Overview

The first full change of the party in government for 14 years presents the UK with an opportunity for renewal, and for real reform. It must take it. The challenges, international and domestic, are huge, as the effects of conflict and political instability are increasingly felt at home.

Nor should Keir Starmer believe that his government’s massive majority insulates him from some of the travails facing governments in Europe and elsewhere; having been elected on a relatively low proportion of the vote, his party needs to show that it can use its parliamentary mandate to deliver for a frustrated public.

Starmer has said he will head a ‘mission-led government’, breaking out of long- standing departmental silos to work towards five overarching aims with meaningful benefit to that public. His ‘Plan for Change’, announced in December, promised to build on the missions much promoted during the election campaign and set some ambitious ‘milestones’ towards meeting them.

For this to succeed, the government will need a highly capable and confident civil service. In this edition of Whitehall Monitor – more data-focused and with less commentary than in the past, to complement our existing publications from the election period – we analyse the latest data on the civil service,* assessing what Labour can expect from Whitehall as it enters its first full calendar year in office. Labour’s political team, too, will need capability in its ranks, so in this year’s report we also look at Starmer’s cabinet, its shape and experience, to assess how well it is set up to lead these changes.

Mission-led government will require a fundamentally different way of working

The government envisages much of its reform agenda, and indeed its wider policy aims, being delivered through its five missions. But this year will show whether promises made in opposition can be translated into government

There is much work to do. If the missions are to function in a truly cross-government manner they will, for example, require a clear and radical governance structure. But while mission boards have been established, they have not yet gripped their tasks and have been created alongside existing government structures rather than replacing and directing them.

That will need to change as work comes to a head on the comprehensive spending review, reportedly to be announced in June, which will be the most important indication of whether the government is serious about its new way of working. If so, it will be essential that budgets are aligned to priority missions, and that mission boards have the authority to direct cross-departmental activity.

‘Rewiring’ the British state is a welcome but formidable task

Reorientating government around missions will require deeper changes to Whitehall, and the government has started to show that it recognises the scale of the task. Starmer has appointed Sir Chris Wormald as his new cabinet secretary, publicly charging him with “nothing less than the complete rewiring of the British state”. ¹ Cabinet Office, ‘Prime Minister appoints Sir Chris Wormald as new Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service’, 2 December 2024, www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-appoints-sir-chris-wormald-as- new-cabinet-secretary-and-head-of-the-civil-service  The prime minister is expecting much from the half a million officials under Wormald’s leadership, too many of whom are, he says, “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. ² Prime Minister’s Office, ‘PM speech on Plan for Change: 5 December 2024’, 5 December 2024, www.gov.uk/ government/speeches/pm-speech-on-plan-for-change-5-december-2024

This level of expectation has been matched by other senior government figures. After Starmer announced the Plan for Change, the senior Cabinet Office minister, Pat McFadden, reinforced its message, emphasising his own personal investment in civil service improvement and reform. This is encouraging, as many previous reform agendas have foundered without the high-level backing that, for now at least, Labour is showing.

McFadden talked about creating a “test and learn” mindset. To succeed, that will mean ministers and civil servants doing more to learn, as well as to test. Policy evaluation, for example, has improved in recent years – but it needs to be embedded in more policy areas and across public service delivery. Learning also implies more failures, and McFadden said that he wanted to encourage more risk-taking in the public sector.

Ministers will need to be willing to absorb risk too, and ensure that their teams are savvy enough to ‘fail’ in ways that can be presented as constructive learning rather than media disasters that undermine the government’s efforts.

In 2025 we will learn whether the government is in it for the long haul, and start to see how ministers, the civil service and wider public sector respond to the challenge. We hope that this is the galvanising moment for the state that the prime minister envisages.

