Britain’s civil service merry-go-round

LONDON — It’s not just Boris Johnson’s ministers who are settling into new jobs after his reshuffle earlier this month — many top officials are newbies too.

As Britain reels from crisis to crisis, with this week’s fuel panic coming off the back of a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and amid the coronavirus pandemic, more than half of those in the 21 biggest civil service jobs have been in post for no more than 18 months, according to data from the Institute for Government analyzed by POLITICO.

At a time when state institutions are under heavy pressure, former civil servants and MPs warn that a lack of institutional memory, and in some cases expertise, could be hindering the government’s ability to spot and deal with crises.

They raise concerns about a culture which sees civil servants rotate around the institution rather than work their way up through a single department to its most senior posts.

“A permanent secretary [in charge of a department] who has been parachuted into a department simply cannot know all the people that he or she needs to know,” said Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin, who spent a decade scrutinizing the way Whitehall operates as chair of the Commons public administration committee.

Newbie chiefs

The U.K.’s top civil servant Simon Case, has been in post for just 13 months. Appointed at the age of 41, he is the youngest-ever head of the civil service. Case, a key figure in Brexit negotiations, left the government to work for the royal family, before returning to No. 10 to help with the government’s coronavirus response just before he was given the top job.

Case’s appointment was unexpected in some quarters because he had not previously run a Whitehall department.

Several of those at the top of government departments are good examples of the civil service tendency to switch departments regularly.

Antonia Romeo, who became the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice in January, was previously at the Department for International Trade (DIT), and before that at the Cabinet Office. However, she had been at the justice ministry as a director general, and at the time of her appointment she said she had spent the majority of her career in that department.

While Susan Acland-Hood has some previous experience in the Department for Education, her previous two jobs were at the courts service and the Treasury.

Sarah Munby, who started her civil service career in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, worked at the consultancy Mckinsey & Company, before returning to Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in 2019 as a director general, a year before becoming permanent secretary.

Jenkin said civil servants tend to want “as many things as possible” on their CV if they leave the organization — something he argues can work against them becoming experts.

One former political adviser, who worked with the U.K. government on the pandemic response, agreed.

“If you want to be a successful civil servant you don’t stay at a department for decades,” he said, with ambitious officials instead entering through the graduate Fast Stream program and then jumping “around departments, and you zigzag your way to the top.”

“It means the ambitious and effective civil servants rarely stay on the same policy area or department for a long time, and reduces the institutional memory,” he added.

Blame game

A spate of exits last year included the resignation of Home Office chief Philip Rutnam, who took the government to court over bullying claims, and the departure of Mark Sedwill, a Whitehall veteran who stepped down as cabinet secretary amid reports of tension with senior members of Johnson’s team. Sedwill described his exit as “amicable.”

One former civil servant, speaking on condition of anonymity so he could be candid, acknowledged the churn, which was particularly acute in 2019 and 2020 as many of Whitehall’s top brass left. That, he said, had seen a “loss of experience and judgment” — but he pointed out that many of the replacements were also highly experienced.

He cited the decision to appoint Ministry of Defence veteran Stephen Lovegrove as national security adviser, in an abrupt about-turn from initial plans to give the job to Brexit negotiator David Frost. Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May, attacked that idea, arguing Frost had “no proven experience” in the area.

The same official said Philip Barton, the Foreign Office boss who came under fire over the government’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, was “extremely experienced” on security matters.

Others, too, pushed back on the idea that longer-serving officials would have alleviated the current crises. The first former civil servant quoted above said the state had “incredibly few levers” to pull to ease fuel shortages beyond providing a few extra drivers and bringing in the army to help with logistics — tools mainly useful in communicating a sense of control to the public.

He cautioned government against reverting to a pattern of acting too slowly in the face of crises.

A second former civil servant warned ministers not to believe they can simply communicate their way out of a problem, and criticized “faffing around” on whether or not to involve the army.

But, he said, responsibility for gripping a crisis ultimately lies with the prime minister, who will have been given a host of options by the government’s Civil Contingencies Committee. “If the prime minister sat there and said, ‘I don’t care, we’re not going to worry about it, we’re going to see what happens,’ [then] whatever the officials do, the prime minister says what’s going to happen.”