Civil Service still in a state of upheaval

The Institute for Government's 2020 Whitehall Monitor points to continuing weaknesses in the UK civil service.

Civil service staff numbers have risen as the government prepares for Brexit. They have increased in every quarter since the 2016 EU referendum, with the number working specifically on Brexit estimated to have tripled since 2018. These new recruits are changing the shape of the civil service: there are more people in senior roles and in London; the percentage of civil servants aged under 30 is increasing as the 2010 recruitment freezes thaw; diversity is improving, although female, minority ethnic and disabled civil servants remain under-represented in senior roles.

But perennial issues remain – and these have been given greater emphasis at the start of 2020 with figures including the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and one of the authors of the Conservative election manifesto, Rachel Wolf, writing about the future of government. Both have touched on the high turnover of civil servants, so disruptive to the delivery of policies and projects and to institutional memory, and so costly – £74 million in recruitment and lost productivity.

The latest figures show that turnover remains a problem – it has increased in five departments over the past year. Senior civil service turnover is particularly damaging – senior civil servants move roles, on average, less than every two years. This is especially true for Brexit-related roles: more than 10 senior civil servants in charge of key aspects of Brexit, including permanent secretaries, changed roles in 2019.

If government wants to tackle the problems of high turnover, it will need – as the Institute for Government has recommended – to reform pay, promotion, rules on internal competition for jobs and its human resources policies generally. It also needs better data to understand and fix the problem.