What happens to the Civil Service when we have a change of government? What will change, and what will stay the same?
A few years back I developed a model for thinking about the different, and sometimes conflicting, roles played by senior civil servants. It was developed mainly thinking about Whitehall – but I have found it resonates with senior civil servants in other democratic countries.
The model suggests four key roles:
The Counsellor (looking upwards). Senior civil servants are supposed to be the main source of policy-advice to their elected political masters. ‘Speaking Truth To Power’ falls within this role.
The Chief Executive (looking downwards). Most senior roles include an executive function – managing ‘their’ organisations – some of which are quite large and many of which deliver services directly to the public, businesses and others.
The Cooperator (looking outwards). Government is increasingly complex and requires cooperation – within government, across the public sector and beyond to business and civil society – to get almost anything done.
The Conservator (being looked at). I’m grateful to the late US academic Professor Larry Terry for this term. It means the role of upholding the constitutional, legal, and moral rules of government (sometimes against elected politicians).
So, let’s examine these roles in more detail and how they are likely to change along with the change in government.
The Counsellor
Let’s first dispel the myth that the Civil Service is ‘neutral’. It isn’t, it’s partisan to the “government of the day”. This is summed up in the famous ‘Armstrong Memorandum’:
Civil servants are servants of the Crown. For all practical purposes the Crown in this context means and is represented by the Government of the day …. in general the executive powers of the Crown are exercised by and on the advice of Her Majesty’s Ministers, who are in turn answerable to Parliament. The Civil Service as such has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly constituted Government of the day.
Or, to put it another way, the civil service are “serial monogamists”. On 5 July 2024 they got divorced from Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives and married to Keir Starmer’s Labour. These party transitions are as abrupt as they are rare. A senior civil servant coming up for retirement now would probably have only seen this four times in their career: 1997, 2010, 2015, 2024. (Although they might have experience of 10 Prime Ministers and many more reshuffles of ministers.)
Adapting to these changes is not as difficult as it might first appear. Civil servants are trained to act rather like barristers – they serve the interests of their clients (ministers) to be best of their ability, whoever they are. But after a long period of one party in power, such transitions are bound to be more difficult.
And most recently we have seen a number of senior civil servants either pushed out or who jumped-out under the Johnson and Truss governments. There have also been relentless attacks on the Civil Service from some Conservative politicians and their supporters in the media. As a result a Cabinet Secretary, National Security Adviser and as many as six other Permanent Secretary level careers ended. There has been a serious deterioration in the minister-counsellor relationship.
Labour have come in promising to repair this breakdown and work constructively with the mandarins. Nevertheless, I expect we will see a few changes at the top in the counsellor roles, not least the departure of the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, and a whole new swathe of policy ‘counsellors’ recruited from think tanks and other places.
The Chief Executive
The popular image of civil servants as all ‘Sir Humphrey’s’ working in Whitehall offices is of course far from the reality. Only a small fraction of the approximately half a million civil servants work on ‘policy’ (about 3-4%). Most work on delivering services directly or indirectly through other parts of the public sector (about 5 million).
The largest ministries with the most people to manage directly are Justice (92,000); Work and Pensions (88,000); Revenue and Customs (58,000); and the Home Office (43,000). The picture for larger ministries in terms of spending is very different, though. Health & Social Care is the largest (£183 billion). Followed by Education (£82 bn); Defence (£53 bn); Transport (£29 bn); Local Government, Housing and Communities (£23 bn); and Energy (£20bn).
The ‘chief executive’ role therefore varies quite a lot across departments. The Permanent Secretary at the Treasury with only 300 or so staff, for example, is very different to that of the Permanent Secretary at Justice with the Prison Service to manage, or at Health and Social Care, with a budget of £183 bn and a sprawling health and social care system to oversee.
Labour do not appear to have plans for major changes in such structures, and neither, therefore, to the chief executive element of these roles, but other changes are likely, such as their ‘mission-driven government’ ideas which we’ll come back to below.
One important thing to note here – the most senior civil servants including those in chief executive roles also often act as accounting officers. We’ll examine this under ‘conservator’s’ below.
The Cooperator
In addition to being the ‘chief executive’ of ‘their’ organisations, many top civil servants are responsible for the funding and regulation of a wide variety of civil and public service organisations. The civil service itself is only about 10% of the public sector and is itself divided into hundreds of units and semi-arms-length bodies. Beyond this there are literally thousands of other public sector agencies. There are over 400 elected local governments, and now ‘metro-mayors’, and 12,000 elected town, parish and community councils. And far more unelected public bodies in health, education, policing, fire and so on. As a result, many public policy outcomes need the active engagement of businesses, civil society organisations and citizens to get anywhere. Essential to this are senior civil servants working as cooperators, ensuring the wheels of the machine are oiled and that the civil service can work effectively with some of the bodies described above.
