A year into office Margaret Thatcher said: ‘If Sir Derek Rayner could teach the civil service to manage itself as well as he manages Marks & Spencer’s I should be very pleased.’ In 1999, Tony Blair talked of the ‘forces of conservatism’ and the ‘scars on my back’. But David Cameron’s speech describing civil servants as ‘enemies of enterprise’ and ‘bureaucrats in government departments who concoct… ridiculous rules and regulations’, comes at a particularly bad time – for the government and civil service.
We are entering uncharted territory. Thatcher cut the civil service by a little over 10% between 1980 and 1984 and much of that was the result of moving posts into newly created executive agencies. Now there are to be cuts of a third or more from a much smaller and leaner civil service with nowhere to turn.
At the same time, Cameron has said he wants to ‘turn government on its head’ and is reliant on the civil service to deliver a hugely ambitious reform programme, including major health, welfare, education, justice and local government reforms.
Even in the private sector, the success rate for major change programmes is about one in three. If that holds true for the civil service, reforms in about 12 out of 19 main departments could fail.
At best, this means the administrative savings won’t be realised. At worst, whole areas of the reform programme would be jeopardised.
In the private sector, leaders have to struggle to win the hearts and minds of staff to support, or at least go along with, a new way of doing things.
But in the civil service morale is already at risk of returning to the low of the 1980s as staff are made redundant, pay is frozen and pensions cut back. So far, however, the civil service has worked to the coalition’s ambitious reform programme and has shown no sign of organised rebellion or dissent. Attack by political leaders and defence by senior civil servants, albeit behind closed doors, risks all that goodwill.
Adopting a ‘public bad, private good’ stance is familiar political territory but doesn’t make for good government. Politicians are reliant on the civil service to achieve their aims. So, rather than bashing the bureaucrats, the government needs to establish what a new deal for civil servants would look like and give them a vision to look forward to. Such a vision should inspire current and future civil servants to see beyond the present turmoil, attracting and managing the talent needed for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges.
There is danger in any major transformation too that you lose the best people. The civil service is, just like any workforce, dependent on motivation, good leadership, encouragement and a talent retention policy. Ministers have just as much a role to play here as the civil service leaders themselves.
You cannot simply say that most blocks to entrepreneurialism come from the civil service, when most of what they do stems from political will. Andrew Cahn, who recently stepped down as chief executive officer of UK Trade and Investment, a quango to help British business overseas, wrote for the Institute for Government about the difficulties of making entrepreneurialism work in government. The risk aversion often comes from ministers themselves, not always from the civil service, but a risk aversion culture can be turned around.
From Whitehall to the front line, this is a moment where, with the right motivation, ministers could get the best out of the civil service and wider public sector. But creative thinking and reform won’t have a chance if the teams relied on to make it happen are seen as the enemy.
Lord Adonis is director of the Institute for Government
