In defence of the Civil Service

It seems bashing the Civil Service is par for the course of politics nowadays, be it the former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declaring that it bathes in the “tepid bath of managed decline” or Danny Kruger of Reform contending that it “prevents Ministers…from getting good quality advice … from implementing decisions … and obscures accountability”. 

As a former civil servant, I ask for the opportunity to mount a (partial) defence of my erstwhile colleagues.

There are certainly structural defects in the Civil Service, particularly around recruitment, dismissal and retention of expertise, which ought to be corrected. Nonetheless, when they blame civil servants, politicians forget their own leading role in the dysfunction of the State. As with any organisation, competence flows down from the top; if the executives of a company are rubbish, then the company will be too. Rubbish in, rubbish out. Ministers and the business of government are no different.

Now, “bureaucracy” is an accusation commonly — and not unfairly — levelled at the Civil Service. Government is slow and cumbersome. Yet much of that bureaucracy is the product of Ministerial and government decisions: Impact Assessments, the Better Regulation Framework, the Public Sector Equality Duty, consultations and government responses to them, Environmental Principles Policy Statements, Freedom of Information requests, and so on; these consume an absurd amount of civil servants’ time and are the result of legal obligations created by governments. These could be undone if they so wished, but rather than do so they instead choose to moan as if they were immutable laws of nature. Indeed, while actively complaining about bureaucracy at repeated Liaison Committee hearings, Sir Keir then proceeded to stipulate that, in addition to all the rest, policies had to also produce a “Growth Impact Assessment” which considered its economic growth implications. 

In and of itself, a consideration of a proposed policy’s impact on economic growth is justifiable, perhaps even rational and proper in some cases. When layered on top of the myriad of other assessments and processes and the Prime Minister’s own complaints about the very same, however, it becomes not just superfluous, but incoherent and contradictory. Does the Government wish to reduce bureaucracy and speed up policy, or does it want to explain, evidence and justify its decisions at every stage of the process? There is an inherent tension in these objectives which Ministers not only refuse to address but in fact exacerbate.

That is a niche example of the incoherence and contradiction which is writ large across government. Consider how the Government wishes to reduce youth worklessness while simultaneously raising the minimum wage and employment taxes on businesses, increasing workers’ rights (and hence the costs of employing people) and failing to address the immigration influx of millions of low-skilled workers taking precisely the entry-level jobs those young people would work. There are others besides: wanting to improve access to housing and stop soaring rents while also increasing costs and burdens for landlords, for example, or pledging to reduce household energy bills while continuing to pursue the very same energy policies inflating those bills in the first place. It is reasonable to suggest that almost every significant policy issue facing the Government is so affected by these unresolved tensions.

Contradictions and trade-offs are inevitable in modern government given its size and complexity. It is the role of Ministers to reconcile these, imposing an overall direction and prioritising different objectives. Civil servants cannot do this, for they serve individual Departments which have their set goals and aims (or even specific policies within the Department). When, for example, the objective of reducing household bills conflicts with the objective of decarbonising the electricity system, only Ministers can resolve that. The problem with the British State (and its politics) is that they do not. Give civil servants direction and clarity, and they will do their job, even if politically they disagree.

Yet instead of doing so, Ministers choose to muddle through, fudging, deferring and tinkering, allowing the contradictions to fester and entrench, making it ever more difficult to untangle the knot in the future should someone try to do so. Civil servants are then left to implement the mess, constructing layers of process and bureaucracy around the political fudge in an (usually vain) attempt to neutralise or circumvent it. When the policy is inevitably thus bogged down or rendered functionally inert and the complaints and criticisms start rolling in, Ministers blame the civil service. So the merry-go-round continues.

If one alleges that the calibre of civil servants has declined, then the same must also be said of Ministers. This is not a problem of Ministers rarely having expertise in, or notable foreknowledge of, their briefs; that has, by and large, always been the case, and the role of Ministers is to make political, not technical, decisions. Rather, it is a problem of will; a certain disinterest in governance, an aversion to confronting vested interests, and a deference to ideology.

Ministers, especially the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, offer no direction to government and have no willingness to confront salient policy dilemmas

This is not to deny that the Executive has become trapped by the legal-bureaucratic architecture built under New Labour. But that is a prison of its own device and the great advantage — the saving grace — of the Westminster system is its ability to change course, to remake the law as required, if only there is the will to do so. Ministers, however, prefer to attend international conferences and meet foreign counterparts to look important, or visit some business for a photo-op that they can post on their social media, rather than govern. All the more so when any attempt to govern, to resolve those policy conflicts, naturally encounters activist opposition from long-nurtured vested interests who will attack and criticise. Criticism, or even — God forbid — unpopularity, are to be avoided like the Plague. Much easier, then, to steer clear of such things and simply coast along, announcing with much fanfare the occasional ideological tweak that gets some plaudits from one’s base and soothes one’s conscience but fixes nothing (or is even detrimental long-term).

Thus has the British State rotted from the head down. Ministers, especially the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, offer no direction to government and have no willingness to confront salient policy dilemmas. Government drifts aimlessly with no sense of the whole, lurching from one issue to the next, never fixing, only fudging. Unlike their counterparts in countries with rigid constitutions, British politicians have no excuse whatsoever for their inertia and inaction. They are trapped and blocked only as long as they choose to be so, as they have for the last twenty or more years. Responsibility for the sorry state of Britain today rests in large part with its politicians and the litany of bodges they have bequeathed to us. Do not let them claim otherwise.