Ideas for Civil Service reform from the inside

There are ways to improve the public sector we have

By Tom Greeves, former civil servant

Politicians are often profoundly sceptical about the civil service. In October 2024, Kemi Badenoch said “about 10 per cent” of civil servants “are absolutely magnificent” but complained of others:

“Leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers … agitating. I had some of it in my department, usually union-led, but most of them actually want to do a good job. And the good ones are very frustrated by the bad ones”.

Last December, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made a speech in which he asserted that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

As of September, around 551,000 people worked in the civil service, a 35 per cent increase on 2016. The Reform Party has advocated huge cuts and promised to “replace Civil Service leaders with successful professionals from the private sector, who are political appointees, who come and go with the government”. Recent convert Danny Kruger MP has been tasked with planning major civil service reforms should Reform enter government.

Having worked for the Conservative Party, I never imagined I’d become a civil servant. However, in 2013 I took on a freelance contract at the Department for Education, where I wrote speeches for a junior minister called Liz Truss. I then became a pukka civil servant at the Department of Health. I went on to the Culture Department and then the Department for International Development, which was wisely folded back into the Foreign Office. I ended my civil service career at the Home Office, in February.

I realise that many – probably most – readers of this blog will take the view that civil service reform is a waste of time, that the public sector is essentially unreformable, and that the only thing we can do is drastically cut it back. I have some sympathy for this view, but for the time being, we are stuck we the public sector we have, and I believe that there are ways to improve it.

I was a keen observer of the system and the people who work in it. Here are six things I think government ministers should do with the civil service.

1. Challenge their own preconceptions and prejudices

It’s vital to do a deep drill into what works and what doesn’t. The results might be surprising.

To an outsider, the number of communications staff seems very inflated. Yet I worked closely with six departmental comms teams, and they were all highly capable and worked flat out. 24-hour news and multimedia meant constant firefighting and responding at great speed. Comms staff are typically very well-versed in policy and determined to deliver for ministers.

However, there are far too many policy officials, and many of them cover far too small a subject area. This is a waste of money and greatly slows up processes, because everyone expects to feed in. If I’d let policy officials have their way, every speech I drafted would have been three hours long. There were some excellent policy officials, but the system rewards the scrupulous following of processes rather than tangible achievement.

Some of my least effective colleagues were very senior. Many of the best were very junior. Among the higher ranks, civil servants were often like ministers – moving from job to job and developing little institutional memory. It’s lucky that some junior civil servants are happy to stay in the same job for decades, turning down promotions and pay rises, and becoming highly expert. Some of the parliamentary clerks, for example, were superb. But we need to encourage more of this.

Expertise is very precious and the acquiring of it should yield a financial reward. I would like to look at this in more detail to find the perfect way to improve output while maintaining taxpayer value. One answer may be to pay staff more for taking on more work, not just for taking on more staff as managers.

As has been widely pointed out, there is no penalty for failure at the top. Inept Permanent Secretaries and Directors must be removable. Ministers should also be able to make more political appointments, as would be expected in comparable countries.

2. Treat staff well

There is a tendency on the Right to put the boot into civil servants. But common sense and the lessons of high-performing organisations dictate that treating staff well leads to better outcomes. It’s also basic decency.

We often hear that civil servants should come into the office every day. I worked for the Home Office entirely remotely. If you’ll forgive me, I can say with confidence that my Home Secretaries were very happy with my work. (I received a Sustained Excellence Award, so it’s official!) Videoconferencing has changed the game. You can make a proper connection on video. Several departments have multiple sites, and I was rarely the only person dialling into a meeting. I built very strong professional relationships throughout the Home Office (and, incidentally, lots of friendships).

I didn’t sit around watching daytime TV. In fact, I was a lot less distracted at home than I had been in offices. Sometimes hours would go by when I didn’t get up from my desk because I was so absorbed in writing and meetings - but that was my problem. And the job didn’t pay well enough for me to have lived in London. Homeworking meant the Home Office could afford to hire a speechwriter of my experience and calibre.

Another department had made me come into the office … where I couldn’t sit with my team as there weren’t enough desks! Inevitably, I resented this. A civil service colleague was forced to go into his local office three days a week. He saw his newborn child for ten minutes on those days. Astonishingly, none of his colleagues worked in that office. There was zero practical benefit to the department. The whole thing was an exercise in making sure the attendance statistics looked better. That was a wretched way to treat someone – and an example of counter-productive red tape.

There were other surprises. In twelve years and six departments, no job-share team ever let me down. Not once did X say, “Sorry, only Y knows about that and they’re not back until Monday.” Some of my most effective colleagues were part-timers. One contractor had basically retired but fancied helping with digital planning. He saved taxpayers millions of pounds.

For junior and middle-ranking staff, the civil service cannot compete with much of the private sector on pay. It should continuously look to make the job attractive in other ways. This may mean offering some things that don’t pass the Daily Mail test as obviously good uses of taxpayers’ money. It’s emphatically in the national interest to attract the brightest and the best into the civil service - and then encourage them to stay.

Photo by Rose Galloway Green on Unsplash

3. Demand political neutrality

Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of left-wing groupthink. There are also civil servants who deliberately work against the government. All too often, while at work, civil servants have their heads filled with the sort of politically contested nonsense that only sociologists believed twenty years ago. Staff intranets were awash with this bile – much of it ahistorical. It is plainly in contravention of the Civil Service Code.

Likewise, the ability of trade union officials to campaign against government policy while they are at work should be massively circumscribed, permanently. The taxpayer should not fund trade unions at all and being a full-time trade union official should not be treated as a civil service job.

In December, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote an article in which she praised “the majority of civil servants I encountered” but reported that “it was undeniable that a culture of ideological orthodoxy had taken root, subverting the mission of the department.” She went on to detail the findings of a report she commissioned into the Home Office’s “Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion training”.

