It’s all change at the top of Whitehall, with a newly minted Cabinet Secretary and, very soon, a host of new permanent secretaries (or to lapse into Civil Service jargon, “perm secs”, for short).
The appointments are likely to reignite the debate about the value of picking career civil servants to guide the ship of state. Whilst the debate isn’t new, it has heightened significance in an era where the government’s ability to deliver basic goods is increasingly being questioned.
So, who are these master mandarins? Boris Johnson’s former Chief of Staff-cum-nemesis, Dominic Cummings, is notoriously disdainful of the permanent secretary class, channelling T.S. Eliot in describing them as “hollow men” who have lost all purpose.
A more nuanced pen portrait than the Cummings critique is that permanent secretaries are the cream of British bureaucracy, heading up government departments and equivalent agencies.
This group is, by any metric, incredibly monocultural. The typical route for most permanent secretaries is Oxbridge humanities degree, Fast Stream (the finishing school for future Civil Service leaders), then a swift rise to senior civil service. Many of these people spend some time on their route to the top working alongside ministers in private office, too.
It’s a grounding that makes permanent secretaries fantastic fixers, deft with words and able to diffuse the trickiest of political problems.
The upshot of such adaptability means permanent secretaries are adept at ensuring smooth transitions between governments and explaining policy to ministers. There is a solid rationale for this: most ministers know little about their portfolios, so having an experienced hand on the tiller helps.
Outsiders with experience of competition and commerce are, undoubtedly, useful in challenging group-think tendencies
Yet when one looks at the governance structures permanent secretaries are working with, it’s difficult to discern a real incentive for them to innovate in delivery or policy.
An often-overlooked barrier to this is sometimes the permanent secretaries themselves. They’ve reached the top, so, naturally, they‘ll deploy the usual lines of “Rolls Royce Civil Service” (You’re not going to say the system that earmarked you as a star is terrible.)
Moreover, there’s an accountability gap in terms of performance management. While permanent secretaries get feedback from their secretaries of state, their yearly appraisals are undertaken by the Cabinet Secretary, who signs off their appointments in the first place.
Focusing on being political fixers reduces permanent secretaries’ ability to take a step back and look at where the state apparatus is failing.
There are several areas where this is the case (commercial management is commonly cited) but the interplay with intelligence and security warrants a closer look — especially when recent decades have seen the creation of fora populated by securocrats who set policy with limited democratic oversight.
This is particularly concerning when securocrat assumptions and decision-making have been repeatedly exposed over the past few decades. (Despite being seemingly unable to procure armoured vehicles at cost or on time, Iran and Russia still see our securocrat class as master Machiavellis.)
Taking the above as proof that replacing civil servants with people from the private sector is the sole answer to bureaucratic dysfunction is reductive, though. For every hit (see Dame Kate Bingham and the Vaccine Taskforce), there’s a miss (see Baroness Dido Harding and NHS Test and Trace).
Outsiders with experience of competition and commerce are, undoubtedly, useful in challenging group-think tendencies. Indeed, research shows that cognitively diverse groups are better at identifying problems and developing practical solutions to address them. Nonetheless, it’s also the case that getting the machinery of government to work efficiently and effectively is different to (and more complex than) running a business.
At the same time, more needs to be done to increase the number of senior civil servants with deep specialist expertise — a skillset that is often overshadowed by the systemic preference for fluent generalists. This view has been articulated by successive governments, but with little tangible progress in bucking the trend. In 2020/21, under a fifth of all new entrants to the senior civil service were external recruits.
The current government talks a decent enough game about reforming the state along these lines, though with its polling struggles and a sluggish economic outlook, it’ll likely want to keep officialdom onside — a dynamic that precludes protracted Whitehall battles about civil service reform.
This situation isn’t wholly the fault of our mandarins, whose behaviours and incentives are shaped by the systems they work within. Given that there’s seemingly little substantive appetite from politicians (or breathing space for bureaucrats) to radically retool these systems, it may well be the case that — to once again channel Eliot — that British statecraft ends “not with a bang/but a whimper”.
