So, London is to lose 12,000 civil servants, and this time, it’s the big cheeses. Already eighty per cent of the half million civil servants work outside London, but this shift is meant to include senior people as well as the small fry. In fact, the Government’s ambition is to ensure that half of the senior mandarin class move outside London by 2030. It’s all part of the spending review; and departments have until 11 June to submit plans for relocating staff, including bigwigs.
This, I suggest, is going to be a problem. If government ministers are based in Whitehall, so as to be close to Westminster, how are they going to be able to get properly briefed by senior advisers who are based in Newcastle? By Zoom? Really? I can tell you right now that the quality of that interaction is going to be significantly poorer than a personal encounter. Civil servants separated from the minister down in London have a problem.
On the bright side, our loss is Manchester’s and Aberdeen’s gain. For there are to be two new major "campuses" created, one in Manchester focused on digital innovation and AI and another in Aberdeen. You know, this sort of brilliant thinking makes you think wistfully about the sheer genius of the concept of Whitehall: that is, a physical space encompassing quite a large area, right next to parliament, where senior civil servants in different departments could mingle by simply walking down the road, or meeting in a pub. If half of a department is up in Glasgow, that’s going to be a bit more difficult.
In fact the whole concept of physical proximity between different groups in public service has, I think, been undervalued under successive governments. If you go to that interesting hotel, Old Scotland Yard, you’ll find it’s conveniently close to Whitehall. In the days when public buildings were properly situated, Scotland Yard and the senior police were in that space, five minutes away from the Home Office and the Home Secretary, to whom they were accountable. It was easy to get hold of the head of the police, because he was within walking distance. That actually matters. It’s all very well for Pat McFadden, who is presiding over the changes as head of the Duchy of Lancaster, to say that this is “taking more decision-making out of Whitehall and moving it closer to communities all across the UK". What it’s actually doing is moving decision making away from ministerial control.
And the trend is all the more worrying because of the sheer value of the sites on which government departments are based. Eleven government office buildings will close as part of the plans in a bid to make £94million of savings a year by 2032.
There is an alchemy about the capital whereby the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why ambitious people want to come here
Does that sound good? If you go to another hotel (I know, I seem to frequent luxury hotels), the OWO, or Old War Office, you’ll find yourself in an astonishingly impressive space, a marvel of Edwardian design. As the name suggests, it housed the department responsible for the armed forces and some lucky bits of the MoD were based there until 2016. Selling it was an easy way for the then government to raise funds, but once it’s gone from public ownership, it’s gone (same goes for Crown Post Offices). I’m pretty sure that selling the Treasury buildings, say, would raise eyewatering funds for the NHS, but it would incalculably diminish the workings of government.
The eleven government buildings that are to be sold are, I think, architecturally unprepossessing. No one marvels at 102 Petty France, one of the largest civil service offices where some 7,000 people at the Ministry of Justice, HM Courts and Tribunal Service, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Government Legal Department are based. But it’s actually important that these people should be close to Westminster and indeed to the higher courts. Physical proximity is important. Ditto the Department of Health building in Victoria Street – an example of the postwar decline in the quality of design in public buildings. And yet, it’s undeniably handy. The temptation will be for future governments to raise more easy money by selling more Whitehall real estate, impoverishing future generations.
And then there’s the human factor, and – how can I put this nicely? – I wonder how many senior civil servants will rejoice at the prospect of being moved to Darlington, where parts of the Treasury are already based, as well as Birmingham, Leeds, Cardiff, Glasgow, Newcastle and Tyneside, Sheffield, Bristol, Edinburgh, Belfast and York. Now all these places are wonderful in their own ways, but can you imagine the contemporary equivalent of Sir Humphrey oiling his way up the ladder so as to work at the other end of the country? Granted, some of the change will be done on the basis of recruiting new hands into the new locations, but some people will have to move.
I know just a few senior civil servants but my impression is that one reason some joined the civil servants precisely in order to get away from the provinces and into London. Even now, in our present condition, there is an alchemy about the capital whereby the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why ambitious people want to come here.
But you may well argue, correctly, that it’s not much point in having civil servants in central London if they can’t be bothered to drag themselves into work which, post Covid, fewer and fewer of them do…three day week working from the office is the norm for many civil servants. And here we should scrutinise the statement from the The Public and Commercial Services Union which has urged the government to “do the right thing by workers” still based in London. “That must include guarantees of no compulsory redundancies, no compulsory relocations and access to more flexible working arrangements to enable them to continue their careers should they wish to do so,” general secretary Fran Heathcote.
Flexible working? That means working from home. Or not, as the case may be. And that means less effective working, at our expense.
Here’s a suggestion: how about a smaller, leaner civil service which operates out of Whitehall and works in the office, and therefore more effectively. Radical, I know. But it’s how we did things once.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
