The end-of-season finale is almost here. As the country slides inexorably and eagerly down the greased abattoir chute towards the end of what might be the worst-ever parliamentary session, you might ask if civil servants have become paralysed – either by chronic depression or pathological levels of schadenfreude – due to the spectacle of our leaders’ insistence on prioritising political theatre, the now-doomed Rwanda policy and the war on “diversity and inclusion” over doing the actual day job.
The short answer: it’ll take more than that. Yes, civil service staff turnover is worryingly high, and morale has been declining fast. We’ve been persistently attacked for being “remoaning” obstructionists, “activist” saboteurs and Brexit crybabies. We’ve been castigated for showing that working from home actually works, and for daring to raise questions about the legality of arms sales to Israel. This month, we’ve even – for the first time – had to mount a legal challenge over the constitutional jeopardy that ministers have put civil servants in by ramming through their unworkable Rwanda scheme. Last but not least, we’ve had to weather another virtuosic blizzard of “common sense” from Esther McVey about banning “diversity and inclusion” jobs. McVey doesn’t seem to realise that listening to the Tory party sermonise about the perils of diversity and inclusion has the same level of credibility as Dr Crippen giving a Ted talk.
But the longer answer is that despite all of the above – and maybe partly because of it – civil servants are idealists. Adherents. A 500,000-strong (and growing – thanks Rishi!) army of believers with absurdly high, perhaps comically high levels of optimism.
I’ll concede that the civil service has a reputation for cultivating lots of workplace “churn”, and that many of us (according to the Institute for Government) are leaving for greener pastures elsewhere. But on the whole, civil servants tend to stay for years – certainly for far longer than some of the current crop of ministers, who struggle to last more than eight months. You can argue the toss about whether we are any more effective, but the vast majority of us believe in what we are doing, and tend to stick around in the hope that things can get better.
Where does that optimism come from? Tradition and practice. For the battered (but still functioning) machinery of government to get anything done, from pensions and passports to public health, we have to show – not just by inclination, but also by law – that we believe in three fundamental principles that it suits some ministers to pretend to consider quaint.
First, civil servants believe that facts matter and that we all share the same reality – we don’t really go in for magical thinking. Second, we believe in fairness, and that what works in Guildford should also work in Gateshead and Glasgow. And we believe in the principle of moral equivalence: that if it’s wrong for you to do something, it’s wrong for us, too.
Not exactly the Sermon on the Mount, eh? Yet this stuff underpins the not-yet-dead Nolan principles of public life, the civil service code and every recommendation that we present to ministers, who may or may not decide to implement them. But we don’t take the decisions lightly. Recent polling suggests that the disintegrating quality and integrity of this government’s decision-making is precisely what is driving it toward electoral oblivion.
In the meantime, what really helps us keep going is knowing that the British public are with us. According to a poll last year, they think civil servants are far more trustworthy and hard-working than government ministers. Of course they do. According to recent Cabinet Office figures, the average civil servant is more likely to be female, is 44 years old, earns slightly more than £30,000 a year and is overwhelmingly likely to live outside London. Not exactly deep-state wokerati sleeper agents. They’re just normal people doing normal jobs, not in the gilded drawing rooms and private offices of Whitehall but in the call centres and service hubs of Darlington, East Kilbride and Cardiff.
Weirdly, the further away from London we are, the happier we seem to be: a survey by the Institute for Government on how the civil service is changing showed that turnover is highest at the heart of government, at 26.2% in the Treasury and 23.7% in the Cabinet Office. Turnover was lowest in the Welsh and Scottish governments, at 4.7% and 6% respectively.
It’s not hard to guess why. Taking a look north may provide clues: Scottish government civil servants (who report to Scottish ministers rather than UK ones) are the sixth largest department of the UK civil service and – according to friends and colleagues who work there – enjoy a far less hostile environment.
Oh, and they also happen to have recently won the right to knock off early on a Friday, were the first UK civil servants to win the right to not be contacted outside office hours, and have been trialling a four-day work week. And while there were reports earlier this year that the ruling SNP party has “captured” Holyrood civil servants, the mood music of the first few days of John Swinney’s new tenure as first minister suggest he’s far less likely than his Westminster cousins to insult, harangue and undermine the civil servants on whom public services depend.
To ministers in Sunak’s England, we say, look to Scotland – look and learn.
The author works for the UK civil service