The evidence reveals familiar problems with the civil service that must be addressed

But the civil service will not be able to meet the challenges of the moment if familiar problems remain unaddressed. Perhaps most obvious is poor workforce planning. Civil service numbers have continued to grow, mostly because of the need to recruit more front-line workers such as prison officers and Jobcentre staff. Ministers are right to resist repeating the mistakes of their predecessors and so should not be tempted by a specific headcount cap or target, because of the perverse incentives such a crude measure will introduce. But efficiencies will need to be made, and that will in many areas mean a reduction in the number of officials on the books.

Staff still move too often. While 2023/24 saw a welcome drop in the proportion of officials leaving the civil service entirely, there was a large increase in moves between departments – probably a result of machinery of government changes – which pushed up overall rates. Talented people are still cycling through jobs too quickly, failing to develop sufficient expertise to do them to the best of their ability. Civil service pay structures incentivise such movement, and inflation-eroded pay (albeit boosted recently) fuels even more movement and contributes to grade inflation.

Elsewhere, morale has dropped again, if only slightly and despite satisfaction with paying improving. But officials’ increasingly negative views about their leadership and how change is managed shows that the civil service needs an injection of energy
and direction.

And there is no shortage of work to be done in improving the capability of the civil service. Spending on consultancy, for instance, remains high. Consultants can be used well if providing specialist or temporary expertise. But the civil service needs to be better at growing its own capability rather than hiring it in from outside at greater expense. Both a change of government and a new cabinet secretary should be able to add momentum for improvement in all these areas.

There are also examples of where the civil service has continued to make progress over the last year. It has built on its long record of becoming more reflective of the society it serves – with numbers of female, minority ethnic and disabled officials continuing to rise – though there is more to do on the mix of socio-economic backgrounds. There are also signs that Whitehall is taking developments in new technology seriously. Reliance on legacy digital systems is still a problem, but on artificial intelligence there have been several exciting pilots, and a logical consolidation of relevant teams in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

A plan for the year ahead

Labour spent much of the six months following the election saying what it plans to do in government. In 2025 it needs to start acting on those plans. After the election, we published 20 Ways to Improve the Civil Service, summarising more than a decade of Institute for Government research on the subject. ³ Worlidge J, Urban J, Clyne R and Thomas A, 20 Ways to Improve the Civil Service, Institute for Government, 31 July 2024, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/ways-improve-civil-service  It proposed a series of tangible measures that would make the civil service more effective.

It is positive that there has already been movement from the government on several of our recommendations. Particularly welcome was a commitment to a comprehensive workforce plan and, announced in McFadden’s December speech, another to expand secondment programmes into the civil service. Opening up recruitment processes is another McFadden priority we firmly back.

But there is much more to do. Our assessment of the most important reforms to equip the civil service to deliver on the Plan for Change are found overleaf.

Priority reforms to best deliver the government’s Plan for Change in 2025

1. Ensure that the workforce plan in development is comprehensive, long-term, and aligns the civil service’s work, budgets and people.
2. Replace ‘success profiles’ to make recruitment less prescribed and more decentralised.
3. Require all civil service professions to develop capability frameworks for their members, including clear guidance for departments on pay.
4. Continue relocating civil servants outside London to themed campuses.
5. Create a mandatory training programme for performance management
6. Establish a physical campus for the Government Skills and Curriculum Unit to strengthen the civil service’s commitment to staff training and development.
7. Advertise all civil service jobs externally by default.
8. Create more senior specialist roles in every department, which do not entail significant management responsibilities.
9. Set up large-scale secondment programmes in every department and ‘mission’ to facilitate higher levels of interchange with sectors outside UK government.
10. Require each department to appoint an individual with the authority to establish multidisciplinary teams.
11. Set stringent standards for departments to follow on the timely publication of internal evidence, analysis and policy advice.

* Whitehall Monitor draws on many data sources that cover different date ranges; in every case, we use the latest data available. This means that some data reflects a period since the general election. Data on civil service staff numbers, for example, is available up to Q3 2024. But in other cases the latest data covers a period before the election. Figures for civil servants’ morale are only available for late 2023, while most other data on the civil service reflects the situation in March 2024.