In the early hours of 24 June 2016, the world turned. For the permanent secretary spotted in carefree party mode the previous evening – along with everyone else in public service – Brexit has since been the only game in town.
It has become Whitehall’s black hole, sucking in resources and those most precious of commodities, ministerial time and attention.
You can hear the damage Brexit has done public service in Britain in the drawl of pro-Brexit Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who criticised Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, for his warnings about Brexit. The object of his sneer by vocation, knows more. Central bankers are public servants and their colleagues, permanent secretaries, chief medical officers and local authority service directors have all been damaged by this year’s denigration of expertise and casual dismissal of planning and forecasting – the lifeblood of responsible public service.
The views of the prime minister, Theresa May, on expertise and public management can only be surmised. As home secretary, she de-professionalised aspects of police work and appointed Tom Winsor, a solicitor with no police experience as chief inspector of constabulary. May has been conspicuously silent on the justice department’s failing effort to de-professionalise probation by splitting it up and parcelling the pieces out to private firms with no track record in offender management.
And yet Brexit also affirms how stolid and unchanging public management has been in 2016.
That isn’t necessarily a compliment.
You could ask, as in many previous years, why there are notmore signs of cumulative efficiency, or why the National Audit Office keeps finding the same problems – for example, the absence of common, cost-saving procurement.
Take shared services. It remains a no-brainer that much more of the work of Whitehall departments, NHS trusts, local authorities could be standardised and supplied by third-party specialists, which don’t have to come from the private sector. But as with procurement, the divisions and particularities of the public sector defeat the common good – and unit cost reduction.
Yet that stolidity is also a virtue. The OECD survey of civil service in austerity is remarkable. Despite cuts and downsizing, there has been so little blowback, taking the form of corruption or internal dissent.
Stability’s personification is Sir Jeremy Heywood. Whether or not he personally deserves credit for the relatively high scores for engagement and morale in the Cabinet Office’s people survey, his 2016 has shown him as the ace practitioner of what Whitehall does best, which is keeping the show on the road.
Prime ministers stand in Downing Street and announce their departure; prime ministers come in and rearrange the deckchairs. Profound cracks show in British society. The economy is in high jeopardy. But Heywood keeps on keeping on, and has even found time for photo opportunities with his predecessors as the Cabinet Office celebrates its centenary.
We said earlier in the year how welcome a bit of reflection would be, even a smidgeon of theorising about public service and management. There’s plenty of scope, in areas such as who should take responsibility for failure. Local government chief executive Andrew Travers walked the plank in Barnet; should there have been other exemplars?
And what about intellectual integrity? Emran Mian of the Social Market Foundation has joined the education department as chief of strategy, presumably to implement a grammar schools policy - a policy backed by no evidence and much false assertion. Is that really the civil service vocation – to condone the speaking of untruth by power?
But hoping for reflection is a vain hope: Heywood’s forte is doing, including creating a new department of state from scratch, organising private offices for new ministers and so on. He has also, of course, ripped up the set of departmental plans that John Manzoni had published only a few months before that referendum changed everything.
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