The UK Government is intent on the reform of the civil service. But, beside the voluble rhetoric and signature replacements of top civil servants, will anything actually change? History says not, as it not possible to reform the civil service without reform of the whole system of governing.
In 2004 the London think tank, Demos, published my report The Dead Generalist: Reforming the civil service and public services. It caused quite a stir. The heavyweight permanent secretary for Intelligence, Security and Resilience, Richard Mottram, came to the launch, I think to assess how much of a threat it posed to the established order. The director of the Senior Civil Service’s lobby group, the First Division Association, set off around Westminster spinning against me. Others were more receptive and I was asked into 10 Downing Street to brief the prime minister’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. He then briefed Tony Blair who instructed the Head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary, Andrew Turnbull, to prepare reforms along the lines of my report. Tom Bentley, Director of Demos and I were summoned for discussions with Turnbull, who spent most of the meeting explaining how difficult is the job of the civil service and really how all is OK.
Duly The Professionalisation and Specialisation of the Civil Service was published by the Cabinet Office and its proposals “rolled out” to the senior civil service in London – Whitehall. At last, having just about come to terms with employing qualified accountants nearly forty years after the Fulton Commission had proposed tackling the “cult” of the generalist, the Civil Service was to embark on what every other organisation has found: as more and more becomes known, you have to specialise more and more narrowly. Brain surgeons don’t do hearts, statisticians don’t build bridges, bakers don’t do butchery.
However, a year or two later, you would find the civil service just as it was with the “generalist” model intact, with high fliers staying in one role for no more than three years, leaping from say the lead on pensions to the lead on climate change. The presumption being that so long as you are “clever” in a verbal/linguistic mode (from Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner) you can “master the brief” rapidly.
It was as if I’d never written a report, the political leadership had never endorsed it, and the civil service had never implemented its own proposals. Thus did I receive my first lesson on and from the Whitehall civil service: It has an extraordinary capacity to roll with external threats and political “attacks”, to show abundant willing, wait for the government’s interest to go elsewhere, and, like memory foam, return to its original shape.
That said, I had made a mistake, as I was to discover. In 2010, Francis Maude was appointed Minister for the Cabinet Office as part of David Cameron’s coalition government. In 2012 Maude laid out his plans for reform. The programme was endorsed by leadership of the Civil Service, the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. The document proposed a series of practical actions including steps to improve the skills, abilities and performance of civil servants – again. But his reforms ran into an obstacle. The effect of reducing the independence of the civil service in order to reform it, in practice transfers power to the Executive, which in the UK system already has so much that the “absolute monarch” model of prime minister is never far away. And, unless your absolute monarch is absolutely fabulous, they end in tears.
In conversation with Peter Hennessy, a leading academic constitutionalist in the House of Lords, he was so concerned with this power shift that he favoured sticking with the existing “Northcote-Trevelyan” model of 1855. My mouth fell open – after all the model was 150 years old, it was introduced to remove cronyism and corruption, at a time when governments ran few public services, without the specialist organisational knowledge developed over the last 70 years or so, and without the modern governmental roles of dealing with the climate and associated emergencies, global finance, corporate power, media power, intergenerational conflicts of interest and supra national government. Why on earth go back there?
Reflection allowed me to see my earlier mistake and grasp the second lesson: Under the current constitution, the Civil Service is there to act as bulwark or counterbalance to the government of the day. Indeed, some senior officials see the very ineptness of the government “machine” as essential to prevent more political or ideological policy errors being put into practice. This is especially so with First Past The Post voting endowing majority powers to a single party with minority votes.
In being seen off in accordance with lesson one, Maude joined me and others, to the extent that interviewing him in 2015 he was moved to write a book on this “conspiracy against democracy”. He had also made the mistake of many politicians in thinking that they will be successful because their party is better and they make better ministers. As with many before him, experience altered this perception. During the back end of his term, he forged a link with Margaret Hodge, Opposition chair of the apparently powerful Public Accounts Committee, in pursuing reform. But by then it was too late. Politics had moved on. Election time was looming.
The third lesson lesson emerges here: Politicians are as much a cause of mediocre performance as are civil servants. This can, of course, be convenient for both as a place to allocate blame and avoid responsibility. Expanding the boundary of concern, the Lords, the public service regime, centralisation, the absence of real local government, receding democracy, and the formation and maintenance of effective state institutions are all malfunctioning parts of the whole.
Once New Labour had thrown in the towel in 2010, I set to work on a book on the root causes of why – entirely unnecessarily – the party had lost. This developed into why, more generally, governments fail. I grouped the underlying causes into Policy Failure, including “cake capture and preferential lobbying”, Dodgy Delivery, including unregulated regulators and the wrong model, People Failure – enough said, and Feedback Failure, the peculiar norm in government of, mostly, never knowing whether a policy, law, programme, etc has met its purpose. There is more wrong with systems of government today than many could possibly imagine. Changing one bit may make a little difference, but a step change requires a new constitution and new system of governing. This is actually quite straightforward. Its design is relatively straightforward, although it may look complex. The tricky bit is getting it to happen.
