It tends to come as a surprise to new governments that the civil service doesn’t really do policy. After the deprivations of opposition, when parties may have one or two young and underpaid staff working on any given policy area, there’s an expectation of riches, thousands of smart officials bursting with ideas on how to improve things.
But it doesn’t work like that. Whitehall is still good at reactive policymaking—ask civil servants to work up ideas to deal with a specific technical issue and they will give you three in a well-presented submission. If there’s a crisis they’ll respond. During the Brexit years, EU officials remarked with admiration on the greater flexibility shown by our officials in dealing with this enormous change compared with their own institutions.
They don’t, however, do the big picture, at least not consistently or well. Nor are they best placed to do so given that ideological visions have to be political by definition. The problem is it’s not clear who is supposed to do this job.
Sometimes you get a ministerial team with real expertise in their sector, but our system isn’t designed to facilitate that. Prime ministers have to fill most positions from their cohort of MPs, which is a shallow pool.
Over the years, and in a typically British way, governments have tried to fill this gap, somewhat incoherently, with a mix of special advisers, expert commissions, “tsars” and friends snuck into nominally independent roles.
But this has just created more confusion. For instance, the role of special advisers (or spads), initially introduced under Harold Wilson in 1964, has morphed over the years. Though they aren’t formally allowed to manage officials or take decisions, in practice many spads exert enormous authority in their departments, muddying the lines and pushing officials even further away from key policymaking conversations. Plus they are often appointed for their close political allegiance to ministers rather than expertise.
Then there are a panoply of roles that are technically non-political but have been adapted to facilitate ministerial appointments, like fixed-term policy advisers (I was one of these) and non-executive directors of departments. With no proper rules there is a complete lack of clarity about the acceptable use of such appointments. Labour got into bother in their first few months for having friendly experts appointed to critical civil service roles.
There are two risks here. First, that an independent civil service can get ever more undermined by governments, desperate for support and trying to bend the rules. Second, that it’s a messy and inadequate way for ministers to get that support. Some permanent secretaries—the most senior civil servant in a government department—have pushed back against Labour ministers trying to appoint policy advisers, which is entirely counter-productive to the government’s ability to develop big-picture thinking.
It’s past time to create a proper structure for ministers to get the advice they need. A recent paper from the Reform thinktank (not connected to the political party that took the same name) sets out a number of proposals for doing so. The most important is to bring back the idea of extended ministerial offices. The last government planned to do this, but the initiative was kyboshed by the EU referendum and a change of prime minister.
The core idea is to supplement ministers’ private offices, which currently consist of private secretaries and admin staff who manage their time, in-tray and diary, with a set of policy experts jointly appointed by politicians and senior officials.
This would mean ministers could deploy people with real knowledge about their sector, but who are sympathetic to the government’s politics, to work with their department on a systematic agenda. And it would allow spads to focus their time on managing political relationships with colleagues in other departments, the media and MPs. It would also protect the independence of the rest of the civil service as there would no longer be any need to sneak politicos into roles that are supposed to be impartial.
Junior ministers should also have access to this extended office. They are currently expected to operate without any support at all despite doing most of the technical work that goes on in government. Given their average tenure is around a year, this is a major reason for policy sclerosis.
What goes for departments is also true for the centre of government. Keir Starmer has made a mistake common to new prime ministers of imagining he can operate with a slimmed-down staff.
He has an unusually small policy team and no strategy unit for longer-term thinking of the kind introduced by Tony Blair. He needs one.
These may seem like small administrative issues given the scale of global and domestic problems this government faces, but it really matters. Across most departments there are worthy policies, but no real story. This is often seen as a comms problem, but with no one around to write the story there’s too often nothing to communicate.
