When Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, had responsibility for the civil service, it was agreed that the numbers would be cut down to pre-Brexit levels, i.e. 65,000 or 13%. In October, “Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced civil service ‘expansion’ would be ‘frozen’ and a plan would be put in place to return to its size before the Covid-19 pandemic.” Apparently it would be the ‘most ambitious public sector productivity review ever’.
The reality is that the civil service continues to increase in size. Footnote 25 in the Chancellor’s 2023 Autumn Statement says “According to the latest ONS official statistics on public sector employment in the UK, there were 457k FTE in June 2023, compared to 391k in March 2019, excluding devolved administrations. If the size of the civil service remained at June 2023 levels, instead of increasing at the average 2016-2023 growth rate, up to £1bn could be saved by March 2025.”
The word “could” is significant here as we currently don’t know how the government plans to achieve this. He has asked departments to come up with some ideas for reductions sometime next year- probably through ceasing new hires and using artificial intelligence. But in last year’s Autumn Statement when he declared that was not the way to do things.
Meanwhile, in July 2022, Government announced that a civil service "Governance and Accountability review will be led by former Cabinet Office Minister Lord Maude, who will chair the work and recommend ways to make government more efficient in autumn."
This 140 page document was sneaked out earlier this month with so little fanfare that most of us failed to notice it. The more controversial aspects seem to have been removed. In particular, the aim now seems to be efficiency, rather than a reduction in the size of the civil service. In fact, the size of the civil service and number of civil servants are not mentioned in the published report. The 57 main recommendations are about structure and HR.
The report does, at least, make many good, often amusing, criticisms of the civil service institution, as distinct from the civil servants themselves. And he is right to say that ministers and their special advisers are part of the problem. Churn is excessive and neither receive any training for their roles. Recommendation 45 says: “Ministers should generally stay in post for longer and there should be an element of continuous professional development (CPD) for all serving ministers.” But otherwise, the report complicates matters.
In February 1988, the government approved the Ibbs Next Steps report which proposed that the civil service be reduced “to a small ‘core’ of policy makers and ‘transferring’ other officials to work under free-standing agency boards” which we would now call “Executive Agencies”. In other words, the civil service structure would be simplified to two types of unit: each department would have one small team advising ministers on policy and as many Executive Agencies as were necessary to ensure policies took affect. The latter would have annual reports showing performance against objectives. Needless to say, it never happened.
There is no doubt that this model of the civil service would produce better government than the new more complex one, especially if Maude’s recommendation 45, reducing ministerial churn and adding training for ministers and social advisers, was included.
What will actually happen? Frankly, probably very little.