Photograph: Alamy
As Brexit slowly judders into reality, morale is so low that the civil servants who have to prevent the country falling to pieces under the strain are leaving their jobs in unprecedented numbers.
One third of civil servants in the Cabinet Office left their jobs last year. It’s the same story across Whitehall. Staff turnover at the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has more than doubled since 2010. And at UK Export Finance, the churn has tripled, to more than 20%.
This burgeoning confusion is exacerbated by the need to fill 8,000 jobs, with civil servants working solely on Brexit itself, draining talent, experience and daredevil careerists from the daily business of government.
The consequences of unchecked churn are obvious: the loss of expertise, uninformed decisions, the great wheels of state gumming up because the person who knew where the oil was kept just moved to the private sector.
No profession can ever have looked after so much while being respected so little. These are the people who are responsible for your commute, your job opportunities, the safety of the air your children breathe. Yet there are no parades for them, like the Army gets; no automatic classification as key workers , like there is for nurses and firefighters. Just the old jibes about bureaucrats and jobsworths clocking off at five and taking home their lovely pensions.
This country and its government need to start raising civil servants’ morale by showing them some proper gratitude. The UN organises an annual public service day, as do countries from India to Hungary. The US has a public service recognition week. In this year’s, a joint statement from the 20 most senior ministers in the federal government said: “America loves heroes and our nation is fortunate to have an abundance of them. But many of these heroes never appear on the evening news or on the cover of a magazine. They quietly serve our country with steadfast commitment and selfless duty to help others.”
The closest equivalent in Whitehall is probably departmental sports days. The UK needs to get its act together and initiate its own national day of appreciation for all civil servants, backed by the UK government and the devolved parliaments.
To be fair, there are many things civil servants do that it’s hard to feel grateful for, like collecting taxes, issuing parking tickets and designing maddeningly arcane websites and application forms. But at Apolitical, a global network for public servants, we see thousands of smart, determined people working their guts out to make people’s lives better. And if we as a society don’t start showing them some appreciation, we’re going to have much bigger problems than parking tickets to contend with.
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