This note summarises developments following the election of the Labour (Keir Starmer) Government on 4 July 2024.
New Ministerial Code
The Prime Minister took a long time to publish his own Ministerial Code, but the delay seems to have been worthwhile as several useful improvements have been made.
There were significant changes to the sections on powers of the independent adviser and the acceptance of 'freebies'.
Of more direct interest to civil servants (emphases added):
The code once again (but unlike the immediately previous code) explicitly included international law when it recorded ministers' 'overarching duty to comply with the law'.
It also now clarified that 'the ultimate responsibility for public appointments and thus the selection of those appointed rests with ministers ... Ministers have a duty to ensure that influence over civil service and public appointments is not abused for partisan purposes.'
The number of Spads per department was no longer limited to two - but this rule had not in practice been observed for many years.
The Code reaffirmed ministers' ‘duty to give fair consideration and due weight to informed and impartial advice from civil servants’ and repeated that a private secretary or official should be present for all discussions relating to government business.
There was some welcome new text:
The relationship between ministers and civil servants is a partnership underpinned by their common duty of public service as set out in this code and in the civil service code.
Ministerial office requires candour and openness. Ministers should demand and welcome candid advice. They should be as open as possible with parliament and the public.
Permanent secretaries are the most senior civil servants in government departments. They are the principal advisers to departmental ministers and are responsible for translating ministers' ambitions into a clear vision to staff, and upholding the rules and guidance they are bound by as civil servants and Accounting Officers. Ministers and permanent secretaries should have a trusting positive relationship, with regular opportunities for the exchange of feedback.
The Attorney-General has also issued welcome new guidance on how government lawyers should assess legal risk when advising ministers. The main change was that, even in cases where a challenge is not likely, lawyers are told they must assume that a challenge will be brought and consider what a court would decide. Joshua Rozenberg:
… lawyers can no longer sign off something dubious on the basis that it’s unlikely to be challenged. ... there is less of a ‘can we get away with it?’ vibe now.
Relations with the Civil Service
Mr Starmer's relationship with the civil service began positively: "From the get go, I want you to know that you have my confidence, my support and, importantly, my respect."
He was less positive in a speech in December 2024:
Make no mistake – this plan will land on desks across Whitehall…With the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down. A demand, given the urgency of our times… For a state that is more dynamic… More decisive… More innovative…Less hostile to devolution and letting things go…Creative - on the deployment of technology…Harnessing its power to rethink services…Rather than replicate the status quo in digital form.
...
Country first, party second. Because this is something we’ve totally lost sight of in British politics… And, to be honest, across Whitehall as well. I don’t think there’s a swamp to be drained here… But I do think too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline. Have forgotten, to paraphrase JFK… That you choose change, not because it’s easy… But because it’s hard.
David Henig commented:
Big talk of action, but no reflection that officials do their jobs of pursuing the many different interests of a modern government. It is for the centre of government led by Ministers to reconcile and prioritise by making decisions that may be unpopular. They often won't. ... Many people don't seem to realise that the whole government machine coordinates because policy crosses departmental lines. [It is] second nature. The issue is always how to reconcile differences. That needs political leadership. ... What I see is politicians demanding the pain-free option, which doesn't exist. And denying the need for process to show the fairness of decisions. Ending with inaction and secrecy.
There's a decision ministers could take today which would demonstrate action in support of growth and Whitehall would be empowered. That is to align with EU goods regulations unless there's a good reason not. Who is not making that decision? Whitehall, or Ministers?
Maybe this time it will work. But I just see the same words as previous governments, which assume there are magic solutions that somehow haven't been deployed before to achieve growth, a well functioning NHS, etc. Sure, you can improve. But I don't see enough recognition of underlying issues.
[I] don't like the cross-party consensus that 'Whitehall' is to blame for the UK's recent failings, whether it is because it is too woke or too timid. Very convenient for politicians though.
[In response to Starmer's criticism of a £100m bat tunnel and no reservoirs being built for for 30 years.] So where is the commitment to revoke all laws that protect bat habitats? Not happening, presumably, and for good reason. So we have Schrodinger's Bat, perhaps - one that is legally protected but where that protection doesn't affect any construction.
The Tepid Bath of Managed Decline?
There were further somewhat odd ministerial comments later that year. Here is my resultant blog:
Civil servants were the subject of a number of pre-Christmas communications, including from Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden:
Too many civil servants are “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” and “caught in bad systems”. They need to “feel emboldened [to] upset the apple cart … Too often, needless bureaucratic impediments, silos, processes about processes, all impede your ability … to deliver for the people we are here to serve. And from the conversations that I have had with many of you over the past five months, I know these barriers frustrate you every bit as much as they frustrate me.”
