Thank heavens for a strong and stable civil service, Sir Peter Housden tweeted on Friday morning. The point made by the former head of the Scottish government and permanent secretary for communities can be applied across the public services.
The institutions of the state went through another trial by ballot box and emerged with glowing reputation. Despite financial depredations, councils organised democracy seamlessly. If only (some might say) Irene Lucas – who was also permanent secretary at communities for a brief period and is now chief executive in Sunderland – could deploy the energy and efficiency of her vote counters in other more complicated and expensive service areas.
Expensive is the word. Here’s the crux question from the election that may not be answered for months. Did voters back spending more on public services and the higher levels of taxation that are needed to sustain the NHS, social care, schools and so on?
Will that overnight muttering among disconsolate Tory MPs about public services translate into an ideological rollback and abandonment of the plan to shrink public spending down to 36% of GDP by 2020, as set out most recently in Philip Hammond’s March budget? The affirmative language used about public services in the Tory manifesto could prove more apt than intended.
A hung parliament isn’t going to be the place for bold fiscal initiatives. Yet all roads lead back to the matter of money and lifting the cap on public service pay, meaning that glaring recruitment problems, in the Department for International Trade as much as among NHS nurses, can be addressed.
Political instability won’t affect most. The heavy lifting will be done by Jeremy Heywood and colleagues in the centre of the centre. They didn’t war-game this outcome but, the Tory party remaining in charge, no fundamental adjustments are yet needed. (The portentous Cabinet Manual produced under Gus O’Donnell never was and isn’t now much of a guide to practical action.)
Civil servants will, however, be assiduously reading up on John McDonnell’s speeches and statements, just in case; the Treasury will take comfort from the report McDonnell commissioned from Lord Kerslake concluding it should not be split up.
Problems in staffing the departments most directly involved in Brexit remain as acute as ever. Transferring officials in from departments less affected by leaving the EU (such as communities and work and pensions) may now feel even less of a stopgap – if the election refocuses political and policy attention on public services.
Managers in departments and agencies, local government and the NHS: they today confront the same problems as yesterday – problems of service delivery within tight, sometimes impossibly tight, budgets.
In the NHS, the conviction has been growing that extra money will be found, one way or another, and the election outcome has reinforced that. It won’t be money with strings labelled “reform” or even “sustainability and transformation planning” attached.
Since she became prime minister, Theresa May has exhibited very little interest in the public services as a theme. That word transformation, which once fell so readily from politicians’ lips, has been heard less and less. It’s a safe bet that the next political cycle, protracted or short and sharp, will see even less attention paid to reform, so often a codeword for contracting out and privatisation.
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