One of the potential big changes under Labour is their approach to what is usually called ‘multi-level government’. The fact that Keir Starmer prioritised meeting the heads of the three devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and then the ‘metro-mayors’ in England was highly symbolic. Even during the recent Covid pandemic crisis, the previous government was reluctant to acknowledge the roles of devolved and local governments.
It remains to be seen how much of this is symbolism from the new government. There are some obvious centralising tendencies and people in the new Cabinet, so how far senior civil servants will be expected to act as cooperators outside of Whitehall is an open question. But what will certainly change is how far they are expected to be cooperators within the Whitehall village.
Labour’s commitment to a ‘mission-driven government’ that cuts across traditional Whitehall ministerial ‘silos’ is not entirely new. The idea has been around for over three decades (despite some who are claiming more recent authorship). During the last Labour government, it took the form of attempts at ‘joined-up government’ and specifically ‘cross-cutting reviews’ with the multi-year spending reviews. If Labour is serious about both improving multi-level governance and mission-driven government this will mark a step-change in the cooperator role among senior civil servants.
The Conservator
The conservator role is one of the most interesting and controversial in democratic government. It is about the degree to which unelected civil servants can and should uphold the constitution, law, morals and rules against elected politicians.
That elected politicians can stray across these boundaries is without doubt. Even the most well-meaning but over-enthusiastic minister can inadvertently stray into asking for things that would not be constitutional, legal or ethical. And we’ve had plenty of recent examples where crossing the line has been much more serious than the odd mistake. The unlawful Prorogation of Parliament is probably the most obvious example.
In the UK senior civil servants with accounting officer responsibility can seek what is called a “ministerial direction”. According to the Institute for Government (IfG) the accounting officer should ask for ministerial direction if they think a spending proposal breaches any of the following criteria:
Regularity – if the proposal is beyond the department’s legal powers, or agreed spending budgets
Propriety – if it doesn’t meet ‘high standards of public conduct’, such as appropriate governance or parliamentary expectations
Value for money – if something else, or doing nothing, would be cheaper and better
Feasibility – if there is doubt about the proposal being ‘implemented accurately, sustainably or to the intended timetable’.
IfG analysis suggest there has been something of a spike in requests for ministerial directions since 2015, especially in 2020 – the first full year of Boris Johnson’s government.
This suggests that the conservator role has come under increasing pressure recently, perhaps ironically from a Conservative government.
Recently several long-running issues such as the Horizon-Post Office scandal and contaminated blood supplies have suggested serious deficiencies in how well the role of conservator has worked in government and other public institutions.
Labour clearly intends to address some of these issues through a new law placing a “duty of candour” on all civil and public servants. Keir Starmer has said that it is “not enough to deliver justice on outrages like the infected blood scandal and the Horizon scandal – we must take on the work of prevention to make sure this behaviour can never happen again”. Labour ministers have made many statements about wanting to work constructively with the Civil Service to improve standards as well as to deliver on policy.
Roles Defined?
These four roles, regrettably, often exist with tensions between them. In 1988, for example, the then Thatcher government published the ‘Next Steps’ review of the Civil Service. Central to its findings was that the senior Civil Service spent too much time ‘looking upwards’ towards ministers (the counsellor role) and not enough time looking downwards towards managing their organisations (the chief executive role).
The ensuing ‘Next Steps’ programme sought to separate the two roles by creating “executive agencies” run by actual chief executives reporting directly to ministers. Their role would be to ‘look down’ to managing their organisations and delivering against objectives and performance targets set by ministers advised by their counsellors.
This separation of roles never really worked, and it has been gradually eroded over time so that now in most cases they are an administrative fiction, if they exist at all. Labour seems to have no plans to reverse this. But the Party does have a strong focus and priority on ‘delivery’, which is what ‘Next Steps’ was meant to address all those years ago. Last time Labour was in power this took the form of the Delivery Unit and the whole ‘deliverology’ approach developed by Michael Barber. What it will mean this time, in the context of their missions, remains to be seen.
Whatever happens, these four roles – counsellor, chief executive, cooperator and conservator – remain important for the top of the civil service. Some will change more than others under the new regime – especially I think the last two. And the balance of what is expected may also shift.
Colin Talbot.
Colin is Emeritus Professor of Government, University of Manchester. He also has relationships with the Cambridge Judge Business School and the Federal Trust. Colin has worked extensively with all levels of British government and public services, including being an advisor to two House of Commons Select Committees and appearing as an expert witness over two dozen times in both Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh Assembly. He has also advised more than a dozen other governments, from the USA to Japan.
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