Digby Jones gives the civil service a kicking

The Watcher

Speaking as someone who works in The Civil Service I can agree with nearly everything that Jones has said. In my office there are a lot of admin staff, usually from agencies, who are there simply to make up the little empires of middle managers. In the last few years everything has been made more bureaucratic and procedures heavy so as to justify those middle management positions. Things that previously operated informally and smoothly have been formalised and governed with protocols which then have to be monitored and therefore, yep you guessed it! managers are needed! Half is probably too high a number but I have no doubt that a significant number of posts could be culled and Joe Public wouldn't notice the difference and many people within the Civil Service would welcome that.

Muhammad Haque

I am not an ex Minister! This is probably because I never went for a job as a minister! How reassuring to hear Digby Jones tell the truth on the state of the amusingly labelled personnel called the 'civil service'. As can be expected, Brown has missed the point, if his published co,moment in response to Digby Jones is any guide. The problems that exist within the civilian staff in various public organizations including in the UK local councils are mainly due to the failure of the elected office holders.

That failure is widespread.

It is a cultural one.

And thus it is not party political.

It is only party political in a limited number of areas.

Although Digby Jones was speaking today to some of the type f elected postholders I have in mind, I do not believe that his comments will make any difference to the status quo whatever.

The reported reactions to digby jones by Gordon Brown aside, there is no citable, far less sustained tradition in this country of the elected postholders demanding rigorous standards by the personnel employed to carry out the legitimate political agenda.

This is probably linked with the morally compromised position of most career politicians and politicos seeking or occupying the main political posts positions...

Millbank Tower

I know somebody who went to work part-time for the Department of Education on a job directly related to Jamie Oliver's school dinners gig.

She told me it was impossible to get anything done because the place was mass of flexible working and job sharing, and when not actually 'working' the staff would switch off their mobiles.

So, even the simplest decisions would take days of chasing elusive senior staff.

Polly and Alice's mum

Why cant I get one of these cushy jobs-for-life-gold-plated-pension-and-all-the-trimmings???
Perhaps because I live in France, and possibly because I have too much common sense.

ATFlynn "Norfolk's Mutineer"

I wrote a number of letters to Digby Jones in the beginning of the year 2000s. The one I'm looking at is an answer sent by John Cridland on the 30th. October 2002. Digby was too important to answer mail.
What is happening today with the economy and the total mess this government is responsible for, I was predicting from at least 1995. But John Cridland said it was not,"in our members interest for us to pursue options that directly conflict with the Government's fundamental policy objectives, at a time when we are seeking to persuade Ministers to take account of our concerns over measures which they will shortly be enacting."
All I was trying to point out was the massive debt build up from the PFI. contracts and other obligations like the massive extention of the Welfare State and doubling of the NHS. budget plus the huge increase of the Benefits liability.
Today, there is no escaping the fact that this country will be bankrupted by the year 2010. I do still have the correspondence
from the CBI. and others, especially the Auditors and Accountants.
Kind Regards, ATFlynn,
"Norfolk's Mutineer"

Mindbender

The explanation is not hard to find. As a Minister Lord Digby-Jones will have encountered almost entirely members of the so called "Senior Civil Service". All those promoted into this august body over the past 10 years or so are almost all a complete waste of space. They are for the most part: office politicians;those deemed by the Labour party to be sympathetic to the cause, ie toadies; wimmin or members of favoured ethnic groups. Labour Governments will use almost any criterion except merit to judge promotability. This is not the first time this has happened. Mrs Thatcher had to spend much time in the early/mid 1980s weeding out the dross that had accumulated in the upper reaches of the civil service during the 1960s-70s. If elected, Cameron will have to do the same, except the problem is much more severe now and encompasses almost the whole of local government as well.

seb

The Indians love 'babu' jokes. Jokes about civil servants, jobsworths and pencil-pushing leadswingers whose desks are covered with work they have no intention of even starting to do. People who'll do anything to avoid the least exertion and are entirely invisible whenever anyone else needs to speak to them or have them actually do what's in their job spec. We've had hundreds of thousands of Brit Babus for decades and, all of a sudden, someone has noticed! Of course, the advent of the mobile phone and the social networking sites has made our babus even more useless than before. You wouldn't have thought it possible, but those are the benefits technology has brought us.

Athesius the Facilitator

I'm a civilservant with the MOD and I think Digby is talking rubbish. Why!? Because its worse than what Digby says. He has only suffered in whitehall. Digby get out into the real civil service if you can it's so bad it's funny.

Forlornehope

The following update on Parkinson's law, "Explaining the Curse of Work" supports Digby Jones's conclusions:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126901.300-explaining-the-curse-of-work.html

I had some experience working with ex-nationalised industries in the 1980's; it all sounds very familiar.

The point is that unless and until you mandate a series of across the board reductions you never find out how little you really need or what is essential to do the job. This is dangerous because you inevitably cut out some muscle and bone along with the fat. Unfortunately, there is no other effective way of getting through a bureaucracy. The electricity supply industry, in particular, ended up running with a third of the nationalised numbers.

Susan Hill

Last year a friend went to work in a Civil Service department - low-rank, mainly inputting data. But she found the job and the surroundings congenial and hoped to progress upwards. After a month, she realised she had finished her work every day shortly after lunch, and so asked to be given more. The shocked and horrified reaction was that she had better slow down then. She saw that she was showing everyone else up and was very unpopular. The office, she said, had work for 3 people full-time but had 9, who spun out their time working slowly and otherwise e-mailing one another silly jokes and family photographs and doing their online shopping. She left after just over a year, bored, frustrated and disgusted and has no doubt that her experience could be replicated throughout the Civil Service.
They should, as they say, wake up and smell the coffee. Because I think people are suddenly waking up to just what is happening in most office-based areas of the Public Sector - and in today`s economic climate, they don`t like it.

