The UK is the most frenzied civil service reformer on the planet.
But after 65 years of reforms there is no shortage of contradictory and trenchant views on the civil service. The paradox of UK civil service reform is that is subject to two quite contradictory narratives.
The positive, sometimes evangelical, narratives come from international institutions, practitioners and some academics. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund and strategy consultancies continue to champion UK reforms (Pollitt, 2013). The academic industry that sprang up around the New Public Management reform Paradigm did much to promote the UK’s reform experiments. There is a lucrative global industry promulgating often mangled, ahistorical and acontextual interpretations of major UK reforms.
On the other hand, assorted select committees, self-appointed commissions and think tank reports seem united in a negative narrative which portrays a civil service that despite endless reform is either unfit for purpose or a shadow of former glories. This negativity is fuelled by those academics with strong governance and ‘Whitehall Model’ interests rooted in the classic view of bureaucracy and public service. Such academics bemoan where the reforms of the 80’s and 90’s to have led to:
…an institution whose organisational principles, culture and ethical standards are in disarray and decline… the end of the civil service’… ‘the end of Whitehall’ (Pyper & Burnham, 2011).
…after two decades of ‘new public management’ the British state’s administrative apparatus is now a fragile thing, vulnerable to acute failures and ‘public service delivery disasters’, and devoid of many of the ‘strengths in depth’ that once sustained it. (Dunleavy, 2018).
The recent report of the Institute for Government led commission on the centre of government delivered an assessment that almost matches the notoriously scathing first chapter of the Fulton Report. But their fire is rightly directed primarily at issues of governance, the Cabinet, the Prime Minister’s office and accountability - and much less at civil service management.
The UK has become a highly centralised country with a closed, and weak, centre.
The centre of government fails to set and maintain an overall strategy for the government to follow. The resulting vacuum is filled by the powerful Treasury.
Cabinet… has ceased to be effective… the big decisions are taken elsewhere.
No.10 is underpowered but compulsively involved in detail, with ambiguous structures that undermine the clarity of instruction from the prime minister and encourage in-fighting. There is an inward-looking bunker mentality, too closed to the external expertise and outside perspectives that are necessary to make the best decisions.
The Cabinet Office… has become bloated and unfocused… it is failing in its core role of supporting the prime minister and cabinet… its relationships with other departments can be dysfunctional, reinforcing silos through a budget setting process that makes it harder to tackle the cross-cutting and long-term problems facing the country.
The civil service’s leadership lacks authority – nobody is running the civil service from the centre. There is insufficient pressure or impetus to address urgent capability gaps in the skills, workforce planning and talent management of the civil service.
The last 5 years have been a showcase for the limitations of UK governance, but there is a danger this diverts us into the wrong conversations about civil service management reform. To expect civil service reform to fix the fundamentals of the governance of government is to overload expectations on reforms that are essentially managerial.
The starting point for my research efforts is that both the public administration view and the prevailing narratives of decline are partial, often misleading and generally fail to capture the cumulative and transformational impact of 65 years of civil service reforms.
It is possible to believe the civil service has substantially improved its capability through decades of reforms whilst also holding the view that it is still not fit enough for today’s purpose and tomorrow’s challenges.
My research programme on civilservicereformuk.com
My personal mission is to investigate when, why and how civil service reform works. I aim to develop actionable insights that will help both politicians and officials to succeed in civil service reform. As they emerge my findings will be published on my new website.
I will propose a way to think about reform impact that breaks the ‘what is success’ log jam I describe below. I will go beyond public administration research to use other more promising fields to explore how reforms succeed. I am drawing on these fields to establish a new perspective (my conceptual framework) for re-looking at famous and forgotten reforms.
A word about impact
Discerning the impact of managerial reforms is a tough task that faces almost insurmountable barriers. These barriers partly explain the lack of evaluation and the often-unsatisfactory findings of those few evaluations that are undertaken (Pollitt & Dan, 2013).
But we struggle to describe civil service effectiveness let alone government effectiveness. Hopes for an objective view on whole of government and or civil service effectiveness are likely to misplaced. Most academic efforts draw on administrative data (data collected and published by government organizations themselves and scores issued by government inspectors).
Unsurprisingly they tell you more about the priorities of powerful interest groups - often within the state - than they do about government effectiveness (Andrews et al., 2011).
A related but highly influential branch outside academic research is the thriving global industry assembling and promoting indices purporting to rank the effectiveness of governments and in some cases civil services. Indices tend to reflect the dominant paradigms of public management and democracy at the time of their creation. And they are inevitably skewed to what can be measured and the existence of some roughly comparable datasets offering a time series. They tend to fall back on questionable surveys to fill data gaps or shore up the credibility of their index. Their claim to make meaningful comparisons is suspect given they cannot possibly account for culture, context and antecedents which are critical to the evolution and effectiveness of governments (M. A. Thomas, 2010).
