How to be a Civil Servant

Societies fail if their governments are ineffective, and governments are ineffective if their civil servants are ineffective. This website accordingly examines the skills and effectiveness of the UK Civil Service. It has two parts.

  • The first part - originally published as a book How to be a Civil Servant - contains a series of notes which summarise civil servants' skills, duties and responsibilities.
  • The second part provides detailed information and analysis about the UK civil service, civil service reform, and regulation.

The whole site contains around 120 separate pages of information. The most popular or key pages are listed below, together with links to detailed lists of content. You might also like to use this Google search tool.

How to be a Civil Servant

Working in Whitehall

Developing Policy

The European Union

Parliament, Ethics etc

Information and Analysis

Basic Information about the UK Civil Service

Civil Service Reform and Efficiency

Miscellaneous Popular Pages

Regulation

  • A sister site www.regulation.org.uk has information and analysis about regulation, science and risk, including the growth of the regulatory state, the regulatory burden on small firms, economic and competition regulation, the regulatory failures that led to the 2008 credit crunch.
  • In particular, it contains news of the abandonment of regulatory budgets - see the note on regulatory costs

This website is an important resource for civil servants, journalists, academics, students and others, attracting around 150,000 visitors a year. Please therefore email me if you can help improve, update or add to the site in any way.

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