Andy Burnham must avoid repeating Keir Starmer’s failed ‘civil service reset’

“From the get go I want you to know that you have my confidence, my support and, importantly, my respect”. So said Keir Starmer back in the summer of 2024, in a personal video to the roughly half a million civil servants newly working for him. Those July days saw cabinet ministers enthusiastically clapped into their new departments and, after years of poor relations with the outgoing Conservative governments, hope abounded that we would see the end of the civil-service-bashing, leaks and tensions: a new dawn of ministers and officials working harmoniously together.

A relationship reset needs more than warm words 

Five months of mounting frustration followed. Ministers were disappointed, even angry, with officials they felt were lacking dynamism and drive. Officials in turn felt such accusations were unfair in the absence of clear political direction. Starmer’s December jibe about the “tepid bath of managed decline” wasn’t a snap change in his feelings towards the civil service, but ratcheting up of private discontent ill-advisedly spilled out in public.

In short Starmer, and his government, had lost trust in the civil service as an institution.

Burnham is not Starmer. He has more experience of working with the civil service as a politician, having led a major Whitehall department in the last Labour government, and far deeper misgivings about the state – he has described the Hillsborough disaster, and the long years of state failure surrounding the cover-up of policy actions that followed, as his political awakening. That said, the new prime minister has kicked off his relationship with the civil service in a similar way to his predecessor, going out of his way to praise them in his first weeks. 

This is welcome and necessary. Ministers who respect the officials who serve them should not be taken for granted. But it is not – as Starmer’s failed experiment shows – enough. 

The relationship is in a moment of jeopardy 

The transition to a new government is a moment of jeopardy for the relationship between officials and ministers; there is a desire to make this set-up work, as well as an underlying unease about the last failed reset. While there is a role for new ministers – in resisting the urge to make snap judgements about their officials, and in providing clear and consistent direction – it is ultimately up to officials to do the hard graft of earning trust in those early months. That presents all sorts of pitfalls which the civil service will have to navigate.

High on the list should be the risk that, in a bid to win trust from a prime minister who has already expressed scepticism, the civil service ducks difficult, direct conversations with new ministers about the trade-offs needed to deliver their asks. We know this happens. It is not an indictment of individual civil servants, and nor is it a consistent practice, but there is a culture of conflict avoidance and over-compliance that permeates parts of the civil service. In part this is because a workforce that has been told – since Brexit – that surfacing trade-offs or risks means ‘you’re against us’ has found itself too often avoiding or delaying surfacing them, or doing so only obscurely. Ministers want, or should want, to grapple with the real-world impacts of their decisions: their being left in the dark only leads to frustration. 

Civil servants will be trying to guard against this, and against the other drivers of a loss of trust in the institution. That job is made almost impossible however by the slippery, useless, or downright harmful language we use to talk about the relationship between ministers and civil servants. This is what needs to change.

The government needs an accurate conversation about trust

Loss of trust is not a mysterious or nebulous phenomenon. There are specific traits in the civil service that – when not displayed – lead minsters to lose trust in the institution. A new Institute for Government research project, drawing on interviews with ministers, officials and special advisers across multiple administrations, identifies these and sets out how the civil service is currently failing in them. The five traits span from ‘giving good advice’ (where there is currently a worrying lack of creativity and curiosity), to ‘getting it’ (which is currently hampered by a sense of overwhelming inertia and status quo bias).

Starmer’s government and its predecessors – ministers and officials – seemed unable to pinpoint these issues. Frustration boiled over. But the language that was available to them, or to the journalists and commentators talking about the relationship, was far too limited: jibes about ‘the blob’ of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, or platitudes about ‘respect’. And so we simply saw the relationship deteriorate, without changing. 

Instead ministers and officials need to get under the bonnet of the relationship, and accurately look at what is going wrong as a prerequisite to fixing it. Our new work gives them tools to do so. If Burnham dodges this, he will simply repeat Starmer’s failed reset – and with it leave ministers and civil servants trapped in a low trust culture, with each group second guessing the other and an abundance of caution and risk aversion permeating the government.

For a prime minister who prides himself on plain speaking, he could do worse than start with an honest conversation about the relationship with the civil service.