Every civil servant watching the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, give his barn-burning speech to the Conservative party conference knew that the words “we have the best civil servants in the world” would be swiftly followed by a tragicomic recipe for putting that right.
He didn’t disappoint, with a deadpan delivery of the announcement that the government was going to be “freezing the expansion of the civil service and putting in place a plan to reduce its numbers to pre-pandemic levels”. This crowd-pleaser was greeted with loud applause and cheers.
Which wasn’t a surprise. In their parallel universe, you wonder what other nonsense is going to seize emerging Tory opinion-leaders.
This isn’t Britannia Unchained; it’s Britannia Unhinged. Yet there is method in the madness. Like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss before him, in targeting the civil service, Rishi Sunak is pushing a tried and tested formula for distracting from more serious electoral threats, which this week include the toxic fallout from the cancellation of the HS2 leg to Manchester, the looming threat of more NHS strikes, and a Covid inquiry that is zeroing in on the quality of political decision-making at the heart of government.
This is no more serious an attempt to reform the civil service than the last cynical effort. It feels like yet another trial balloon designed to test the public’s acceptance of the continuing expansion of the culture wars that this government relies on for its survival.
Here is why the current wheeze won’t work.
First, as Dave Penman, leader of the FDA civil service union, said, Hunt’s claim that freezing numbers would save £1bn a year amounts to a 7-8% cut in the pay bill, with scant detail on where those cuts would be made. In Penman’s statement yesterday he characterised Hunt’s decision as “intellectually bereft”, “glaringly arbitrary” and “straight out of the Jacob Rees-Mogg playbook”, recognising that while the government is free to decide the size of the public sector, ministers need to “be honest with the public about the consequences”. There is no evidence to suggest that they are ready to do that, which is why Sunak ditched the Johnson administration’s 91,000 civil service job cut target.
Second, civil service reform is horribly complex, and has been attempted by every government since the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of Victorian times. We still await the public sector productivity review from the chief secretary to the Treasury, John Glen, and the review of the civil service being masterminded by Conservative peer and former Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.
It seems vastly unlikely that with a general election looming over them, this crop of ministers will be minded to even read all those plans and reports in full, never mind take the time needed to implement them. This government doesn’t really do detail.
Third, the current effort is already hopelessly corrupted by the culture wars spilling over the sides of this week’s party conference: Hunt’s announcement was launched with news of a review of “equality, diversity and inclusion spending in the civil service … to ensure it represents value for money”.
Nobody in their right mind takes this “review” at face value. As if the home secretary’s war on “woke” diversity training at the Home Office hadn’t already made it clear, the notion that diversity and inclusion are somehow responsible for sabotaging public sector productivity and efficiency probably tells you all you need to know about how seriously this lot are taking civil service reform. It’ll probably be quietly forgotten about by Christmas.
Of course, the chancellor is right to say that “new policies should not always mean new people”. But it’s worth remembering what drove the recent expansion of the civil service headcount, from less than 400,000 in 2016 (the smallest size it had been since the second world war, according to the Institute for Government) to 488,000 according to official figures for June 2023.
First, Brexit – which, even when only partially enacted, means permanently increasing the size of the civil service to take on functions previously carried out by European institutions on our behalf. Covid, too, has shown that having permanent capacity in place to deal with pandemics – a capacity, incidentally, dismantled by Johnson months before Covid hit – is probably a good idea.
Our tech bro PM also has the challenge of squaring reduced headcount with, among other things, a desire to get more science, engineering and digital talent into the government. It was only six months ago that he launched the government’s plan to “cement the UK’s place as a science and technology superpower by 2030”.
All of the above means that the civil service must deal with, yet again, the threat of job cuts as our bosses frantically figure out how to retrofit their existing workforce plans to meet the chancellor’s arbitrary target in a matter of months.
That isn’t even the worst of it. Reports suggest savings released by civil service cuts – like cuts to benefits – will be used to fund tax cuts before the next election.
This is the name of the game, finding political cover and convenient culprits for cuts to public services. Don’t fall for it.
