It’s not just Whitehall that needs a Dominic Cummings
The topic of Whitehall reform has never exactly been sexy.
No list of “Moments that Made the Modern World” would ever include, let alone kick off with, the publication of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854.
Even many who work in Westminster would be unable to pick the cabinet secretary out of a line-up, even though the holder of that office is generally one of the two or three most powerful people in the country, alongside the Prime Minister and chancellor — and it has often been debatable as to which order the trio should be ranked in.
Today, however, the future of the civil service is a hot topic.
The emergence of Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief strategist, as an object of pathological media obsession means that his crusade to bring data science and cognitive diversity into policymaking — by encouraging thousands of “weirdos and misfits” to email in their CVs — has attracted widespread attention.
And rightly so. Those who have been in the belly of the Whitehall beast, whether working for the political parties or in the civil service itself, generally acknowledge that the 21st-century British state is often calamitously poor at implementing its policy decisions.
There is no point having the best of intentions if the government machine translates them into gobbledegook.
It is not for nothing that the Prime Minister invariably also holds the title of “minister for the civil service”: it is the civil servants who make the whole thing work, which is why they need to be working at optimum capacity too.
Yet there is an irony here. Much of the conversation around public sector reform has long been couched in terms of injecting “private sector efficiency” into Whitehall. And there is no doubt that the private sector is markedly more efficient than the public — you only have to look at the productivity figures.
However, a generally unnoticed trend in recent decades (and, some argue, one of the causes of the alarming stagnation in growth rates) is the way that the private sector is becoming more like the public.
Part of this is about regulation and bureaucracy. In a celebrated speech in 2012, Andy Haldane of the Bank of England pointed out that between 1980 and 2011, the UK had moved from employing one regulator for every 11,000 people working in the financial sector to one for every 300.
Financial regulation had become much more complex, with the latest Basel rulebook (itself far lengthier than its predecessors) requiring large banks to carry out several million calculations, as opposed to single figures a generation ago.
The trend has continued in the years since. Over the last decade, the proportion of Citigroup’s global workforce devoted to compliance and risk went from four per cent to 15 per cent.
A neat chart in The Economist showed the number of times the word “compliance” appeared in major banks’ annual reports in 2018 compared to 2006: the growth was vertiginous.
But it is not just about regulation. In many firms, the number of people actively devoted to the core task of generating profits has shrunk and shrunk.
The adoption of a wider definition of corporate purpose has been accompanied by a growth in the number of staff whose mindset is effectively public sector rather than private: their role is to ensure that the company does good and is good, rather than that it meets its targets.
Similarly, one of the aspects of the civil service which drives energetic ministers mad is that its embrace of flexible working — itself an enlightened practice — has been transmuted into a culture in which departments essentially empty on Friday afternoons. But is that practice really unique to the public sector?
Likewise, excessive layers of bureaucracy and a tendency towards sluggish decision-making are hardly a phenomenon exclusive to Whitehall.
I don’t want to be a Luddite here. I’m as familiar as anyone with the literature which shows that working madly excessive hours drives down productivity; that flexible working can improve performance; that genuinely diverse teams perform far better.
But I also remember the words of one of David Cameron’s advisers, explaining why Whitehall hated dealing with startups. Big government, he explained, likes big business, because they both move at the same speed.
And, he might have added, the tendency of recent government reforms and demands has been to make the private sector act more like the public, rather than vice versa.
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