Finding out how well the civil service is performing is an extremely difficult question, as the Institute for Government thinktank admits in its fourth annual assessment. But it’s a question that urgently needs answering for everyone involved in all the other public services for which government departments are responsible.
From education to social care, from prisons to the police, all public services face a huge challenge. Politically, the debate may be dominated by Brexit in Westminster, Whitehall and the devolved assemblies, but the civil service also runs the country – and that’s getting harder.
Handling Brexit has been the major topic within the civil service ever since the UK voted to leave the EU, with dire warnings from many, including the former head of the civil service Lord Kerslake, and the FDA union, which represents the country’s most senior civil servants, that the service would be unable to cope, given the scale of cuts to Whitehall since 2010. It has also resulted in demands for a pay rise.
And last year, former top civil servant at the Foreign Office Sir Simon Fraser observed that anyone who wanted to make a career as a civil servant in the next five years would “need to be across” Brexit, whether or not they work for one of the three main Brexit-focused departments, David Davis’s Department for Exiting the EU, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Trade.
According to the thinktank, just under 385,000 civil servants work for the government - down almost 19% since the spending review in 2010, when it was just under 475,000, and the smallest number since the second world war.
The report says creating new Brexit departments was a distraction and a better option would have been a cabinet minister for Brexit, with a unit in the Cabinet Office. But they are now finding their feet.
However, it’s some of the other departments facing the biggest challenges around Brexit that may struggle. The report points out that about a quarter of EU laws (1,200) relate to the work of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, where staff levels at Defra have fallen by more than a third. The Home Office – also likely to be affected by Brexit, given its immigration responsibilities – has had its budget reduced by nearly a fifth and a staff reduction of around one in 10.
The institute broadly thinks most of Whitehall is performing reasonably well despite big changes in recent years. “Departments continue to function. Ministers continue to receive policy advice. Legislation continues to be passed. Major projects continue to be delivered (although with slightly less confidence than in some previous years),” say the report’s authors. “The business of Whitehall continues even after reductions to staff numbers, reductions to budgets, and – in some cases – major changes in what departments do and how they do it. But this may not be the case for some of the public services that departments are ultimately responsible for.”
Day-to-day spending budgets have fallen nearly everywhere. Only five of the 16 main Whitehall departments have seen budgets increase since 2011, including the Department for International Development the Department of Health and the Department for Education, due to international aid, NHS and schools funding being ringfenced.
Other departments have been slashed: the Department for Communities and Local Government has seen its budgets cut by more than 50% and the Department for Transport budget has been cut by more than 60%.
We’ve already seen the drastic impact on public services of welfare and other cuts, from the rise in the use of food banks to the threats to nursery provision. To take only one measure, the government’s own figures, published on 25 January, show a huge rise in the number of rough sleepers in the past five years – up from 2,181 in 2011 to 4,134 by last autumn.
Even leaving aside, as if it were possible, the huge and troubling social impact of department cuts on public services, how does this square with the new industrial strategy announced by the prime minister on 23 January, which will require greater state intervention? Theresa May will need civil servants to carry out an effective industrial strategy, but we already know there’s an acute shortage of project management, financial and infrastructure skills within Whitehall.
The Institute for Government’s report is a useful checklist – but also makes it clear that the challenges remain acute, not just for civil servants but for all those they serve.
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