“Almost every civil servant I talk to is looking for a way out,” says Jill Rutter, a former Treasury official and now an expert on Whitehall.
It’s hardly a surprise after the past few years: civil servants have been demonised as workshy by former Cabinet Office minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, blamed for the Partygate scandal by Boris Johnson and threatened with 91,000 job cuts.
And when relations were at their lowest point, Tom Scholar, the most senior civil servant at the Treasury, was sacked by Liz Truss when she feared her financial plans would be challenged.
Rutter, a senior research fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, was one of those calling for a “reset” in relations between ministers and civil servants when Rishi Sunak took over.
But despite the opportunity for a fresh start, several senior Whitehall sources told the Guardian they thought the atmosphere was now worse than ever over the issue of pay and a feeling of being under attack from politicians.
This has only deteriorated over the past week, as Dominic Raab resigned when a report found he’d bullied his staff but gained support from Tory MPs for blaming “unionised officials” with a vendetta.
Rutter says the findings against Raab “could and should” have been a moment for Sunak to attempt to bring the civil service back on board by acknowledging they had been forced to put up with bad behaviour. However, she said the government had instead “allowed Raab’s victim narrative to take hold” about a “great activist civil service out to get him”.
Rightwing MPs, already scapegoating the civil service for a perceived failure to make a success of Brexit, are now renewing their calls for ministers to be allowed to make more political Whitehall appointments. Rees-Mogg claimed those complaining about Raab were a “blizzard of veritable snowflakes” and even singled out one senior official as a “complete wet wipe”.
There is certainly a sense within Whitehall that pitch-rolling has begun for an attempted shake-up of the civil service, amid a backlash among MPs over the Raab report – despite the likelihood that the Conservatives may have little time left in power. One Conservative backbencher said there was sympathy for Raab but it was about wider concerns about civil service impartiality, with particular anger over the departure of the senior civil servant Sue Gray to work as chief of staff for the Labour leader, Keir Starmer.
A report due from Francis Maude, the former Cabinet Office minister, is likely to recommend more “politicisation” of advice for ministers within weeks, while a new inquiry by the public administration committee has been launched, asking: “Does the civil service need reforming?”
Sunak himself has given very little public support to civil servants who were victimised, despite having appointed two cabinet ministers who have been forced out for bullying their officials – Raab and Gavin Williamson – and a third, Steve Barclay, whose behaviour is also under scrutiny.
Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, has also raised eyebrows within Whitehall by failing to give any public backing to those whose complaints about ministers were vindicated.
One former permanent secretary said: “Frankly, Simon Case should be standing up for the civil service more. I know Jeremy Heywood would have been. Case is noticeable by his absence. The wider political response has been to address a complaint of bullying by treating the bully as the victim and the civil service as the perpetrators.”
Another senior Whitehall figure said: “He is the head of the home civil service and needs to start acting as such.”
Instead, the role of defending the civil service has been left to a small group of former permanent secretaries now willing to speak out in defence of officials, along with Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA union for senior civil servants, who has been one of the few voices standing up for the civil service.
Against this backdrop of tensions, ongoing pay disputes have led to strikes across more than 130 government departments involving at least 150,0000 workers.
While ministers have settled with some sectors, the civil service has been offered just 4.5% this year, after 2% the year before. Unions sources say the sense of betrayal is particularly acute because they had been led to believe civil servants would be offered a lump sum to help with the cost of living but this failed to materialise at the last minute after being blocked at the top. “There is a sense that the government think it’s OK to be at war with the civil service, and that’s not healthy,” one senior union official said.
Morale over the issue of pay has now fallen to its lowest since it was first recorded 14 years ago, according to the civil service people survey. Only 27% of civil servants felt their pay adequately reflected performance, compared with 38% the year before – after a biting year of inflation.
Rhys Clyne, associate director of the Institute for Government, a thinktank, said the “flare-ups” in bad feeling between politicians and the civil service was also a problem from the point of view of effective government. But he said unhappiness with pay appeared to be the largest factor affecting morale.
“Real-terms pay has fallen between 12% and 23% in the civil service and plays a large part in the morale issues we see now. The impact of the morale problem is in churn and turnover of the civil service. We have lots of data in our Whitehall monitor report on extremely high levels of turnover, with 14% of officials either moving department or leaving the civil service last year, which is the highest level in over a decade. It’s partly post-pandemic demand being let out but it’s also a symptom of morale problems.”
Clyne added pointed out the government’s pay offer to civil servants was “lower than in the wider public sector, let alone the private sector,” and that this “speaks to the government’s strategy”.
On the third national day of strikes for the PCS union, Mark Serwotka, its general secretary, summed up the view that civil servants had deliberately been put at the back of the queue as part of “an ideological war on civil servants”.
“The evidence stacks up – ministers bullying their staff, giving our members the worst pay rise in the country, refusing to give them a backdated pay claim or lump sum like they’ve given everyone else, failing even to negotiate with us – so how else do you explain it?” he said.
“How else do you explain the incessant attacks by government ministers on their own workforce, if it’s not a point of principle?”
