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pfOpinion ■ LordAdonis
No, prime minister, the civil service is not your nemesis
coalition is rightly prosecuting a radical programme of market-based reforms to public services, from offender rehabilitation to secondary education. Once these reforms are through, civil servants will be less involved in direct service delivery than at any time in the history of the welfare state. That implies a changing, but no less important, role. Public service markets do not conform to the perfectly competitive ideal. They need careful design and stewardship. Not even the most bone-headed free-marketer thinks that public services such as health can be delivered in a manner resembling the grocery market.
The design and commissioning of a market such as the government’s Work Programme for employment services is a complicated undertaking. Small changes in the structure of the market, how providers are paid, and how effectively their performance is managed, will make the difference between the programme’s success and failure. Offi cials will have to steward the market effectively in order to create the space in which entrepreneurs can do what they do best. It is to these complexities that the work of the future civil service will increasingly be devoted. So politicians will continue to give voice to the ebb and fl ow of the regulatory tide, blaming the bureaucrats when it suits them. But across swathes of the emerging public services, modern civil servants are neither the enemies of enterprise nor its entrepreneurs. Rather, their job is to enable enterprise in public services: to steer while getting others to row.
Ian Mulheirn is director of the Social Market Foundation
Photos: PA
A year into offi ce Margaret T atcher said: ‘If Sir Derek Rayner could teach the civil service to manage itself as well as he manages Marks & Spencer’s I should be very pleased.’ In 1999, Tony Blair talked of the ‘forces of conservatism’ and the ‘scars on my back’. But David Cameron’s speech describing civil servants as ‘enemies of enterprise’ and ‘bureaucrats in government departments who concoct… ridiculous rules and regulations’, comes at a particularly bad time – for the government and civil service. We are entering uncharted
territory. T atcher cut the civil service by a little over 10% between 1980 and 1984 and much of that was the result of moving posts into newly created executive agencies. Now there are to be cuts of a third or more from a much smaller and leaner civil service with nowhere to turn. At the same time, Cameron has said he wants to ‘turn government on its head’ and is reliant on the civil service to deliver a hugely ambitious reform programme, including major health, welfare, education, justice and local government reforms. Even in the private sector, the success rate for major change programmes is about one in three. If that holds true for the civil service, reforms in about 12 out of 19 main departments could fail. At best, this means the
administrative savings won’t be realised. At worst, whole areas of the reform programme would be jeopardised. In the private sector, leaders
have to struggle to win the hearts and minds of staff to support, or at least go along with, a new way of doing things. But in the civil service morale
is already at risk of returning to the low of the 1980s as staff are made redundant, pay is frozen and pensions cut back. So far, however, the civil service has worked to the coalition’s ambitious reform programme and has shown no sign of organised rebellion or dissent. Attack by political leaders and defence by senior civil servants, albeit behind closed doors, risks all that goodwill.
Adopting a ‘public bad, private good’ stance is familiar political territory but doesn’t make for good government. Politicians are reliant on the civil service to achieve their aims. So, rather than bashing the bureaucrats, the government needs to establish what a new deal for civil servants would look like and give them a vision to look forward to. Such a vision should inspire current and future civil servants to see beyond the present turmoil, attracting and managing the talent needed for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. T ere is danger in any major transformation too that you lose
the best people. T e civil service is, just like any workforce, dependent on motivation, good leadership, encouragement and a talent retention policy. Ministers have just as much a role to play here as the civil service leaders themselves. You cannot simply say that most blocks to entrepreneurialism come from the civil service, when most of what they do stems from political will. Andrew Cahn, who recently stepped down as chief executive offi cer of UK Trade and Investment, a quango to help British business overseas, wrote for the Institute for Government about the diffi culties of making entrepreneurialism work in government. T e risk aversion oſt en comes from ministers themselves, not always from the civil service, but a risk aversion culture can be turned around. From Whitehall to the front line, this is a moment where, with the right motivation, ministers could get the best out of the civil service and wider public sector. But creative thinking and reform won’t have a chance if the teams relied on to make it happen are seen as the enemy.
Lord Adonis is director of the Institute for Government
Seeing red: Cameron needs to stop attacking civil servants and instead get them on board for his reform programme
APRIL 2011 PublicFinance 13
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