Dominic Cummings vs the Civil Service - fated to end badly?

You can’t deny that, in terms of winning, Dominic Cummings has so far been very effective. Yes, he has driven a coach and horses through many of the conventions in terms of behaviour, and his tactics come with their own long-term issues, but I suspect that he is of the view that, in the long-term, we’re all dead, so that isn’t important.

The thing about a campaign though is that once it’s over, you generally move on to the next thing, preferably something interesting, where the results are visible. Civil service reform is seldom like that, because unlike a campaign, delivery of government happens day after bloody day. It operates within a rule-based structure which can be limiting rather than liberating to those both within it and served by it. Indeed, what most people want is not something radical, but something effective.

So, if Dominic really wants to change the way the Civil Service functions, he needs to take a holistic view across not only the Civil Service but Government too, and that’s an “interesting” challenge. If he thinks that civil servants are, for the most part, useless, cautious and obstructive, then perhaps he needs to consider why that might be.

There are issues of supply and demand, in that salaries for senior civil servants (and some relatively junior ones) are increasingly out of line with their private sector counterparts, especially in terms of skills such as procurement, IT and tax compliance. Do you really believe that you going to get, and more importantly, keep, talent if it is so easily lured away by the promise of higher salaries elsewhere? The pension schemes have been devalued somewhat by recent government reform, and you can’t live off of a knighthood, even were you to be far enough up the food chain to get one.

Another issue is the quality of legislation that emerges from Parliament. The House of Commons has an increasingly poor record in terms of scrutiny of new proposals, and whilst the Lords is far better, relying on increasingly partisan administrations to accept credible ideas for improvement is a gamble at best, a pipe dream at worst. Civil servants work with what they’re given, especially on the frontline, and if what they’re given is endlessly tinkered with as foreseen glitches begin to pinch, application of government intent is jeopardised.

A good point has been made about stability, i.e. leaving senior managers in post long enough to see through changes. Many frontline staff grow weary of a new senior appointment arriving, forcing through major changes against sometimes reasoned objections only to disappear before the effects are known. By the same token, attempts at cultural change tend to fall foul of corporate inertia - “if we wait long enough, leader X will leave, to be replaced by leader Y who will be enthused by something else”.

It is being suggested that there will be a focus on cutting out perceived deadwood. Removing the supposed feckless and incompetent has been an aspiration of ministers for the more than three decades that I’ve been employed, and the tendency is to apply blunt tools such as picking on, say, the worst-performing 10% of staff. Such broad brush approaches ironically punished relatively well-performing offices, leaving badly run ones roughly unchanged, because of the challenge in selecting 10% out of a broader pool including different types of work, in different offices, with varying managerial standards.

The answer, it is suggested, is a system of ongoing examination. That’s interesting, because it increases the risk of three things - an increased lack of stability, an aversion to risk and a disincentive to recruitment - that run counter to what Dominic wants. If you stick your head above the parapet, will you survive the experience? If you’re looking over your shoulder all of the time, can you take in the horizon? And if your job is as much at risk in the public sector as it would be in the private sector, why not just take the money?

I suppose that I am, in bureaucrat terms, something of a conservative, in that I want things to work, I want there to be a proper balance between state and individual, and I want the state to be a force for good in people’s lives. Ironically, that might be seen as radical in some quarters, and even more ironically, many junior civil servants would certainly support the first and third elements of my wishlist (the second is a bit esoteric, I accept).

So, we’ll see what Dominic and his friends have in mind for the bureaucracy. One can only hope that he can grasp the difference between resistance to change and genuine critique and alternative perspective. My door is always open though...