Beyond this meta challenge of describing what government or civil service effectiveness looks like, there are substantial difficulties in identifying the impact of individual reforms even in terms of their stated aims. A large number of evaluations of the impact of reforms has largely failed to capture the impact of reforms.
The New Public Management (NPM) reforms of the 80’s and 90’s in the UK are found to have failed in terms of the most consistently articulated NPM reform intention – efficiency (Hood & Dixon, 2013). For the classic period of NPM from 1980-1996 they found little evidence of real running cost reductions.
The other ambitions of NPM beyond efficiency were performance improvement and responsiveness to service users (Pollitt & Dan, 2013). A large review of 519 studies of NPM impact across Europe (Pollitt & Dan, 2013)found a mixed ‘hit or miss picture’. Whilst around half reported a positive impact, 47% of those looking at outputs found they did not improve, and 56% of those looking at outcomes reported no improvement. This European comparative review concluded that whilst NPM interventions could not be called a failure, the political, structural and cultural context was crucial to the success of NPM interventions. They compared NPM interventions to ‘a delicate plant [that] requires the right soil and care, more orchid than potato’. As well as being intrinsically hard to evaluate, the importance of the context to each intervention complicates the attribution of the causes of any outputs and impacts (Pollitt & Dan, 2013).
The mainstream research field of public administration is criticised strongly by some of its most notable figures. As a body of work it has struggled to articulate what successful reform looks like; largely failed to offer actionable insights into how successful reform is achieved; neglected the role of politics and policy choices; and, for some of the biggest challenges facing government (for example financial crises) exaggerated the potential of management to resolve them (Pollitt 2017; Peters 2017).
None of this helps with the challenge of better understanding how and why reforms have positively changed the civil service in a way that is of practical use to those who would shape and run future reform efforts. Consequently I will be looking to other fields to shed light on how reforms succeed, and what practitioners do to create success.
The patterns of civil service reform in the UK.
But my work starts with getting the basics right. What has really been going on in civil service reform over the last 65 years? Is there life beyond the famous interventions of the Fulton Review and Next Steps Report? Is it all about big bangs, ministerial speeches and white papers or might it owe more to dogged efforts over the decades by unsung officials to make things better?
Cutting through the rhetoric I have tracked the ambition and actions that followed these symbolic reform statements and provide a visualisation of the scope, intensity and duration of reform efforts since 1960. I looked at over 30 pulses of reform, and nearly 170 specific elements of reform action.
What emerges is a core story of incremental change that accumulates, each step building on what has gone before. Those that are more successful are carefully crafted to accommodate contradictory demands and ambitions, to fit political agendas, whilst also somehow being relevant to the challenges and priorities of individual departments, their ministers and officials. They build on and depend upon previous reforms.
The impetus for civil service reforms as seen through landmark reviews, white papers and reform plans has been remarkably consistent. The same core themes run through these landmark reform statements: cutting costs, controlling expenditure, modern methods, new skills, stronger accountability for officials, transparency of spending, value for money, openness, professionalism, coordination across government and beyond, strategic direction, prioritisation and planning, strengthening the centre, using new technology, management information, open recruitment and promotion, better management of programmes and projects, delivering results, and a smaller civil service that only does what it must. From Major onwards the scope of reform widened to look at management across the wider public sector through the eyes of partners, customers and citizens – a more outward looking approach that continued under Blair and Brown.
My analysis uncovers the extent to which actions continued over years or tailed off when senior interest moved on. For example, contrary to popular view, Major’s Government was more active and ambitious on more areas of reform than Thatcher. But Thatcher drove some foundational and transformative reforms very hard that only reached fruition during his government. The slow burn of these reforms emphasises the long-term nature of reform and need for continuity of support from successive prime ministers and senior officials.
Exhibit 1. The scope and intensity of reform efforts in the UK
Source: analysis by Peter Thomas. The size of the bubble represents the scale of ambition, action and implementation in line with that theme during the period.
There has been striking consistency in the scope of reform ambition and action. Nine of the 13 themes feature in almost all periods.
The focus and language in each theme have evolved through the periods reflecting the trajectory of dominant ideas in contemporary management and organisational thinking, which have variously been promoted to government by business leaders and management consultancies.
Four reform themes have mainly come into the picture since the early 90’s:
1. Customer focus, service standards, outcome focus, behavioural insights.
2. Better policy making, using data and analysis, design led policy, open policy making.
3. Applying new technology, digital.
4. Governance, role of ministers, codification, ministerial support, openness.
The focus on citizens and then cross-cutting outcomes from the 1990’s onwards marks a distinctive shift along with the belated attention on policy making. The innately managerial focus of civil service reform is emphasised by how little attention was given to the quality of policy making over much of the period. This may reflect the more politically driven nature of policy making as well as a degree of complacency from officials about how well policy was made. The entrance of governance is likely a reaction to the groundswell of criticism that the civil service was being ‘hollowed out’ (Milward & Provan, 2003) by the impact of the reforms of the 80’s and early 90’s.
