Keir Starmer picks Chris Wormald to get his missions off the ground

The prime minister has chosen Chris Wormald to be his top civil servant, to work on “nothing less than the complete re-wiring of the British state”. Wormald is the longest serving permanent secretary in government, at the Department for Education from 2012 before moving to Health and Social Care in 2016. But he was not the public frontrunner for the role, with a low profile that may have appealed to Starmer after the intense commentary that surrounded incumbent cabinet secretary Simon Case.

In one sense Starmer has made a conventional choice. Wormald is a career civil servant, a Whitehall warrior who has built his career on getting inside the heads of his ministers. He worked with Nick Clegg in the early years of the coalition, then Michael Gove on schools reform. He saw a rotating cast of ministers at Health – and it is his record here during the pandemic that will now come under particular scrutiny, with questions about his leadership of the department and Covid Inquiry appearances still taking up a fair amount of his time. He also stepped in to cover for Case at the end of 2023.

But there are also unexpected aspects to the appointment, with Wormald bringing a different kind of experience to the role than most of his predecessors.

Wormald’s CV suggests that Starmer wants to take public service reform seriously

Wormald is not from the traditional Treasury or (more recently) securocrat mould of cabinet secretaries. Instead, his career has been grounded in social policy, with a CV that suggests public service reform will be Starmer’s top priority.

That starts with the machinery at the centre. Labour’s missions have not yet been properly gripped and Wormald needs to improve how No.10 and the Cabinet Office are organised to make the government’s soon-to-be-announced ‘priorities for change’ happen – and how they work with the Treasury, a department which fills the vacuum when the centre does not set a strong direction. 

Wormald needs to jump into the preparations for the spending review straight away and make his presence felt in the Treasury. He needs to show that not having been a Treasury official is a strength, not a weakness. The system must feel the jolt of clarity and strategic direction that can come from a new leader, and one who has been set the task – presumably – of driving improvements in performance across public services, especially in health and education. The government has just committed to invest £22 billion in the NHS and the prime minister needs someone who knows how the money should be spent.

The consummate insider should take on board external critiques

The benefits of experience are obvious. But as a Whitehall insider Wormald needs to seek out challengers and disruptors to give an external perspective. There is much that needs to change in the civil service and it is only a matter of time before ministers start to get frustrated at the pace of delivery and the capability gaps in government.

As head of the civil service Wormald needs to put himself on the side of reformers and to use his authority to address longstanding problems of high staff turnover, gaps in expertise, inadequate performance management and confused accountabilities. At the same time Wormald must build the civil service’s confidence. Officials will be looking to him to make the most of the government’s early relationship reset between ministers and the civil service, and he will have to able to develop a public profile. Like it or not, the cabinet secretary is a job that now attracts public scrutiny and interrogation, and Wormald will need to expand his comfort zone as the voice of the civil service. 

But he needs to do more than send out positive signals. He needs credibility with both the civil service and the prime minister to drive the change that is necessary, but a lifetime civil servant should look for answers outside the corridors of Whitehall. With critics suggesting that an insider is the wrong person to change the system, the new cabinet secretary must recognise the importance of recruiting senior colleagues from new and unconventional places.

Wormald will need more than experience to succeed as cabinet secretary

The reason that being cabinet secretary and head of the civil service is so difficult is that these different parts of the job require very different leadership skills. As cabinet secretary Wormald will need to be totally loyal to the government while representing the continuity of the state. He must warn against policy decisions that will not work and come up with alternative solutions. He will be the upholder of standards while ultimately doffing his cap to the prime minister. And he needs to do that while motivating, reassuring, inspiring, defending and reforming the civil service.

But he has also been charged with rewiring the way the British state works. Wormald will need to make sense of what mission-led government means and, as Starmer’s press release statement said, be a cabinet secretary capable of “breaking down silos across government” and “harnessing the incredible potential of technology and innovation”.

Starmer praised Wormald’s “wealth of experience”, but the new cabinet secretary will need inspiration as well as experience if he is to succeed.