Brexit at 10: The civil service

I joined the civil service in 2015, and my intake, like anyone starting a new career, used those first years to establish our baseline for ‘how stuff gets done here’. Those early years are also where career expectations start to form – speaking to managers and mentors and seeing what paths have been trodden before. Neither were, or are, locked in, but they form the baseline from which we deviate or innovate in future years.

The Brexit years did not offer us a very stable picture here.

‘This is not usual’

Seniors were constantly telling us that whatever we were learning was not the ‘usual’ way of doing things, and as soon as you thought you understood how things worked, they changed again. And while that was neither universally good nor bad, the civil service as an institution has not yet got to grips with what that unstable baseline has, in the intervening years, done to the skills and approach of civil servants, and to the implicit contract between civil servants and the state.

The ‘Brexit cohort’ learnt how government works in a state of flux. The traditional practices of government were often jettisoned, or radically changed or flexed, to meet the huge demands on the state. Everything in the eye of the Brexit storm, from policy making to ministerial decision taking to international negotiations – moved faster.

In many ways this was good, and has had long-term positive effects. Civil servants are now, on the whole, very good at setting up processes quickly, or working round ones that don’t meet the urgency of the task at hand. It is much more common to ask ‘does this meeting, or practice, serve what we need to do today?’ and there is a readiness to ignore the process if not, or at least selectively choose the parts of it that serve a useful purpose. That is a valuable skill.

Crisis work taught the civil service crucial skills

Crisis response knowledge – before Brexit more of a specialist niche – are bread and butter for the Brexit cohort. This no doubt helped the UK civil service to better respond to subsequent crises. From Covid to the Russia-Ukraine war, I saw countless domestic policy civil servants, who might not otherwise have had crisis response knowledge, draw on their Brexit experience to flex systems and get things done quicker.

Brexit did not only accelerate and disrupt the processes of government though, it did the same to careers. Much of the Brexit cohort found themselves with more responsibility, working in flatter hierarchies, and with far more responsibility and exposure – to ministers, stakeholders, and senior civil servants – than they might otherwise have had. For many this change, combined with the job opportunities created by Brexit, meant far quicker career progression than the cohorts before them would typically have seen.

There were – as with the disruption to ways of working – huge benefits to this approach, both in the moment and in the aftermath. High performance got quickly rewarded for many, and many of those who were accelerated into the senior civil service on the back of delivering what was imagined to be a once-in-a-generation crisis found they had the skills and resilience to lead their teams, almost immediately, in delivering another ‘once-in-a-generation crisis’ as the pandemic hit.

But Brexit also set in motion damaging trends in how the civil service works

Alongside those long-lasting positive impacts, however, the Brexit-era changes set in motion what are now deep problems with how the civil service approaches the work of government. It has also created a disconnect between what civil servants themselves expect from their careers and what the government can offer.

The Brexit cohort’s default is crisis and speed. The muscle memory is therefore, more often than not, a crisis response lever – daily meetings, quick notes for ministers, a taskforce to crack the problem or even some emergency legislation. Those are crucial tools, and it is a good thing that so many leaders have them in their arsenal. But for too many of the Brexit cohort, who were promoted on a narrower base of experience than they might otherwise have been and many of whom are now running large teams and policy areas, these are now for some the primary tools being reached for.

This cohort was also not taught the skills of longer-term, detailed policy making. Partly because L&D was hollowed out just as large numbers were being recruited, and partly because it was not being practiced by their seniors. Some of that skill is in understanding what ministers want, and having the confidence and tools to step back from that immediate ask and figure out how to get the state there. Many of the Brexit cohort don’t have deep knowledge and experience of that skill, and so are not passing it on consistently to the post-Brexit (and post-Covid) cohorts joining now.

Civil servants have spent so long responding to external shocks – to what the state needs – that the creativity and practice of responding to manifesto commitments or political goals – that is, to what ministers want – is no longer a widespread skill.

Brexit broke the implicit contract between civil servants and the state

Brexit has also driven a wedge between what many civil servants expect from their careers, and what the civil service can now offer. The rush to hire civil servants as Brexit preparations began meant people were hired at a higher grade, or promoted sooner than they might have been. That has been exacerbated by unhelpful pay structures that leave promotion as the only way to reward performance – or even to avoid real-term pay cuts.

There is now a particular ‘bulge’ at the higher grades of the junior civil service (Grades 6 and 7). This has led to frustration from this group at the lack of career prospects into the senior civil service, and confusion and angst over what their roles are: because of grade inflation the expectation and reality for autonomy and responsibility at these grades now vary wildly.

But the cohort behind this one are struggling too. Many of the post-Brexit, post-Covid cohort set their own career aspirations by looking at those above them, and some expect to move up the ladder just as quickly. This is unlikely to happen. Many of the opportunities for promotion are no longer available, and where they are they are being snapped up by experienced seniors who aren’t yet making it into the senior civil service.

There is rightly now an expectation that staff do longer at each grade. But with real-terms pay so far below where it was in 2010 (a particular issue for London staff where housing costs, in particular, have risen sharply), and still no way to reward staff who stay in their roles and build expertise, that is looking like an increasingly poor offer, and many are demoralised.

Brexit is not the sole cause of all this. But it was the start of the perma-crisis that has forged so much of who the civil service are, and how they work, today. Lots of good came out of that, but the shifting baselines on which a generation of civil servants forged their careers also stored up all sorts of problems which are now coming home to roost.