Memo to Keir Starmer and co: we are civil servants – not the enemy | The civil servant

3 weeks ago 15

So the “mercilessly short” honeymoon I predicted for Keir Starmer’s shiny new administration has turned out to be even shorter and more merciless than the nation’s civil servants expected, especially those of us long enough in the tooth to remember Tony Blair’s endless “new dawn” back in 1997.

Back in July, Sir Keir spaffed a fragile meringue of “confidence, support and respect” over the civil service. That was then vaporised 10 days ago under the unforgiving lights of Pinewood’s film studios in Buckinghamshire.

Starmer there delivered his landmark Plan for Change speech which, among its well-trailed themes, contained the slightly Trumpian claim that too many civil servants are “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. To which many civil servants will – after enduring the bleeding clusterbùrachs of Brexit, Covid and the cost of living crisis – only say: “Wow.”

Spare a thought, too, for Sir Chris Wormald KCB, whose very first few days as Starmer’s new cabinet secretary and head of the civil service have been spent not rewiring the state but dealing instead with a furious union backlash.

The PM has since read the room and beat a hasty retreat, though not before mustering yet another ejaculation of praise for the civil service that commends us worker bees for our dedication and professionalism. Ministers right across government have also been re-spreading the love. But you don’t need to be an expert in the law of diminishing returns to know that this round of affectionate outgassing is going to dissipate even more rapidly than the last.

Sure enough, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden appeared a few days later to carpet-bomb the public square with cringeworthy tech-bro metaphors about disruptors, rebooting the civil service and taking a Silicon Valley move-fast-and-break-things approach to public sector reform. While McFadden – who has the slightly mournful air of a second-tier football league referee – at least has the common sense to state that he is more interested in answers than pursuing grievances, his tone seems calculated to channel the “weirdos and misfits” skunkworks phase of a certain D Cummings, with whom Starmer’s senior officials are widely reported to be of one mind when it comes to the “problem’” of the civil service.

And that’s the problem: we civil service milquetoasts don’t mind being taken for “tepid”. But in the aggregate, these emissions eerily resemble the coordinated ambushes that we came to expect from the last lot: drip, drip, drip.

Is it excessively uncharitable to suggest that the ideological vanguard of the new cabinet may be panicking, and is falling back on well-worn tropes about the recalcitrance of the civil service “blob” in an effort to distract attention from the fact that they are tying themselves in knots about exactly what to fix first? After all, five months in and – despite the Plan for Change relaunch-not-relaunch in early December – is it that much clearer what this new government really wants to do, including to the government?

Consider what we’ve been asked to swallow: seven pillars, six milestones, five missions and three foundations, all chucked up into a pear tree that’s starting to look – a bit like this metaphor – dangerously wobbly, and made even wobblier by more news of departmental cuts and head-count reductions.

It’s an unappetising conceptual shitstorm that would make even Cummings blush – the kind of management-speak gobbledegook we thought the government was trying to stamp out.

Maybe Starmer and his cabinet are trying to reassure the public that they’ve got a grip on things, and are therefore ready to incentivise a sluggish civil service into ensuring that the machinery of government can meet the “people’s targets”.

I don’t have a problem with targets; no good civil servant does. Done well, targets can genuinely focus minds and drive improvement. But done badly or arbitrarily, they can create havoc that damages public services – NHS reform is a haunting textbook example of what can go wrong. That reality is at the heart of the Institute for Government’s recent warning that “the milestones will be difficult to meet … The risk is that departments focus on the headline metrics but ignore the wider objectives of the missions.”

Yet more missions and milestones on this scale risk confusion, paralysis and perverse incentives that will probably be hung around Starmer’s neck – or ours. At least until the next reset.

But in the meantime, demoralising his workforce isn’t going to do the PM, or the public, any favours. As union boss Dave Penman has pointed out, civil servants support reform and are up for the challenge of improving public services. Couldn’t the prime minister try to bring us with him?