It’s obvious to anyone who has encounters our creaking bureaucracy that Whitehall is ridiculously, and expensively, overstaffed.
The last government’s plans to reduce the headcount by 20% seem like one of their better ideas, especially given that civil service numbers have grown by far more than 20% over the last seven years. It wouldn’t be a particularly taxing project, as natural turnover and pausing non-essential recruitment could do most of the job.
But now, we are told, Liz Truss is backtracking on the idea. Cutting Whitehall numbers, it seems, is not one of the PM’s burning priorities.
Then again, maybe it never has been. As Foreign Secretary, Truss presided over a department that grew to a record number of 16,500 staff. And of course she will need a reasonably biddable civil service to carry out her ambitious reforms to taxes and regulations and public services.Even before she took office, she was saying lots of nice things about the civil service and the number-cutting plans were never mentioned. After her election, the talk turned to ‘reducing cost through improved efficiency’ rather than annoying them with the prospect of shrinking job numbers. And now, the civil service reckons that she is seriously weakened and therefore in no position to take them on. She may also have been spooked by the up-front cost of redundancy, which Nadhim Zahawi apparently reckons to be in the £6-7bn range.
So, it appears, things are back to business as usual. Officials will doubtless assure the Prime Minister that they are actively pursuing ‘efficiency’ measures. They have even been casting around the think-tanks for suggestions. But this approach, if it even happens at all, is not going to do any good.
We have seen Whitehall ‘efficiency drives’ many times before. Their fatal shortcoming is that they search for efficiencies only within the existing structures. They don’t ask whether the structure itself is fit for purpose, has clear objectives or is capable of delivering those objectives. They look at how a department’s various schemes, programmes, offices and teams and agencies might be run a bit better. However, they do not ask whether those various elements achieve anything useful, or whether the department’s overall structure is a dysfunctional mess.
Whitehall’s biggest cost is personnel. And not only have numbers grown, the proportion of civil servants in the higher, better paid grades has expanded even further. No ‘efficiency drive’ is going to deliver a leaner Whitehall. A few junior roles might be phased out, but more senior figures (like those in charge of the efficiency drives) are unlikely to cull themselves or their colleagues. The only target that will do anything at all is one that reduces overall headcount.
Rather shockingly, most departments don’t even know how many people they employ. Even the Cabinet Office, which is supposed to be in charge of reporting total Whitehall headcount, reports several different numbers for its own staffing.
No, the only way to drive civil-service economies is to think, not department-by-department, unit-by-unit, ‘efficiency’ by ‘efficiency’, but Whitehall-wide.
We need to ask, for example, whether departments have a clear purpose, and can measure whether they are achieving it? (The Department for Work and Pensions certainly doesn’t, just to take one example.) And do departments have too many core staff doing things that would be better delivered by arms-length executive agencies, as Sir Robin Ibbs recommended years ago? (Here, the DWP certainly does: it has no executive agencies at all!)
Do each department’s units and teams and strategy groups and the rest really do anything useful? Would some of a department’s functions fit better in another one, with consequent savings and synergies? Should some functions be done at all? Could they be better done by non-public bodies? And could we trim bureaucratic costs far more effectively if we began by radically cutting out complexity from taxes, regulations and other government initiatives?
It’s a government-wide set of problems that require a government-wide vision and strategy – and clear targets – of which the clearest is not cost but the number of bureaucrats we have and need. The guiding star for improving Whitehall’s value for money should be reducing the payroll numbers. If that is no longer on the agenda, the bureaucracy will continue to block the government’s desired reforms and remain ridiculously, creakingly, and expensively, overstaffed.
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