As the political temperature rises and ministers get tetchier, it’s not the Conservative Party that really works them up. No, it’s what they call “the bloody Civil Service”.
The tensions began almost as soon as Labour got into power. Some permanent secretaries departed at the earliest possible moment. Senior press officers went even more quickly.
The clashes seemed to subside, but, in reality, they just faded from public view. If anything, ministerial frustration has increased. “We’ve got to kill off the idea that the Civil Service is some kind of Rolls-Royce machine that we’ve been fortunate to inherit,” confides a minister who has served in two departments. The complaint is that, in Whitehall, everything happens so slowly. “Most civil servants”, said another minister, “are not interested in delivery. They like to be involved in policy-making, but delivery and measuring the success of the policies are seen to be lower-grade activities.”
Ministers glance enviously at the three departments that have transcended Whitehall inertia: Downing Street itself, the Treasury and the Department for Education and Employment. “Tony”, said one minister, “doesn’t realise quite how bad it is in the rest of Whitehall because he brought his own people in and has the pick of the best civil servants. Gordon [Brown] and David [Blunkett] also brought in people with whom they worked closely in opposition. They have all taken on the machine and won.”
Tony Blair appointed his own Policy Unit, and took Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell with him from his period as opposition leader. Ed Balls, Ed Milli-band and Charlie Whelan accompanied Brown when he entered the Treasury and immediately started to ruffle a few official feathers. Conor Ryan, a policy expert as well as someone who briefs the media, moved from opposition to government with Blunkett, as did Michael Barber, a professor at London’s Institute of Education. “David couldn’t have managed without those two,” said a government insider. “They came in with an agenda and ran the show. In other departments, ministers were much more dependent on the civil servants.”
Some Blairites can be scathing about policy delivery. “For the top 3,000 civil servants,” said one influential adviser, “policy development is all that matters. Implementation of policy is for the second-raters. If you fail as a policy-maker, you are sent to a regional office responsible for delivery. It is, therefore, a sign of failure to be sent, say, to the Croydon immigration centre. This would not be seen as a job for the creme de la creme, or potential creme de la creme.”
Another appointed adviser puts it more vividly. “Those civil servants who are sent to the social security offices in Newcastle and Glasgow are regarded like the not very bright younger sons of families in Victorian England who were sent off to run a sheep farm in Australia.” According to this Blairite moderniser, those out in the field are “demotivated, regarded as boring by the policy wonks at the centre; their output is not properly inspected and there is no follow-through”.
A particular target at the moment is the Home Office. One senior government figure (not from the Home Office itself) points to what he calls the “half-hearted attempt by the Home Office to keep some polling stations open for seven days” during the local elections. Civil servants, he says, made only the most cursory efforts to tell voters that they had a week in which to vote. Yet he fears the Home Office will declare the experiment a success.
And that’s another problem, say government insiders: the Civil Service doesn’t subject policy delivery to the same rigid criticism that it gives to policy development. During the chaos over passports last summer, a 47-page internal Home Office report (“That’s another problem – all their reports are so damned long and wordy,” observes another ministerial critic) concluded that the passport service was absolutely fine. “They just weren’t bothered about the appalling delivery.”
Blairites regard the attempts to raise standards in schools as one of their successes, but they sympathise with teachers who complain about excessive paperwork. Again, the Whitehall culture is blamed. “Where one form would do, the civil servants will send out ten.”
The same applies to the private sector. “This government believes in regulation,” said an insider, “but we do not want to alienate the private sector by sending them mountains of form-filling. The French civil service manages to administer the regulation of its private sector with a tenth of the paperwork.”
At a recent Sunningdale conference, Sir Michael Bichard, the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Education and one of the Blairites’ favourite civil servants, proposed that potential high-fliers should spend two or three years in service delivery. This led to a minor rebellion among his colleagues.
In the end, they agreed with some reluctance to phase in the proposal over several years. Some ministers fear it will be decades before it actually happens.
More generally, ministers complain that the Civil Service is backward-looking, rigid and over-cautious, working a nine-to-five routine while ministers and their advisers work late into the night.
The Cabinet Office, for example, is supposed to work imaginatively and creatively. But a senior civil servant confirms that “the burden of proof is always on those who think boldly”.
There are particular complaints about Whitehall’s indifference to new technology. “They are 20 years behind the times in their new technology mindset,” says one moderniser. “There are many at the top of the service with Latin and history degrees who prefer to use their own pens rather than computers. They are the sort who say that, in theory, they approve of computers, but would never use one themselves.”
Even now, the computer systems are rather basic. There has been no attempt at a co-ordinated system linking different departments.
Although some of his staff in Downing Street occasionally despair of the Civil Service machine, Blair himself is slightly less critical. But he sees the best of the bunch: the permanent secretaries and the highly regarded officials in Downing Street such as the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson. The top civil servants are themselves well aware that things need to improve.
In a recent Radio 4 series, The Whitehall Village, presented by the former civil servant Romola Christopherson, Bichard listed his concerns quite openly. He condemned a lack of purpose and direction, adding that the values and objectives are “not as clear as they should be”. There is, he argued, ” a lack of focus on delivery and results”.
Bichard also criticised the narrowness of Civil Service recruitment, a commonly recognised failing. Women and ethnic minorities are in short supply in Whitehall. When Bichard needed to fill a senior post in his department, he found that there were no obvious internal women candidates, and no senior women to poach from other departments, either. To find a woman, he had to go outside.
In some respects, things are changing. There are attempts to end the insularity of the Civil Service and the rigidities of Whitehall’s departmental boundaries. Bichard himself is a former local government executive who brings to the Civil Service all the impatience of the outsider. The Social Exclusion Unit contains not only civil servants, but also outsiders from the voluntary sector, social workers and probation officers. It has managed to focus ministerial minds from different departments.
But the unit has the huge advantage of being set up and led by the Prime Minister. If he wants a report on the problems associated with sleeping rough, and the possible solutions, it is not surprising that he gets one; nor is it surprising that ministers drop their departmental baggage in an effort to perform well for the unit.
Such prime ministerial attention, however, is also the unit’s main flaw. It has no long-term structure or purpose. Blair sets a task and it delivers. When Blair’s mind is focused on other matters, the unit is deprived of a clear lead.
So what really matters is broader reform of the Civil Service. Government insiders want to introduce a greater range of targets for service delivery. For example, they say that the average time to process a passport should be no more than six weeks.
Naturally, the Civil Service has its own side of the story. One former civil servant says that the initial goodwill towards new Labour was immense after the years of drift under John Major. Within six weeks, she says, it had evaporated because of a peculiar combination of ministerial high-handedness and a lack of policy direction. Some ministers were unprepared for high office and blamed civil servants for the resulting policy vacuum.
Some civil servants also argue that ministers are threatening the neutrality of the service.
The ministers and advisers anonymously quoted in this article are highly aware of this charge; for that reason, they try, if anything, to restrain their criticisms. Although they will talk to me without attribution, they fear that, if they speak out more volubly, they will be branded once more as sinister control freaks.
But there is a rare opportunity hidden in this largely suppressed tension between ministers and their officials.
After 18 years in opposition, ministers still have a clearer sense of the real world than officials who have spent their lives in an intoxicating Whitehall hierarchy. They have made enough senior civil servants genuinely aware of Whitehall’s faults to hold out the real prospect of change. If the Civil Service does not reform itself now, it probably never will.
Steve Richards is political editor of the New Statesman
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