“From my time as director of public prosecutions, I know first-hand just how fortunate this country is to have a Civil Service that is admired across the world. … I know how hard you work … [I recognise your] dedication, professionalism and strong sense of public service. … You want to change the country and make Britain a better place”.
“Instead of writing more complicated policy papers and long strategy documents, the government will set … teams a challenge and empower them to experiment, innovate and try new things.”
Newly appointed Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald added that the Prime Minister “has been clear that he wants a re-wiring of the way the government works … this will require all of us to do things differently – from working much more effectively across departments to taking advantage of the major opportunities technology provides”.
I recognise that these comments were principally aimed at ‘the blob’ - the mandarins who (deliberately or otherwise) delay or oppose ministers’ attempts to introduce exciting and important new policies. But most civil servants are employed in agencies or local offices, collecting taxes, paying benefits, examining novice drivers, forecasting tomorrow’s weather. They are no more ‘frustrated’, nor ‘dedicated’, nor opposed to change, than are their friends and relations in the private sector. It would surely help if senior ministers avoided over-generalising and put a little effort into defining more clearly what they want to change.
More importantly, I don’t know if it was deliberate, but the targeting of the Civil Service looked like an attempt to blame officials, in advance, for future government failures. We all recognise that just about every part of our political system has failed in recent years. I and others have written extensively about weaknesses in the civil service. Ian Dunt and many others have written extensive criticisms of ‘Westminster’ and beyond. But you can’t sensibly blame the civil service for politicians ….
- who, in government after government, have failed to reform the funding of social care,
- who agreed to support the US invasion of Iraq without sensible plans for what to do next,
- who voted to block a military response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people
- who consistently failed to raise fuel duty and so discourage the use of public transport and rail freight at a current cost of £3 billion pa,
- who told the financial regulators to prioritise growth and apply a ‘light touch’, so contributing to the 2008 financial crisis,
- who will not go on the record to say which immigrants offer a net benefit to the UK. Students, tech, care, NHS workers, farm workers?
- who failed to consult their own Ministry of Agriculture (let alone anyone else) about the best way to restrict agricultural inheritance tax relief.
- who are so in thrall to the gambling industry that they allowed the number of addiction cases to double last year,
- who sold 55,000 military homes to the private sector for £1.7 billion whilst retaining all responsibility for upkeep and repairs. They are now being sold back for £6.0 billion. (Officials had to scrabble to justify the first decision and eventually found that it could only stand scrutiny if they made the unlikely assumption that property prices would rise by only 1%pa before inflation.)
- who have even failed, year after year, to agree how and when to refurbish their own crumbling Palace of Westminster.
It troubles me, too, that the Prime Minister and others think it worth spending time and political capital on civil service issues when they (and we) have so much else to worry about, including …
- a Russian-led war that is beginning to look truly global
- the expiry, in 2026, of the final remaining nuclear arms control treaty
- the urgent need to facilitate economic growth
- climate change whose consequences are clearly already affecting many communities in the UK, let alone abroad, and
- the need to decentralise decision-making and empower ‘the front line’.
Here are some other’s comments on what ministers said. Robert Shrimsley in the FT:
Reform is not delivered by declamation. It is slow, detailed and difficult. It is dangerous to invest too heavily in the idea of government as a startup. Agile work processes are effective for new and discrete projects, but organisations whose decisions affect millions of lives cannot "move fast and break things".
Amy Gandon :
Framing the failings of Whitehall as a matter of personal complacency … misses the point. Civil servants are not slow, risk-averse or inexpert because they choose to be. They are slowed down by 5 layers of people signing off their work. They are risk-averse because mistakes mean headlines and ministers don’t always back them to innovate.
They may end up inexpert because the only route to better pay or more responsibility and satisfaction is to slip around departments every 18 months. Now is that a matter of personal responsibility or system failure, you tell me?
David Higham quoted Norman Lamont, many years ago:
I am astonished how, when things go wrong, often it is the civil servants who are blamed when it is we politicians who make the decisions and it is we politicians who should carry the blame.
And here is a current civil servant, writing anonymously in the Guardian:
Is it excessively uncharitable to suggest that the ideological vanguard of the new cabinet may be panicking, and is falling back on well-worn tropes about the recalcitrance of the civil service “blob” in an effort to distract attention from the fact that they are tying themselves in knots about exactly what to fix first? After all, five months in and – despite the Plan for Change relaunch-not-relaunch in early December – is it that much clearer what this new government really wants to do, including to the government? …
I don’t have a problem with targets; no good civil servant does. [But] demoralising his workforce isn’t going to do the PM, or the public, any favours. As union boss Dave Penman has pointed out, civil servants support reform and are up for the challenge of improving public services. Couldn’t the prime minister try to bring us with him?
Let me finish by recognising that it is early days for this administration. They are not responsible for the politicians’ failures listed in the middle of this blog, and it is still too soon to expect them to have finalised their plans for local government and defence spending, social care, the NHS etc. etc. We await their (and not their officials’) decisions with interest.
