Former prime minister Tony Blair has criticised the UK civil service, saying there is a “genuine problem with the bureaucracy” of the country. He has said UK civil servants are “superb” at coping in a crisis, but failed to implement major reform during his time in office.
“I learned it’s [the UK civil service] great at managing things, but not great at changing things,” Blair told Reflections with Peter Hennessy on Radio 4. “If you had a crisis, there was nothing better than that British system. It kicked in, it operated to a high degree of quality and on numerous occasions I had cause to be thankful for it,” he said.
But Blair added that he found civil servants “frankly just unresponsive” when it came to major changes, such as healthcare or education reform. He recalled “early battles” over reforming asylum and immigration policy.
Blair said he did not accept that the Labour government was wrong to bring in special advisers and “to make the system work differently”, adding that this was a “constant debate” between him and senior civil servants such as then-cabinet secretary Richard Wilson.
But Blair said that in the final six or seven years of his premiership, there was a “more balanced perspective” in the Labour government, which he said had a liberating effect on “the people within the bureaucracy who do want to make change and who are enthusiastic behind an agenda of change”.
Blair added that he tells governments around the world to treat their civil service with respect. “You should recognise what it can do, but if you become a prisoner of it, believe me, you’ll achieve nothing,” he told Hennessy. “You’ll just go round in circles.”
Blair also said that the whole concept of how government itself should work is fundamentally important, especially given changes in technology. “Reinventing government has fallen off the political agenda in recent times and it really shouldn’t,” he said.
Frustration with the civil service was a longstanding gripe of Blair’s when in office and in 1999, he asked Wilson to draw up a plan for implementing internal reform. Since leaving government, Blair has continued to criticise the UK civil service, although he also told Hennessy that it remains one of the best in the world - “top of the top”.
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