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The coronavirus pandemic is a significant moment for civil service reform

Ministers should support a strong civil service, but there are no quick or easy answers

Sir Bernard Jenkin, the new chair of the House of Commons Liaison Committee, has written for the IfG about the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic for Whitehall. With turbulent relationships at the top, he is right to argue that ministers should support a strong civil service, but there are no quick or easy answers, says Alex Thomas

Bernard Jenkin has thought more about the civil service than most politicians – part of his job when he chaired the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee was to scrutinise the government bureaucracy.

In his article for the Institute for Government, he is correct to note that the pandemic response is an important moment for the civil service. The new government was always going to want to reform the machinery of the state but now, as Sir Bernard says and as we have seen in recent days with the departure of Sir Mark Sedwill, the civil service is being lined up to absorb at least some of the blame for mistakes made during the pandemic response.

This is a time to strengthen the civil service

Far from weakening it, ministers should use this moment to strengthen the civil service. It is the traditional but enduring value of civil service loyalty to the government of the day that gives civil servants the confidence to challenge, test and argue with ministers, but in private, never in public. Strong and challenging advice means fewer u-turns and higher government credibility – something the current administration should welcome.

Sir Bernard is worried about timidity and lack of self-confidence in the civil service. From my experience that concern is overstated. Senior government officials are for the most part confident and professional. Of course those civil servants who are promoted into the top positions are people who deliver what ministers want – that is how our impartial civil service works. But it does not mean they are cowed into submission by tyrannical ministers and special advisers. It is true that, as in all successful organisations, leaders should welcome challenge and criticism, and be on guard for putting naysayers automatically into the “too difficult” box. But civil servants who can offer well-constructed advice and alternatives have been the ones who do well.

Appoint civil servants who challenge hard, then know how to get things done

A profusion of party political recruitment would be cause for concern, and despite the political appointment of David Frost as National Security Adviser we do not yet know whether the prime minister, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings and others in government have a wider plan to replace senior civil servants with personal appointees. In fact their permanent secretary hires so far have been startlingly conventional. But Sir Bernard is right that ministers must not appoint subservient placemen and women. The priority should be to find senior figures who can challenge them hard but also work the system to deliver the government’s agenda.

And Sir Bernard gives his colleagues good advice when he says that ministers, advisers and political parties need to do their bit too. If the message that comes from ministers – through their words and their actions – is that they want a focus on the long term, diversity of background and thought and excellence in a range of professional skills then that will act as a catalyst for change. Michael Gove’s recent lecture on government reform covering all these issues is an interesting start. The test will be how the government follows through on what he says.

Good intentions will not be enough and quick fixes should be avoided

But even with good intentions we should not expect a rapid change in political culture. The pressures are too great, the need to satisfy media and parliamentary demands is too strong. And alongside ministers the civil service needs to generate momentum for reform from within.

Civil service leaders know that there is much more work to do on recruiting people with the right skills including on project delivery, on breaking down departmental barriers and in making more extensive use of the digital, commercial, financial and analytical skills that already exist in government. It will also be important to change the pay, performance and bonus packages for civil servants to reward experts and those who demonstrate a track record of delivery.

There are other lessons from coronavirus too. The government did not “miss” the risk of a pandemic – it was recorded on the national risk register – but it did miscategorise the pandemic risk as being one primarily of influenza rather than another novel disease. That meant too much focus on capacity and vaccination responses to flu and not enough on other scenarios. And while the co-ordination capacity of government through its civil contingencies and COBR arrangements is impressive, its risk assessment arguably did not reach far enough into the daily decisions made in the health service and elsewhere, and into the minds of ministers when deciding budgets and service capacity.

The coronavirus response is an important moment for the civil service and Sir Bernard rightly identifies many of the challenges its leaders need to address. But if reform is to be used to best effect, ministers and civil servants should work together to focus on the long haul and look at systemic cultural and organisational changes, not reach for quick fixes.

The history of the civil service is one of reform: sometimes abandoned, sometimes successful. The next chapter in that story was going to be an important one even before Sir Mark Sedwill’s resignation and Michael Gove’s direction-setting remarks. It is strongly in the civil service’s own interest to take advantage of this moment and to own the agenda for reform.

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