Lesson four then is: Reform of the Civil Service can be realised only as part of the reform of the whole system of governing.
We arrive at today and the CS model is once more under political scrutiny. In practice, it has not altered in its fundamentals. More “direct entry” specialists are employed. But they tend either to embrace the existing culture or stay for a limited period. With John Hoskyn’s attempt as Policy Adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, four times has civil service reform been seriously on the table. The progress of each has been very similar. A fresh new prime minister arrives determined to implement the policies on which she/he has been elected, the government gets frustrated, an adviser or minster identifies the “cause”, and a reform programme swings into action. One attempt may be bad luck, twice pure carelessness, thrice obsessive, but the fourth, and now a fifth?
Which brings us to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, who are talking much sense on this issue. Indeed, I read Gove’s speech at Ditchley with increasing incredulity. His notion of reform includes:
Government needs to be rigorous and fearless in its evaluation of policy and projects…. and open up data to external challenge….We need to ensure more policy makers and decision makers feel comfortable discussing the Monte Carlo method or Bayesian statistics, more are conversant with the commercial practices of those from whom we procure services and can negotiate the right contracts and enforce them appropriately…. There are precious few Government-sponsored or owned sources of reliable evidence on what works….We need, as a Government, to create the space for the experimental and to acknowledge we won’t always achieve perfection on Day One.
He could be a systems thinker. His speech is certainly systemic in its analysis.
Cummings has been much derided for wanting different types of civil servant, a refrain running through all these past attempts right back to 1968 and Fulton. He points to an excess of humanities graduates – any subject from literature to anthropology, and including economics and politics, which is based on the study of human behaviour. Some seek their subject authentication through terming these a “science” – as in the oxymoron “political science”. But as Chris Dillow said about how and why people react as they do: “There are no general laws in the social sciences, just a bunch of mechanisms that sometimes operate and sometimes don’t.”
The wider point is that any organisation dominated by one tradition of understanding will miss so much. That humanities tradition extends to the wider London establishment fraternity of politicians, journalists, think tanks and constitutionalists. To watch it forced into a crash course in statistics over the pandemic is testament to its narrow base. Even now, few there appear to have grasped what is and isn’t science, the way it develops, and the subtleties of modelling. And where were the people who have specialised throughout their careers in making things happen?
The first step in the Gove/Cummings’ reforms was to sack the head of the civil service and get a new one. This is termed the “appoint a man or woman” solution. The huge Procurement department in the Ministry of Defence has been the recipient of this practice since Margaret Thatcher first tried in the 80s. Thus, get in an industry experienced new broom with a successful track record and the problem is solved. Except it has not been. The National Audit Office continues to report on failings in weapons procurement. Their reports show little difference from those in the 60s – over time, over budget and don’t fulfil the quality objectives…… A new head cannot change that much in a generalist system originating in 1855, with few of the powers of a company CEO, the armed services pulling this way and that, and politics swirling away in the back and sometimes foreground. As ever, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
As Gove and Cummings will find out, but not without a fair amount of disruption. They now believe they will succeed because they are better people. But the civil service will activate its institutional alliances with the House of Lords, the news media, the judiciary, less ideologically driven Conservative MPs concerned at the concentration of power by the prime minister, and others to stymie their efforts. Politics and “events dear boy” will take its emergent course and dim their determination. Cummings may contain his frustration for say two years and then leave.
As for Gove’s fine words, what will happen when “government being fearless in its evaluation of policy and projects” comes face to face with the political messaging of certainty and strength and competence? The former will tumble as rhetorically massaged statistics are poured forth to “prove” the government right.
Gove’s thinking on evaluation and feedback is borne out by acres of organizational and systems thinking research and experience. Governments are organizations – bigger, more complex and more important than most, but organizations nonetheless. And no organisation can function without knowing where it is or where it is heading. This “knowing in action” has to be independently produced: self-scoring politicians are not an answer. The most potent systemic reform is to institutionalize this “fourth separation of powers” for results and outcomes, building out from the Audit branch of constitutions.
With the reluctance of any system of governing to reform itself – even if it did see the need – this appears impossible. But one “left field” contender is now in view. In the widespread absence of sound feedback, “fact checkers” have sprung up from civil society. Block chain technology has many applications beside crypto currencies, and without their huge energy consumption. The technology could be an enabler in a form of a “commons” in aggregating the research, data, evidence, empirical observations by citizens, international comparisons, and the like for a particular aspect of government. This could be for something as extensive as a health service, or as specific as the regulations for shark fin landing. This feedback repository would be open, would come to be the place to start on any assessment, and, as its reliability became established, would represent a neutral knowledge base. The space for the world to continue to be run on lies would contract and the space for informed deliberation grow. The faster this feedback platform can be activated and institutionalized, the faster governments will improve, and the waste of another round of nugatory “reforms” avoided.
Dominic Cummings has departed but the inherent systemic demand for reformation – far beyond his conception – remains.
