was backed by Cabinet Office minister Steve Barclay, who said that government “must ensure that all civil service appointments are on merit and ensure that we attract the best outside talent into the senior civil service”. He added: “We must open up the highest echelons of public service if we are to meet the challenges of the modern world, and deliver the public services people rightly expect.”
The civil service is not a static organisation. There is never a true steady state in something as big as government, or even individual departments. There is always someone trying to change something, but this current modernisation and reform programme is the outcome of the drive that started when Dominic Cummings joined government as the prime minister’s chief adviser determined to get Whitehall reform done, as it were, after Brexit.
Cummings joined No.10 Downing Street with very clear views on the obsolesce of the civil service, calling the idea of permanent officials an idea for the history books in a lecture in 2014 (the whole thing is worth a watch) and the appointment of Michael Gove as Cabinet Office minister – who has worked with Cummings as his special adviser in the Department for Education – provided a focus on civil service reform not seen since the early days of the last decade. Then, Francis Maude had the power from the centre of government to press on with changes to government functions. Though controversial at the time, these functions have provided a boost to Whitehall expertise, and created better career paths for professions.
It remains to be seen if the outcome of this latest reform drive has as much lasting impact, as it has been – like so much else – been delayed, if not derailed, by the pandemic. Gove has been replaced by Barclay, but the Declaration on Government Reform has set out details of what the government is going to do to change –including “we will open all senior appointments to public competition by default, advertised in such a way as to ensure the widest possible pool of applicants” – though it is always difficult from the outside to exactly chart progress.
It was in his evidence to the health and science committee’s inquiry into the government’s Covid response in May that Cummings highlighted the need for greater external appointments.
“The HR system should change so that all appointments, with a tiny fraction of security oddities, should be open by default,” he said.
“We've got so many brilliant people in this country. And then we have a civil service system, which literally puts a massive barrier and says, ‘we're going to recruit all these things from internally’.
“It's a completely crackers way of doing things, again during this thing we have to go out and get external people to come in and provide all kinds of crucial skills, but that shouldn't be just something that you do because there's a crisis, the British system should be open so that we can get the best people in the country to the best jobs.”
Cummings said that he knew from conversations “there are lots of senior people who agree with me, but part of Whitehall will fight to the death to stop a culture of open by default jobs, and if you plan on changing the system, that's one of the most crucial [changes]”.
However, the Institute for Government’s programme director Alex Thomas highlighted that all senior civil servant jobs are already advertised open by default – although it is not quite clear how often that rule is broken. “Could argue for fewer exceptions, not do as many managed moves, open up non SCS jobs but... this is not a silver bullet for reform,” he added on Twitter.
The Policy Exchange report doesn’t mention Cummings, but is clearly springs from the same well. It might not be fair to call his comments to the select committee a conversion to the cause of Northcote Trevelyan, but it definitely fits in a category that is closer to ‘maximise the benefits of the existing system’ than ‘end the existing system’.
His 2014 speech said civil servants do not have the skills to tackle big problems, which ministers cannot change due to recruitment rules, he said.
It was a call for more flexibility, not less. “So if you have an entire political structure that selects against the skills of entrepreneurs and successful scientists, don’t be surprised when the people in charge can’t solve problems like entrepreneurs and scientists.”
Add this to his famous blog post calling for weirdos and misfits to join government, where Cummings wrote that “we need to figure out how to use such people better without asking them to conform to the horrors of ‘Human Resources’ (which also obviously need a bonfire)”, and it might seem unlikely that a reform applying the civil service’s rules of merit based appointments more universally would be what he would arrive at. But for that reason – and indeed the values it professes for itself – it is something the civil service should embrace.
Links and thoughts
The headline above is a reference to the still-mysterious pledge in last month’s Spending Review to “reduce non-frontline civil service headcount to 2019-20 levels by 2024-25, helping to fund increases to frontline roles”. The introduction of a distinction between frontline and non-frontline officials in a government document prompted much head scratching, and we are still none the wiser. Any answers on a postcard to this particular element of the government’s civil service changes gratefully received.
I wrote this week’s main post before the latest reporting on a row between civil servants and home secretary Priti Patel appeared in the Sunday papers. This risks now becoming a running sore in government that will be used as evidence of the civil service inflexibility, and will undermine the collegiate spirit in which it would be best to make any changes to how government works. It is difficult to know at this point what the resolution to this row will be, seeing as it has been going on for more than two years and has already led to the departure of the permanent secretary, but weekly feuding in the papers will only make whatever the resolution is harder to reach.
Another interesting GGF story from this week was our report on the European Commission’s league table for digital government, which was headed by Malta. Aside from illuminating Malta’s excellence, it is interesting to chart the progress – or lack of – elsewhere. In the 2017 edition of the report (if you want to check how digital government has improved, try wrangling with the webpage hosting this archive information), the UK ranked 20th. In the new 2021 ranking, the UK was 19th. It is not to say that digital government is unchanged in the last four years – the coronavirus pandemic response is proof enough of that – but a sign of how the UK’s digital government is not at the forefront, if it ever was.
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Thanks for reading.