Reform is a long game. These patterns tell a story of iterative, evolutionary change. Next Steps is sometimes presented as a big bang reform but it was the culmination of thirteen years of previous reforms. The path dependency of most reforms is a striking feature: they depend on and build on previous reforms; and the ideas they draw on have been developing, circulating and evolving over time until they found that opportunity to coalesce. As Kate Jenkins - a key figure in the development and delivery of Next Steps - observed:
I do not say that Next Steps is a tremendous success because there are 103 agencies 10 or 15 years later. I say that it is a great success, as the FMI was a great success, because it has led on to the next thing, which is relevant to how the Civil Service is operating now. That is the real story of Civil Service reform (Kandiah, M., 2007).
In all nine of the continuous themes there are clear path dependencies running from the 1960s to the 2010’s.
Exhibit 3. The breadth and intensity of civil service reform action 1960-2024
Source: analysis by Peter Thomas.
The breadth of reform efforts narrows during periods of economic and political crisis, notably 1974-79, and 2016-2024. Such reform as there was during those periods tended to be a continuation of reforms initiated before that period, alongside an increased attention to the enduring issues of expenditure control and cost reductions.
The breadth and intensity of reform efforts during the Major, Blair and Brown governments is striking. This may reflect the relative lack of economic and political crises but more likely the continuity and agglomeration of reforms as they became embedded in the civil service and the agenda of senior civil servants. There is also remarkable continuity between Thatcher Major, Blair and Brown in terms of the main reform themes if not always the rhetoric surrounding them.
This continuity emphasises that civil service reform is a largely managerial agenda not a policy agenda. This continuity also reflects the emergence of a tangible senior civil service leadership collective with a shared sense of purpose between 1995 and 2010. This was reinforced by successive Cabinet Secretaries and reached its zenith in Cabinet Secretary O’Donnell’s creation of the top 200 senior management group, a revamped Civil Service Management Board and his explicit expectation that senior civil servants would contribute to collective leadership of the civil service (a more contentious proposition for some than you might expect):
I have a phrase called “100:0:0”. If you spend 100% of your time just on your day job that is wrong. The next zero is how much do you spend working for your department? The next part is how much do you spend working for the Civil Service as a whole? I am trying to move people to the right on that spectrum. (PAC, 2009)
An evolving group of senior officials (often later becoming permanent secretaries) were consistent players in the main strands of reform through the 90’s and noughties. As that generation left the civil service the collective leadership of the civil service lost their shared sense of purpose, agency and commitment. This seems likely to be one factor in the dwindling carry through of managerial reforms beyond O’Donnell’s tenure. As a report I co-authored at the Institute for Government in 2014 observed:
it is not clear that the Civil Service Board or wider group of permanent secretaries see improving the health of the Civil Service as a core part of their role. There is not a shared view of the level of action required to reform the Civil Service. This sends out mixed messages and weakens the case for corporate leadership even among those most willing to lead beyond their own department (P. Thomas et al., 2014).
This loss of momentum was undoubtedly exacerbated by increasing hostility to senior civil servants from 2016 onwards, exemplified by Dominic Cummings gratuitous ‘hard rain’ and the sacking of several permanent secretaries. The all-consuming crises of Brexit and the Covid 19 pandemic, the tragic death of the Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, and the chaos that characterised the ‘shopping trolley’ premiership of Johnson and Truss’ self-inflicted implosion have left senior civil service confidence and collective leadership at a low ebb in 2024.
Some final reflections
Civil service management reform is a long game. It can take 10 or even 20 years for reforms to come to fruition.
Individual reforms evolve and agglomerate. They intermingle and adapt. They provide the foundations for subsequent reforms. The path dependency of reforms is striking.
Context is critical to the genesis of reforms as well as their subsequent development and implementation.
There is an oddly cultish dimension to the inflated expectations of what can be achieved by managerial reforms, unsupported by evidence of their impact.
Civil service management seems too often to be the fall guy for the failure of governments to bring political ambition, courage and persistence to bear on major economic and policy challenges - or for the recent absence of integrity and honesty.
A persistently negative narrative about the civil service is in part fuelled by the misconception that managerial reforms can fix deep rooted problems in the governance of government - they cannot.
We have learned little about the impact of reforms, and are unable to articulate their impact let alone how they achieved that impact.
The evaluation of impact is extremely difficult using conventional approaches (intention versus outcome). We need a different conversation about better ways to capture the impact of reforms.
What next for my research
I am exploring some promising avenues for thinking differently about the outcome of reforms, and how those outcomes can be related to civil service and government effectiveness.
An article elsewhere on my website identifies and explores areas of research with strong potential for illuminating how reforms succeed. I have drawn on these to construct the first iteration of a conceptual framework for understanding civil service reform.
My further primary and secondary research will re-tell the story of past reforms in a way that provides a fresh perspective on why and how they succeeded. By focusing on the practice of key reformers I will be able to draw out actionable insights for those who would shape and run future reform efforts.
If you want to be part of the conversation or have a different perspective let me know – and we can talk.
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