First published on 4th May, 2010

The civil service will shrink – but it could also improve.

With the election around the corner, all the UK’s newspapers are now coming down on one side or another of the political divide – except this one. Like our readers, Civil Service World feels duty-bound to keep its voting intentions to itself; but, also like our readers, the newspaper has some strong messages for the people bidding to form our next government.

Our coverage of the main parties’ plans and manifestos reveals that the civil service faces a bleak period ahead – and, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed last week, the published plans leave much unsaid: no party has explained how it would tackle more than a quarter of our structural deficit. So the coming cuts will be painful; yet, like any period of change, the next couple of years will also be a time of opportunity.

Many senior civil servants are eager to develop the operation of our government. They are ready to hand more control over service delivery down to the local level; keen to create a more streamlined, professional, businesslike organisation; willing to look hard at where government can share its workload with private, voluntary and community organisations. Not everybody is on board, of course, but a substantial proportion of top officials are adopting what could be characterised as a ‘Total Place’ mindset.

Indeed, there is huge potential to save money if politicians are ready to invest time, energy and political capital in changing the way that public services are planned, managed and delivered. The civil service desperately needs smart, well conceived methods of overcoming the structural barriers that hold back reform – but ill-planned or overly simplistic approaches could cause huge damage.

Unfortunately, political imperatives have already led both Labour and the Conservatives to ring-fence some of the most fertile areas for savings. In health, for example, revenue growth has in recent years reduced the pressure for productivity improvements; by protecting the NHS budget, the parties are guarding inefficiencies in one sector while they plan dramatic cuts in areas that have already worked hard to reduce spending. So politics is already trumping pragmatism in the budget cuts agenda. And there is another reason to be concerned about the next government’s approach: time pressure.

As Greece sinks beneath the pressure of pessimistic lender expectations, raising doubts over the creditworthiness of Portugal and Spain, even the UK’s public debt markets start to look a little shaky; for the next government, reducing the public debt will be an over-riding concern. Labour has well-advanced plans for saving money in the administration of public services; the Tories have also presented realistic plans, albeit set to a frenetic timescale; and an evolving Total Place programme will raise many more possibilities. But all of these reforms will take time to plan, introduce and carry out. The risk is that ministers, under political pressure to protect popular services and Treasury pressure to cut costs, will hastily cut less politically-sensitive budgets – in which case civil servants, deprived of the time or investment funds to foster genuine reforms, will reduce head counts and cut services. Rapid, blunt budget cuts might relieve the Treasury’s concerns, but they would hurt everyone else – public servants, politicians and the public alike.

By investing its political capital in enlightened, intelligent and well-researched programmes of civil service reform, the next government could save huge amounts of public money while improving productivity and protecting essential services. The reality is that the Tories are probably more committed to driving through reform, while Labour has the more advanced plans for change. But either party could make this work by acting in concert with willing civil servants – and either party could get it badly wrong by imposing cuts to arbitrary timescales.

Whether our next government is led by Labour or the Tories, we face a rare opportunity to reform the operation of government. But in a situation when people are forced into transformation, success is utterly dependent on approach. CSW will be arguing that politicians won’t get us out of this mess by banging heads together; we need, instead, to be putting heads together.

Last updated 751 days ago by Civil Service Live