I also recognise that the senior ranks of the civil service could have done better in recent years when they failed sufficiently to challenge Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The Civil Service is no longer a Rolls Royce, if ever it was.
But the Civil Service in general, and Whitehall in particular, is still full of genuinely talented, hard working and committed public servants. They are amongst the least of the problems facing Sir Keir and his colleagues.
Getting a Grip on the System
The above named Policy Exchange Report was published around the time of the 2024 election and probably deserved more attention than was available at this time. It was written by a bipartisan team and examines the resistance to change that faces any energetic minister. Former Labour minister Jim Murphy set the scene with two great quotes in his foreword to the report:
In his diary, the Duke of Wellington described the culture shock of switching from issuing orders to his officers, to chairing Cabinet as Prime Minister: ‘An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’
When I first became a Minister Tony Blair told a much younger me that the good news was that the British civil service had the engine of a Rolls Royce but the bad news was that it also the brakes of a Rolls Royce. He added with his trademark smile that if you don’t drive it, it may find a lay-by to park itself in.
The report itself sets the scene in this way:
So many former Ministers, from the lowliest parliamentary-undersecretary of state, to the “first amongst equals”, often say the same thing: their time in office was frustrating, the system was sclerotic and glacial, the connection between the will of the people and the willingness of the machinery of government to enact it was at times tenuous.
On the left, they complain about the ‘establishment’; on the right, ‘the blob’. The point is identical: democratically-elected Governments, with clear majorities and mandates, and willing, energetic Ministers, meet mighty but subtle forces of resistance. This resistance stems not from bodies of armed men, nor powerful financiers, nor shadowy cabals in St James’s clubs. We can leave that to the writers of political fiction and satirists. It stems from systems, cultures, attitudes, assumptions, groupthink, and at times inertia: the desire not only to assess risk, but ideally to avoid it altogether; to do what has always been done.
Some of its 36 recommendations were more controversial than others. Those of particular interest to the Civil Service were that pay should be improved and the National School for Government reestablished. And ministers should should be consulted on senior civil servant performance assessments.
Recommendations with wider implications include:
Consult on changes to the Civil Service Code to make it clear officials are bound to comply with UK law, meaning it is entirely for Ministers to agree the Government’s risk appetite on international law.
Reform the process of assessing legal risk, giving commissioning officials a stronger input into assessing the likelihood of legal challenge, not leaving this entirely to Government Legal Service.
All Ministers should be given the right to establish personal advisory panels to act as a sounding board for policy proposals being developed in the departments. These should be paid, directly appointed positions capable of seeing departmental papers. The Cabinet Secretary should ensure these are ready to be established across Whitehall in all departments where incoming Ministers have indicated they want them.
Pass a Bill to enhance and make consistent Arms Length Bodies’ accountability to Ministers. A single Bill should ensure that all statutory Bodies are subject to Ministerial strategic direction, and that the Chair, executives and board are expected to follow these and potentially can be removed if they do not. All Bodies with regulatory/executive functions should be required to take account of costs and benefits in the exercise of their functions.
Reform the Public Appointment Regulations to clarify diversity does not override the merit principle; to strengthen the role of Independent Assessors and to enable Ministers to accelerate preferred candidates direct to interview, the remaining process continuing according to merit.
There are lots of other interesting recommendations so I suggest that this is a 'must read' report for anyone interested in Whitehall/ Civil Service reform.
House of Lords Debates
Towards the end of 2024 the Lords engaged in a three hour discussion about the Civil Service. It was a useful summary of current concerns including interesting contributions from several previous ministers and Cabinet Secretaries. You can read some extracts here.
Recently ennobled Sue Gray included this passage in her maiden speech in March 2025:
I want to return to my first set of jobs in what was the Department for Social Security, working in employment support, as it is highly relevant to today’s debate and to the future of our Civil Service. Back then, I worked with truly heroic and committed people, striving every day, in very difficult circumstances, to help people in even more challenging situations. They were the Civil Service at its best: on the front line, as far away from Whitehall’s machinations as it is possible to be. Today, I see the same sort of brilliance. What these and other civil servants are doing is central to the Government’s—and the nation’s—mission to bring growth back into our economy and security to our society. That is why I would caution all of us to be careful, not only about our decisions but our language also. When we hear phrases with “blobs”, “pen-pushers”, “axes”, “chainsaws” and other implements, they hear it too.
Early 2025
A number of (not really) reforms were announced in the first three months of 2025.
First, and sensibly, ministers intended to make it easier to manage out senior poor performers, mainly by copying private sector practice and paying upfront lump sums so as to avoid delay and unfair dismissal claims.
