The need for the civil service reforms which Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden is proposing is glaring. It can be summed up in the evidence that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey presented to the Commons Treasury Committee last week: that since the pandemic, productivity in the public sector has shrunk by 7 to 8 per cent. We have a civil service which has become swollen in recent years, but without any corresponding increase in output.
Over the past 15 years civil service numbers have performed a bungee jump. David Cameron’s coalition made a good start, thinning out numbers by around a fifth. Come the Brexit process, however, and numbers began to rebound.
When Covid arrived in 2020 the growth in civil servants accelerated. Even though both of those demands on the civil service have fallen away, numbers have still continued to grow. By 2023 the civil service had returned to the size it was in 2010, before Cameron’s cuts, and the growth in numbers hasn’t stopped since.
We have a civil service with increasingly seems focused on the wellbeing of its own staff, with unions threatening to strike over being asked to return to work in the office just three days a week. It has become obsessed with diversity and inclusion, with endless courses gobbling up work time. The function of the civil service – to administer the business of government in an efficient manner – seems to have come a poor second.
Governments which try to reform the public sector are always accused of ‘ideology’, yet there is nothing in McFadden’s proposed reforms – which include more performance-related pay and introducing a means of sacking under-performing employees – which is not routinely practiced by many thousands of private businesses.
No one accuses FTSE 100 companies of ideology when they rationalise jobs, reward good performers and show bad ones the door; it is only in the public sector where unions seem to think that employees have a right to keep their jobs for life, even if they achieve very little in their work.
The cultural difference was exposed by Digby Jones, former Director General of the CBI who was appointed a trade minister in Gordon Brown’s ‘government of all the talents’ in 2007. He didn’t last long, later complaining that he believed the civil service had twice as many people as it needed. He complained that many of those he had encountered were so unproductive that they deserved the sack, but the threat of losing their job ‘doesn’t exist’.
There is one problem, though, with McFadden’s ambition to improve civil service performance. It isn’t going to be helped by the government’s Employment Rights Bill, which rather works in the opposite direction.
It will, for example, give workers more power to ask for flexible working hours (although not the right for flexible working if employers have a good reason not to offer it). It will strengthen the role of employment tribunals. And, following on from the Bill, we have been told to expect some kind of ‘right to switch off’ – the ability to ignore work calls and emails out of hours. They are all measures which civil service unions will no doubt leap on in order to try to frustrate McFadden’s plans – and I wouldn’t be surprised if they succeed in seeing him off.
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