Braverman “discovered, much to my horror, that the Home Office was haemorrhaging thousands of pounds not on its critical objectives, but on a burgeoning empire of ideological indoctrination masquerading as training.”

It’s all there: damning the British Empire (and getting it all wrong), “unconscious bias”, “white fragility”, and “safe spaces”. In the face of much opposition, Braverman set about dismantling these programmes, but added “Regrettably, much of this progress was swiftly undone following my departure – a failure that still troubles me.”

She praised the majority of civil servants she encountered, but concluded:

“…it was undeniable that a culture of ideological orthodoxy had taken root, subverting the mission of the department. Some staff, emboldened by my stance, confided in me about the corrosive impact of EDI on immigration enforcement and policing policy. Others admitted they felt unable to voice dissent for fear of ostracism or career repercussions.”

I worked for Braverman throughout her two stints as Home Secretary, but I was not involved in this project. Curiously, I was relatively unmolested by such “training”, which occurred at quite a granular level, within specific teams, rather than across the Home Office. This was also my experience in other departments, although the DFID Intranet was routinely awash with drivel and poison.

The scale of the EDI sector, especially within the public sector, has recently been documented in the IEA report EDI Nation: The growth of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion bureaucracy and its costs. The report also comes up with solutions to radically pare back the EDI bureaucracy.

4. Improve political literacy and actual literacy

What gets overlooked is perhaps an even bigger problem than political bias – a terrible lack of political literacy.

Staff need to be educated about politics … but not indoctrinated. Time spent on imbibing Critical Race Theory should be replaced with instruction on basic, objective facts about how politics works and what ministers want to accomplish.

Routinely, colleagues hadn’t heard of major political figures and didn’t even know the names of serving Cabinet ministers. And yet they had a misplaced confidence in their political judgement. I was told that officials in Downing Street were breezily expecting a coronation for one of the candidates in a Tory leadership election. This candidate was in fact very unlikely to win (and didn’t) and there was no way they would have been unopposed.

Officials often drafted material that suggested the devolved assemblies enjoyed parity with the UK government. I think this was largely a bad habit rather than an agenda, but of course no UK government minister would want to give that impression. Civil servants got things like that wrong all the time. They are told not to be political. In fact, their responsibility is not to be partisan. Yes, ministers should be able to appoint far more advisers, but civil servants still need lessons in politics.

And ministers need to be chosen for their ability to give clear steers to civil servants without falling under their spell. Michael Gove did this exceptionally well at Education, as did Nick Gibb, and the results are clear for all to see.

5. Completely change the recruitment process

It wasn’t just political literacy that was a problem. Colleagues who could write fluently were far too rare. There were even major issues with basic grammar. I ran some writing training sessions, but there needs to be a drafting test for most civil service jobs. I’m sorry to say that a majority of my colleagues were as bad at writing as I would be at ballet. (And I am a very large man.)

Civil service recruitment needs to be completely overhauled.

All diversity targets should be scrapped. This country used to govern much of the world with a small civil service largely comprised of classicists – and it did a much better job then. Harvesting data on civil servants’ sexual preferences, economic backgrounds, and other personal characteristics is creepy, weird, and unproductive.

It is also wrong to stop candidates revealing what university they attended - which is another cackhanded, misguided effort to improve diversity. That said, two of my most impressive young colleagues hadn’t been to university. They undertook civil service apprenticeships instead. Not having had their heads filled with drivel – as is now standard practice at university – was a boon.

The box-ticking approach to hiring staff, in which applicants must hit key buzzwords on forms and in interviews to score points, should be axed. Specific experience is prized too highly and being clever not highly enough. However, having done a similar job well should be a massive advantage when applying for the next rung up the ladder. All too often, someone who’s known to be terrific loses out to someone else who does a little better on the interview scorecard. It should also be possible to be promoted several rungs of the ladder in one leap if you are outstanding.

And we need to accept that being a civil servant isn’t for everyone. A lot of effort goes into finding new roles for inadequate staff. Not nearly enough goes into retaining high-performing staff. There also needs to be more flexibility over pay. A lot of excellent people among the middle grades leave because a job elsewhere will pay a few thousand pounds more or because they’re not confident they will be promoted under the box-ticking method.

At the top of the civil service, there needs to be much more recruitment from outside, including the private sector and the military. This would also challenge groupthink. The civil service is still far too resistant to the idea of learning anything from the private sector, history, and other countries.

6. Restructure the civil service

It’s human nature that different departments will become fiefdoms and rivals. This happens within departments too, but it needs to be challenged. It is barely hyperbolic to say that everyone gets to comment on everything. The write-round process – where every department gets to comment on every proposed policy – is hideously time-consuming, leads to leaks, and stops this country getting things done. The process should happen at a much higher level, probably when a minister presents proposals to Cabinet.

Great leadership is vital. A message needs to come down from the top about what’s expected. The very top. I agree with the popular view that the Cabinet Office should become part of an expanded Downing Street operation. It’s crucial that the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer are in lockstep. Tensions will inevitably persist between No. 10 and the Treasury. They may even be somewhat helpful. But the government cannot function if the PM and Chancellor are not on the same side. Meanwhile the Foreign Office has a worldview which is utterly inimical to British interests. It needs a very different kind of civil service leadership and a tough, bold Foreign Secretary.

Conclusion

They say that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I think one can learn a lot from anecdotes! Nevertheless, my take on civil service reform is necessarily coloured by my own experiences. It would be very interesting to test my prejudices – to conduct a wide-range of interviews with as many people as possible, rattle through annual reports, and look at foreign examples and how other large organisations are run. In the meantime, I hope this is useful food for thought.