Dissatisfaction
The Starmer government increasingly disappointed both its supporters and neutral commentators. Here is what Harry Lambert said in February 2025:
A few readers sent in some great responses to the last post on Dominic Cummings that I wanted to share.
First, a former Downing Street official (older, male):
There are many fragments of truth in this and in Cummings’ comments. But Cummings was essentially lazy - nothing systematic, just rants… [In government] the generalisations fall apart quickly. Some tasks are best done by discrete teams with lots of power (Aadhaar, vaccines etc). For others that's a disaster. Some can work with tight performance management – others not at all. In some fields Silicon Valley methods work well – in others they quickly backfire.
I see Cummings as part of a broader problem. Although he's interested in science, his background is history and he never applies a scientific or engineering method to anything, rather just jumping to opinion. He reflects an essentially literary commentariat who really find the engineering details of government, what I call the plumbing – very boring, and so jump, like Cummings, to colourful generalisation rather than analysis.
Every other field the UK excels at favours learning from the best globally – sport, science, business. Yet when it comes to government we appear to learn nothing, e.g. from the top ten effective governments (which are ranked each year – the UK isn't one of them). Cummings is a remarkable example, not just of ignorance but also lack of any curiosity.
And yes there are still no signs that the new government has a plan, or even a plan for a plan, for 'rewiring the state'. This was never going to be Sue Gray's strength, and it's not Wormald's background. So we are still stuck in rhetorical responses rather than serious ones (with slagging off civil servants the easiest, and laziest option).
I spend much of my life working with the best governments around the world on the detail of this… The UK used to be one of the leaders on much of it, but politicians long ago lost interest; the civil service has lost confidence and capability; and the commentators by their nature try to turn things into pithy 800 words opinions which are more often part of the problem than the solution.
A former civil servant in two major departments of state – younger, female – says:
A lot of what he's written rings true to my time in government. It felt like for a long time policy making was about how it could get a good headline for a minister or how said senior civil servant could retain head count… a focus on 'comms' was always at the forefront, I felt.
It may be idealistic but having ministers connected to constituencies and peoples' votes feels important. Not sure what the answers are but feels like we need radical action/thinking as I've never felt this depressed about the UK before.
And a recent history graduate writes in to say:
Starmer, Reeves and Lammy haven’t said anything remotely interesting or NEW or even produced something that demonstrated that they had reflected deeply… I’m not a Cummings fan boy but find that he is speaking about important things which no one else seems concerned about and even seems to grasp.
I also think Starmer is a joke. In 5 years of opposition plus government he has said nothing remotely interesting and lacks a basic grasp of economics, politics and history. This is evident from any interview that lasts more than a couple of minutes. He can’t think on his feet, lacks any ideas or hinterland and just repeats some meaningless blob of corporate newspeak. The fact that he has an enormous majority and knows nothing about what he wants to do with it is such a shame but predictable… he lacks purpose and ideas – [it is] no wonder why his government has flopped so quickly.”
I am convinced the combination of immigration, QE, insecurity, inequality and political incompetence is going to metastasise into some large scale social and political crisis pretty soon. WE CANNOT CONTINUE AS WE ARE. At least Starmer’s uselessness is going to accelerate this.
Dave Penman's Speech
Speaking at his union's annual conference in the summer of 2025, General Secretary Dave Penman ...
... rejected the idea that civil servants are resistant to change, arguing instead that “the civil service is hungry for reform” and challenging the government to simply “get on with it”. He criticised the language used by the government to characterise its civil servants, stating that they “don’t get to decide the size of government, ministers do. They don’t create regulations or regulators to enforce them, ministers do.
“So, let’s cut out the language of a ‘bloated state’, of ‘blockers’ and ‘the usual suspects’. “Civil servants can be the engine room of reform, they are hungry for it. But reform has to have substance. Being in government means it needs to be more than a buzzword in a speech. There has to be clear political objectives, a matching of resources to commitments and a plan.”
Mr Penman also challenged ministers to provide its civil service with “a clear plan for improved public services and a people plan to match”. He said the government needs “a plan for what unlocking the digital and AI revolution can actually mean in reality. A plan for how services will be delivered differently, for how the civil service can attract, grow, and retain the right talent for the next decade, not simply be fixated with the staffing levels in the last one”.
Penman also lamented the pace of progress since Labour took power back last summer: “Civil service reform will take time to design, negotiate and implement, and all too soon ministers will be focusing on the next election. Almost 12 months in with the new government and we’re nowhere near the sort of discussion we need to be having, for that once in a generation reform that the civil service so badly needs. In this spending round it may not feel like the sun is shining, but we do now need to fix the roof. “The new government has been given a once in a generation majority. It has set itself high ambitions and we all know that there is much to be done to improve public services. It needs a strong, skilled and motivated workforce to deliver them. That’s why we need to get on with it.”