By Jeremy Sare.
The first ever scene of the BBC’s political comedy, ‘Yes, Minister’ shows a new Secretary of State arriving at his Department and amazed to find his work diary for the coming months already full.
“But you didn’t know I was coming,” he protests.
“We knew there would be a Minister,” says one of his knowing civil servants.
Easy continuity has been the hallmark of the British Civil Service for over 200 years. Until now. Under the Coalition Government the traditional power balance and mutual co-operation between officials and their masters is under severe strain.
One indicator has been the rapid disintegration of the top rank of officials. Since the election in April 2010, all but two top officials (Permanent Secretaries) have resigned. The latest, Dame Helen Ghosh of the Home Office (responsible for law and order), has cast aside the lofty trappings of office, to run the relatively lowly National Trust charity.
It seems a huge shift-down in her career trajectory to take voluntarily. The civil servant gains his/her kudos from the status of the department. So it seems peculiar for Dame Helen to exchange being custodian of the nation’s police and prisons for administering its historic houses and gardens.
This battle at the top of Government is partly a numbers game. The Coalition arrived promising to cut departments by 25 percent in their drive for austerity. That is not simply trimming the fat; slashing budgets on that scale means lobbing off limbs. Some Ministers joined in with, perhaps, too much gusto making savings of 40 to 50 percent; in other words on their way to successfully abolishing their own departments.
There has also been a concerted attempt by Ministers to portray public servants as “wasteful” and “the enemies of enterprise.” The Prime Minister, David Cameron, joined in the bashing of public servants, delivering a speech last year which made him sound rather like he was still in opposition. He referred to, “The bureaucrats in government departments who concoct those ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible.” As PM he relies on those public servants to carry out his wishes. Such public criticism can only discourage them from trying their damnedest to making his policies succeed.
The combination of the cuts and the insults has seen staff morale become measurable as ‘below sea-level’. People have been removed from jobs which the public still expects them to do. The Home Office cut the numbers of immigration staff to the extent that queues for passport checks at British airports were routinely three hours. An international PR calamity during the Olympics by this over zealous penny pinching was only just averted by employing more (expensive) personnel.
But mostly the public have not sided with the ‘bureaucrats’. The politicians’ familiar rhetoric is somewhat buoyed by sections of the press which are relentless in their wish to show the coddled public servants have “gold-plated pensions.” In reality the average civil servant retires on just £4,200 per annum.
The architect behind it all is Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. He appears to consider public servants worthy only of contempt and is constantly seeking more imaginative ways of firing them. His top civil servant, Ian Watmore, after just six months in post, chose to be a house husband rather than continue being sidelined by an over-bearing Minister.
Maude has relished his “bonfire of the Quangos” (Quasi Non-Government Organisations) and boasted on numerous occasions of all the “waste” he has saved. Maude culled organisations regardless of their highly successful records, for example the UK Film Council which had been making £4 for every pound spent, was abolished without consultation. This was described at the time as, “an act of cultural vandalism.”
Civil servants have had to endure a long-standing pay freeze, their pensions slashed (twice), their train fares sky rocketing as well as compulsory redundancies while their achievements are publicly denigrated and their standing insulted. It must be like living in a highly dysfunctional family headed by a raging schizophrenic.
All they can do in response is to deliberately fail to do their jobs to the Ministers’ satisfaction. The problem is the Minister thought that in the first place.