CS

As a civil servant, I wholeheartedly agree with The Watcher. However, Digby-Thingy is wrong in one respect - my Dept has had deep experience of captains of industry being brought in to run things and without exception they've ended up doing what was previously thought impossible - buggering things up even worse than they were to start with.

There's a reason why certain things are done in the public sector, because they're non-profit making and a legal obligation. The more kneejerk legislation you get from government, the more people you need to administer it.

Maybe if more people stopped reacting to every crisis by demanding that the government do something, you wouldn't need such a big public sector.

True Bred Pomponian

I am glad someone agrees with me over slashing numbers in the Civil Service. It was certainly all true at the MoD when I worked there a few months back.

cuffleyburgers

Digby was terrific on Newsnight, against some useless mandarin. However, Beeb didn't seem keen to make a big deal of it - none of the passion they show about Gaza for example.

Jobsworth

I'm a Civil Servant and agree with the Watcher and CS. Our Department too has its own empire builder just down the corrider with a staff of nine, all doing "work" previously done by three people. Every now and then a lower grade person becomes upgraded for doing the same job. When numbers of higher grades reach a certain number,they are then entitled to "support staff" although the volume of work remains the same. Oh well, it's better than being on the dole and we do pay tax, NI contributions and we help to keep the local economy afloat ie using the village Post Office, pubs, restaurants etc.

Ian C

Radio 5 last night was full of callers and emails agreeing with Digby, most of them civil servants.

CS makes a good point - the "there must be something done it about it" mentality. This came to prominence under Major - the dangerous dogs act and the weapons ban. It has gone on from there under this gov't whose solution to evrything has been to legislate rather than to empower solutions where there are problems.

Digby for King instead of Prince Charles!

Outsider

Hooray for Sir Digby Jones, at last someone has given the truth, and I agree with everything he says, including the 50% figure.

I've worked in 3 different departments as one of those "waste of money" consultants that is brought in to clean up some over-budget mess. I've been shocked to see £80K per year managers turn a blind eye when their own team willingly attempt to destroy their own projects because it involved "change".

I've watched groups of payroll staff huddle together around a calculator and take a day trying to work out how much back pay someone is due.

I've seen passive-aggressive incompetents promoted because it's the easiest way to remove someone from your team.

There are of course exceptions, and the best manager I ever had was a civil servant.

But once you've seen the inside of the Civil Service, it is no longer a surprise to find out that Equitable Life ran rings aroung the regulator. Huge numbers of Civil Service staff are lazy, ignorant and incompetent.

Oh, and that is before we get on to the nudge-wink processes where senior civil servants are very often promoted for the last two years before retirement, so their final salary pension is boosted.

As for Gordon Brown, I'm sorry to hear people are still listening to him.

And one final point - some of these problems do occur in the private sector, but at least they are doing it with private money, not ours.

C Powell

Like others here, I have had experience both of working in the Civil Service and with government agencies and local government. Easily 50% of their functions and staff could be cut with no perceptible disadvantage to the public.

The trouble is that whenever any cuts are made it's always of those people and services which are worthwhile.

Quite how we get round this problem I don't know. But a start would be to have a proper debate on what functions the state should be carrying out and what it shouldn't. Then you can decide what to remove. Whereas at present it's all shrieking about cutting "services" without any look at whether any of those services are needed at all and, if so, whether they need to be provided by bureaucrats. This is the debate which should be started - now - by the Tories or maybe some think tank, akin to IDS's Centre for Social Justice.

It should consider: -
(a) what the state must do - defence/law'n'order etc;
(b) what it should do - eg ensuring that streets are clean / rubbish is collected; and (c) what is wholly unnecessary for the state to do i.e. all the add-ons we've had in the last decades, which have reached their reductio ad absurdum in the last 11 years with "walking co-ordinators" and the rest.

The aim should be to get people thinking "Why on earth do we have these people in the first place?" when Labour bleats about cuts. In short, we need to change the terms of debate about what the state - and its functionaries - are for.

Susan Hill

Another friend took early (2 years) retirement last October from the NHS because of ill-health. She was due to receive a lump sum immediately and her pension should have started in December. No cheque. No pension. Afetr a week of enquiries she finds someone who finds someone who finds someone who discovers all the paperwork waiting to be signed off on someone else`s desk. NOT apparently, someone who was so overworked that they could not have done it five minutes after they received it. No apologies of course. And to date, still no payment. What the hell are these people DOING all day ?

William Blake's Ghost

"I think you will find that the civil service is full of honest, decent people who work hard."

Likely 'The Curse Of Broon' will strike again. Prepare for a plethora of scandals about the Civil Service!

AngloWelsh Dragon

I worked in procurement in the MOD from 1986-1998. I remember an old boss saying to me that anyone who was still a Civil Servant by the age of 40 was either a mediocrity or a coward. This was born out by the number of us who jumped ship or were poached by clients in our 20s and 30s. My contemporaries who remained and are now in their 40s are to a man/woman lovely, decent intelligent people. They simply have no idea of what constitutes a hard days work!

M Mc Whirtter

I notice that all the comments here are anti Civil Service. Your comment vetters have done a good job at removing any dissent. Just what we have come to expect from the spectator rag. No truth, no honesty, just the usual lies and innuendo.

You really are a filthy bunch.